I want an easy/polite/non-offensive way to say "sorry, this reply is way too long, so I'm not going to read it, so I prefer that you know explicitly that I won't reply rather than feeling like I'm maybe ignoring you and maybe will get to it, and also this doesn't mean that you're wrong, or that a long-reply is the wrong choice, it mainly means I'm trying to prioritize my own life tasks and will be dropping some balls and this is one thing that I think would be healthy for me to drop, and I wish this didn't have negative social implications for our relationship or for your feeling about yourself, because I was also raised in a culture where a reply like this would be rude and make me feel bad about myself, and I really wish it wasn't like that [and I have no idea what to do about it, so I thought I'd raise the meta-problem explicitly in a forum-quick-take. [I wonder if anyone will notice me or if this, too, will be too long]]"

Working out using VR really works

1. The amount I work out is not constrained by willpower anymore, it is constrained by how much my body can handle and how much free time I have
2. The best workout game I found is "thrill of the fight", I have some tips before you try it. Also, not everyone will like it
3. Trying a game for ~10 minutes isn't enough to "get it". Most games in VR aren't polished enough, don't have a good tutorial, it will take more time to decide if you like them
4. I wish someone would have told me this sooner
5. Still unclear: Can I build muscles using VR? So far seems promising, but I'm less certain about this part
6. I only have it for 2 weeks, so maybe you'll think I'm going to grow out of it, but I don't think so myself. It's literally playing games

AMA

Upvoting Is an Act of Community Building

It probably helps people feel welcome to the community.

For myself:

I've been mostly a lurker around international EA activities for about 5 years, feeling that all the orgs have some wow factor that I could never touch. I think this mostly changed because (A) I met some people in EAG (they were actually real people, which really surprised my brain), and (B) I got brave and posted something, and it got 70+ upvotes pretty quickly.

I know, this is stupid, I'm supposed to pretend not to care about upvotes, whatever. Looking back, I think this might have been pivotal for past-Yonatan's sense of being accepted into a community, of having someone in the important EA community care at all for.. I don't know, my attempts at helping? about me? And it lead me to, well, behave differently.

Looking at myself now, I am posting and commenting a lot, I have two more drafts almost ready to go (one for CEA! They asked me for something! Unimaginable if you'd ask me 6 months ago. I tried acting cool and said I'd be happy to help, if you're curious. Hey Ben if you're reading this! Ok I'm off topic).

Anyway if you're reading my shortform, you now know my "dark secret" of caring a ton about upvotes, and I hope that my "coming out" will remind you that it's probably true for many others too.

For myself, I try, when I remember, to upvote stuff a lot, only if I actually like it of course, but I try to be somewhat lighter on the trigger, especially with community members who are not yet so involved

EAG(x) tips

Epistemic status: I've been to 2 EAGs, both were pretty life changing, and I think my preparation was a big factor in this.

My tips:

Have some kind of vision

Take ~5 minutes to try to imagine positive (maybe impossible) outcomes. Consider brainstorming with someone. 

For example "org X hires me" or "I find a co-founder" or "I get funded" (these sound ambitious to me, but pick whatever's ambitious to you).

Bad visions in my opinion: "meet people", "make friends", "talk to interesting people". Be more specific, for example, if you'd meet your new best friend at EAG, what exactly would you do together? What exactly would you talk about? Better would be "Looking for someone to co-work in VR 3 times a week", if that's what friendship means to you.

Is anyone having trouble with the vision section? Let me know, I'll try to help

Swapcard #1 most important part

"how can I help people" + "how can people help me".

Be specific.

"I want to hire senior backend developers" is specific.

"I want to meet people" is pretty bad.

This is where your vision goes.

If you write your wish here, someone might make it come true! (aka Playa Provides)

Swapcard #2 most important part

Tags.

Mark based on how you want people to find you when they search for who to network with. 

1-on-1s are more important than lectures

I think that if you can learn something from a forum post and/or youtube, like "what cause areas exist" or "what's the cutting edge in animal welfare", it's a shame to waste potential 1-on-1 meeting time on those things (except at special cases, like if you already went over all the posts).

Reach out

Be specific with your request (same link).

If you're having trouble being specific, and your only agenda is to "talk", consider going back to the "vision" section.

My secret: Post something just before EAG(x)

I did it both times and linked to my swapcard profile, and many people who care about the same things I care about knew that I'd be really happy to talk to them

Software for Ukraine

We just set up a tiny production system that helps coordinate busses for refugees from Ukraine using Whatsapp, with a UI in Google Sheets.

We built it on Tuesday, and already on Wednesday it was used to coordinate several busses.

:)

Working at arxiv.org - what do you think?

A leading career option for me is joining them, and among other things rebuilding their tech (which is originally from 1991).

Thoughts? (consider forwarding this question to people involved in meta-science, that would help me!)

I specifically think:

1. My professional interests and skillset are very well fitted for this kind of thing.
2. I have some vision for improving arxiv, for example "let people tag an article as your-code-doesn't-run" (and upvote existing tags). I hope to disincentivize people from publishing nonsense (knowing that others will see whatever tag becomes most upvoted on their article).
   1. The dream would be to create a mature karma system like stackoverflow, where people could get reputation by things that help the community, and not only from publishing. Of course this is a very complicated thing to do, but arxiv are in a perfect position to do it.
3. I'm not an academic, maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about
4. Having EA run arxiv sounds potentially useful, maybe?
5. Is advancing science bad because it will help get AGI sooner?

[#meta-science]

Things I'd say to people who are starting out with AI Safety

Intro:

• I'm imagining someone "with a profession" 
  • (a mathematician / developer / product manager / researcher / something else) who's been following AI Safety through Scott Alexander or LW or so, and want to do something more seriously now
• To be clear, I am absolutely unqualified to give any advice here, and everyone is invited to point out disagreements.
  • I did this for ~3 months.
  • This is not my normal "software career" advice (of which I'm much more confident)
  • I'm going to prefer to be opinionated and wrong than to put so many disclaimers here that my words mean nothing. You'll get my opinion

So, some things which I wish I'd known when I started all this, or other stuff that seems useful:

1. There is no clear "this is the way to solve AI Safety, just learn X and then do Y".
   1. Similar to how, maybe, there's no "this is the way to solve cancer, just learn X and then do Y", just much worse. With cancer we have I guess 1000 ideas or so, and many of them have already cured/detected/reduced cancer, at least with cancer there are clear things we want to learn (I think?). with AI Safety we have about 5-20 serious (whatever that means) ideas and I can't personally say about any of them "omg that would totally solve the problem if we could get it to work". Still, they each have some kind of upside (which I can make a cancer-research metaphor for), so for some definition of progress, that would make progress
2. Even worse, some solutions seem (to me and to many others) to cause more harm than good.
   1. Historically, people who cared about AI Safety have pushed AI Capabilities a LOT (which I think is bad)
3. Even worse, there is no consensus.
   1. Really smart people are discussing this online but not coming to clear (to me) conclusions, and they have (in my opinion) maybe the best online platform for healthy discourse in the world (lesswrong)
4. And so, looking at this situation, it seems to me like you have a choice.
   • You can either try to figure out something better than everyone else has (which includes also "figure out who of all these people is correct, without knowing who to trust"),
   • or you can chose some project to join without understanding why they're doing whatever they're doing (beyond hearing the pitch and nodding, or seeing they got a lot of upvotes somewhere)
   • 
5. If your path is going to be "just go do something", then
   1. my biggest piece of advice (or more realistically, my request), is "make sure you don't cause damage", and specifically make sure you know what the "Unilateralist’s Curse" is. It basically means that if we have 1000 people and they can all take some potentially-dangerous action, then the most happy-to-take-risks person (or maybe, the least-aware-of-risks person) is the one who's going to take that action.
      1. This includes suggestions like "cause an AI accident so people will be afraid" (which I hope nobody will do and I'm afraid that as people join the movement one of them will do that).
   2. On a meta level, if you invite lots of risk-taking people to learn a bit about AI Safety and then they go do something bad, that is just as dangerous and I have no idea how as a community we're going to avoid that long term. But in the bottom line, please don't make the situation worse, that is really important in my opinion, and also, not-making-things-worse turns out to be surprisingly hard
   3. If you're looking for someone to trust about wether to join some Project X and you care about my opinion, I'd point you to the opinions of Yudkowsky and Nate (update: maybe also Zvi): did they write something about Project X? In other words, I'm pointing at them as trustworthy-in-my-(current)-opinion. Some people would say it is bad for me to do that rather than telling you to study AI Safety for 3 months and form your own opinions. I agree (if you're interested in studying), but if not - well I think me writing this is making the situation better and not worse (and I also think my message here won't brainwash anyone)
   4. I also endorse taking a job that 80k recommends (consider getting coaching with them, signing up to their longtermist-census, and/or looking at the "top recommended" jobs in their job board (update: they might have removed that option 🙀)). This is somewhat the best we have as a community, and if you talk to 80k you're unlikely to miss a "big (job) win" that you'd find otherwise, I think.
6. If you chose the path of "figure out something smart that nobody else has"... (this is my choice)
7. First of all, the field is flooded with people trying to do that. Almost nobody manages (in my opinion), so the priors are bad. I think this is important to acknowledge just like "most startups fail" is important to acknowledge. So, given these low priors, how would you approach the problem?
8. I'd encourage that you do something "high variance", where if you'd do well, you might be better than everyone else in the field. [disclaimer about don't-do-damage]
   1. For example, if something seems obvious to you but nobody else is doing it - consider doing that.
   2. For example, if something seems super cool and fun to you - consider doing that. 
      1. Prompt: "Is there something you like doing for fun that others consider work?" (I think Alex from 80k came up with this, I really like it)
   3. For example, if you have a strange unusual talent - can you use it?
9. Examples from myself for places that I think I might have a big advantage over others:
   1. It seems obvious to me that "getting feedback quickly and often" is super important and nobody is doing that. Everyone's just reading books and stuff, this seems like an obvious mistake to me, so I'm doing it differently (not that I'm not reading at all).
      1. Note this might go really well or I might fall on my face, but worst case, I do 0 impact but also 0 damage
   2. Infosec around AI Safety seems inspiringly terrible, and I notice this because I did infosec for the Israeli military & government, which are orgs that actually care about their infosec (as opposed to most of the industry which seems to me to want to "look like they care about security" or something like that) [since then, EA started taking AIS Infosec more seriously, unclear what the situation is today. Specifically there's an infosec reading group and an 80k article]
   3. It seems to me like everyone's dropping the ball of "having productive conversations about AI Safety over video", and specifically - people (like me) who don't live in a hub full of AI Safety people don't have enough people to talk to, so I'm attempting to set something like that up. Consider joining! See #hangout for more [update: I sort of gave up on this]
   4. I have priors about how to learn software development (or product management), and I'm using them to learn AI Safety. This is mainly around "feedback"
   5. Seems like everyone's forgetting to ask "if this research agenda would work amazingly, would it solve the problem?", and are instead pursuing agendas that seem interesting/tractable. [I am probably totally wrong about this, don't actually trust me please, I'm just trying to point out ways that I notice I think differently from most, and my attempt to embrace those (without causing damage) as opposed to taking the same path as everyone]
10. Apparently new people keep coming up with the same bad ideas again and again, there's at least one post about that. The meme is that if you ask "why don't we just do X" then you're missing something. I still think it's worth asking (for example, in #no-dumb-questions which won't spam anyone), but expect the answer to teach you something and make you smarter, don't expect a "you solved it, we'll call the president now!" moment
11. Look after your mental health somehow, and/or quit before your mental health gets too bad
    1. I play VR games, I wonder if people would like to join sometimes [update: no more. and also, not doing a great job with my own mental health]
12. Money
    1. You can apply to LTFF even with 0 experience, I think. Worst case you can apply again later, I think. [update: Nonlinear has a form to apply to tons of grants at once. but still, I think most people are stuck on "I'm not worthy of applying" or so, which I think is best addressed by trying, and if you're rejected, then try again later]
    2. Jobs pay money, consider applying to a job
    3. Not having enough money is bad. I don't think it's good to encourage people to work without being paid. You have my support to go take a normal job and get paid.
13. Beware the meta trap
    1. For example, "we will solve ai alignment by accelerating ai alignment research" (me: but.. which research? the research that accelerates alignment research that accelerates alignment research? at some point you've got to accelerate something object-level)
    2. For example, "I will help by helping others help" (who will you help? are they doing something important? are they maybe working on helping others helping others help others recruit people who can help more people?)
    3. For example, "I will investigate timelines so that we can redistribute the funding in a way that will make sense given the time we have left" (but.. are there any concrete research projects that you think are maybe getting too-much or too-little funding given something you might maybe discover about timelines? maybe, for example, everything good is already getting funding? or maybe only bad things are? what is even good?)
       1. This is different if a funder (OpenPhil?) explicitly asks for help with timelines, and if you are in the path of "trust others" and you trust that if OpenPhil asks for something explicitly then they know what they're talking about.
    4. I am not saying that going meta is always bad and I do think some of these projects make sense, but it's really hard to figure out which ones, and it seems to me like some people who want to help with alignment and go directly meta are trying to solve very wrong problems.
       1. I am not against doing high quality product management, including user research, including figuring out who the important users are, and solving those people's problems, startup-style. (but I'd only recommend this path to few people)
14. Beware the "reading forever" trap
    1. If your algorithm is something like "while there is more to read that seems important, read that thing", then you will never exit this loop (I think). Pick your solution to this problem, but don't ignore it
       1. If you start reading about how to solve the "reading forever trap"
15. (I'm tried, maybe I'll continue this later. remember that I have no idea what I'm talking about and that other more qualified people have written about this too)

I've originally posted this in here, in the AI Alignment Slack. If you're interested, I put a lot of my journey (my questions, my solution ideas, and so on) in the same channel.

Since then I've become more pessimistic and am leaning away from trying to solve AI Alignment myself. Maybe I'll write about that too.

If you're not applying to EA orgs because of too-low-salaries, tell them

Or anonymously:

• PM me
• Submit it totally anonymously

Why tell them?

Because they don't know. "Why don't people apply?" - they ask. But this is basically a blind spot: If nobody gives them feedback, they won't know.

Are you not applying because of something else?

• You're better fit for E2G?
• The teams are too small?
• There's no local team in your area?
• Something else?

This is valuable information.

If enough people share this, it will save doing a user research project. Please be one of the people that shares, help understanding what's going on!

1. Scott Alexander had a really hard time evaluating donation causes
2. EA has a ton of articles about how to evaluate charities

What's going on?

Should we stop writing these guides?

Do we need better guides?

Do we need some measure like "would this guide make Scott Alexander's work easier"?

My attempt to help with AI Safety

Meta: This feels like something emotional where if somebody would look at my plan from the outside, they'd have obvious and good feedback, but my own social circle is not worried or knowledgable about AGI, and so I hope someone will read this.

Best bet: Meta software projects

It would be my best personal fit, running one or multiple software projects that require product work such as understanding what the users actually want.

My bottle neck: Talking to actual users with pain points (researchers? meta orgs with software problems? funders? I don't know)

Plan B: Advocacy

I think I have potential to grow into a role where I explain complicated things in a simple way, without annoying people. Advocacy seems scary, but I think my experience strongly suggests I should try.

Plan C: Research?

Usually when I look closely at a field, I have new stuff to contribute. I do have impostor syndrome around AGI Safety research, but again, probably people like me should try (?) [I am not a mathematician at all. Am I just wrong here?]

Bottle neck for Plans B+C: Getting a better model

What model specifically: If you'd erase all information I heard about experts speculating "when will we have AGI" and "what's the chance it will kill us all?", could I re-invent it? could I figure out which expert is right? This seems like the first layer, and an important one

My actionable items:

1. Talk to friends about AGI. They ask questions, like "can't the AGI simply ADVICE us on what to do?", and I answer. 
   1. We both improve our model (specifically, if what I say doesn't seem convincing, then maybe it's wrong?)
   2. I slowly exit my comfort zone of "being the weird person talking about AGI"
2. Write my own model, post it for comments
   1. Maybe my agreements/disagreements with this?
   2. Seems hard and tiring

What am I missing?

Give me the obvious stuff

I'm going to ask for funding

From my limited experience, it really helps to get recommendations.

If you think I am useful to EA, or if you have something similar to say that I may share with grantmakers, please comment here, or email [email protected], or DM, or something.

Thx ♥️ 🫣🐈

Against "networking for the sake of networking"

I am talking about the situation where, for example, EA-1 will talk to EA-2 (for 30 minutes or so) with no goal other than "being able" to ask EA-2 for help in the future.

Nobody is acknowledging the cost here, to the entire community, of having lots of people going around doing this kind of networking and/or suggesting that others do it.

What I suggest instead: If you are an EA-1 and want help from an EA-2, directly ask the EA-2 for the specific help you need. If for some reason this kind of outreach didn't work for you - I invite you to message me and maybe I can help with phrasing or so. 

The example I hear the most: "In order to get a job, I've got to network with people". I am so against this. In almost all situations, it's better for everyone if you just apply (!). Usually the person doing the networking hates networking anyway. And usually the person working at the org would prefer that not all candidates have a 30 minute off topic conversation with them before applying. 

I don't know how to rant about this, this is the best I have. 

Hopefully your takeaway will be "I read something messy in shortform that didn't make sense, but it had a point that networking has downsides and that there might be better alternatives"

Use the "Who wants to be hired" post more effectively

1: Use buzzwords

Hiring managers are probably not reading through all profiles, they are probably running searches. If someone wants a backend dev, they're probably running a search for "developer", "software", "python", "backend", or whatever. 

If you don't have the buzzwords that [your target employer is going to search for], add them!

2: Separate your [skills+experience] from [what you want to do]

If you want to do something that you have no experience in - that's ok! But if you don't write it anywhere, probably nobody will contact you about it.

3. Font

I find text in this format less fun to read. Am I missing something?
I mean, I do like this format for code, but not for free text meant for humans. Maybe people are copying the example from the post body?

The "Better Twitter that promotes high quality discussions" that everyone dreams about - might start from this shortform feature

Especially given the critical mass of people who have high quality discussions around here.

What do you think?

Are there important missing features that would make you transition your social network activity here?

4 EAG(x) events - and I still get a lot of value

Someone asked me "you already know the EA community, no? how come do you still get value from EAG?"

Well - I live in Israel. Contacting people from the international EA community is really hard. I need to discover they exist, email them, hope they reply, and at best - set up a 30 minute call or so. This is such high friction.

At EAG, I can run my project plans by.. everyone. easily. I even had productive Uber rides.

That's the value of EAG for me.

Downvoting without explaining: An act of anti-community-building?

:(

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MBDHjwDvhDnqisyW2/awards-for-the-future-fund-s-project-ideas-competition?commentId=GHnzmGogQq6p5mjxc#RprmhhxJgJt4FhtHB

Remember the illusion of transparency. Whatever is bothering you might not be as obvious to others as it is to you.

You can still downvote, just remember it has emotional consequences

EA Orgs: Not enough people filling out your form? Maybe it has too many mandatory fields

TL;DR Philosophy: Adding mandatory fields means [saving time in calls you have with applicants] at the expense of [reducing the amount of applicants]. Is this a tradeoff you are interested in?

TL;DR recommendation: Make all the fields optional except for (1) CV/linkedin, and (2) email. Then, in the first call, ask whatever's missing

Q: But the fields help us filter

A: Yep, you'll get more bad applicants if you do this 

Q: What if we get too many applicants?

A: Then stop this. My suggestion will get you lots more bad applicants and a few more good applicants, I think. If that's not a good tradeoff for you, dump it. I think it is totally legit to prioritize your own time!!! As my friend says, "know the stats of the card you're playing"

Q: Probably nobody drops out of our form anyway

A: Well, my priors from startups are that long forms sure do hurt the funnel, but maybe in your specific case these priors are wrong?

I'd recommend you do hallway testing: Grab someone in the hall, ask them to fill out your form, watch them do it.

Or save stats about how many people start your form and how many complete it. You can do that easily by posting a bit.ly link that leads to your application form, it will count how many people click it. Better but harder: Google Analytics.

You don't know it until you measure it.

Q: Everyone who drops probably doesn't want it bad enough!

1. Maybe there's a better way to check if someone "wants it bad enough"? This doesn't sound like an intentional decision
2. Are you telling your candidates that you are letting them do extra work to make sure they "want it bad enough"? (If you're asking for a cover letter, then the answer is implicitly yes)

Q: Give us practical examples! Since when do you write such theoretical posts anyway?

You're right, here are some examples:

1. "What makes you a good fit for this role" - hits directly on people's impostor syndrome, which is so common in EA that I am going to bet that even you, dear anonymous reader, have impostor syndrome
2. "How do you define good" - is a question that I am personally stuck on in the 80k hours form. This is so stupid. They WROTE that I'm not supposed to spend too long on it. I'm usually totally a "do things quickly" person. But here, I admit it, this is my situation. Or maybe I don't want their advice enough to be worth their time? I don't know

Q: Tell us your real opinion, it must be super controversial!

How did you know?? It's like you're reading my mind..!

Ok, I think that if you're hiring from a small pool of EAs (who're full of impostor syndrome regardless of their skill level, and who spend hours writing applications) and if you're struggling to get more to apply, and this is important enough to be worth your management focus... HAVE ZERO REQUIRED FIELDS.

I said it. Zero.

If you only get someone's email: You'll have a mailing list of people interested in working for you, is that so bad? (Well maybe it is, in which case don't do that)

I expect most people will fill in lots of the fields, and you can interview those people first, and then you can chose to invite the people who only submitted their CV, or send an email to everyone who only submitted their address, probably better than having them drop out of your form.

And a very few people (bots) will probably submit empty forms. Yes.

And if this doesn't work out, revert back to mandatory fields.

Optimization: Delegation

The person who does the first call and asks "what's your experience with EA" doesn't need to be the startup's founder. This task can be delegated

At least do hallway user testing, like, once

I wonder if 80k have ever done this for their enormous form. If they see this post, do hallway testing once, decide to make the form easier, and get 10% more applicants from now on, could I get a cookie?

EA Forum under rated feature: Subscribing to posts, either by author, or by tag

Brainstorm: How can I talk to EAs who are very senior software developers?

I'm working on understanding and solving problems around EA orgs having trouble hiring strong engineers, and for this I'd like to do some "user research".

I believe I already made progress in this area for EA, but I don't want to elaborate too much in case some developer will read this and it will bias my user research.

Could someone help me contact such people / suggest ideas on how I could do it?

It will be a ~15 minutes conversation (I'm flexible if you prefer interacting in some other way)

Open Philanthropy emailed me - I passed some screening for a position I am totally unqualified for

April Fools? X_X

Rant: How to make new employees sad they joined your company

TL;DR: To avoid predictably-sad employees, advertise your company honestly, including the bad parts.

Longer and more sarcastic:

How to make new employees sad: 

1. Advertise your company as being perfect, including: Your culture, best practices, and team. Use vague sentences like "of course not everything is perfect", but hide the concrete negative things that could give new hires an accurate picture in advance
2. Let them discover the real situation a few months after joining
3. Act surprised

For me personally: When considering joining a company or cofounder, a major thing that "turns me on" is when they tell me about the bad parts. It's obvious that those parts exist, the question is whether we can speak about them.

P.S

I also believe in this for employees, and for romantic relationships

Personal Assistants provide more value than the time they save

Handling bureaucracy not only takes time: For some of us, it's stressful and icky and aversive.

I'd happily spend an extra hour building software (fun!) instead of spending that hour on paperwork (which would deplete my willpower for the rest of the day).

-Written in appreciation to all the PAs out there

How is nobody stressed out about countries freezing the assets of an entire country, practically changing the records of the banks to something else? Are we confident this will only happen in situations that we think are good and moral?

[I'm not an economist]

My EA origin story

hpmor (read, translated)

Loved it, set up the Hebrew crowed sourced translation project, we translated everything and printed it. I estimate over 1000 people bought a copy, not counting online readers, and the number is probably way higher, which I'm really proud of :)

The sequences / Rationality A to Z (effected me a lot)

One of the most influential things I've read. While reading it:

• I noticed I'm not happy in an important partnership and broke up. Main technique: slowly changing my mind
• I decided that the meat industry is indeed bad, yep

Not counting smaller things, or things from more than a month after finishing it

Lesswrong Israel

People who'll geek out about priors with me!

EA Israel

Here's a 2016 intro to EA I found myself doing (Hebrew link), I discussed return-on-investment of donations and was especially excited about translating 80k material. I still consider career advice to be a topic very close to my heart, and 80k to be an unusually important org.

EAG London (2020? 2019?)

My first interaction with the international community, which I considered to probably be scary superhuman people that know everything and I was afraid to even bother them with my email. I know, silly. If you feel like I used to, I hope you feel more comfortable to reach out.

Just before EAG I posted my offer for coaching software developers, which many people replied, met me at EAG, and until today I keep talking to developers, mostly over video.

EAG changed the way I see myself in the EA community.

Other projects

EA Colabs (volunteer's board)

I used to be active there, trying to connect volunteers (collaborators) to projects that need them

Looking for the most impactful tech companies in Israel

Maybe I'll write about it sometime

Thoughts about opening an EA startup

I'm doing this Twitter Style >>

The Neglected Consideration When Planning a Social Network:... Network Effects

Lots of people dream about better social networks that promote higher quality discussions, even me! Some challenges, like "which logo to pick", are things that can be solved along the way. Others, like "why would anybody join a social network if almost nobody is there?" are (I claim) a core part of the plan and need to be addressed in advance.

"If you give the same answer 5 times, write a post"

This isn't meant as discouragement, it is meant as "this is an important thing-not-to-ignore"

For example, if someone wants to open a startup, I first make sure they understand that most startups fail. This is not a knock-down argument to not-open-a-startup, it is just something important to notice and take into account.

This post is a similar thing-to-notice beyond the normal considerations of a startup.

What similar considerations do I think people miss?

A social network has snowball effects. This is nothing new, but I think it's useful to state them explicitly: 

• More users lead to more users. 
• More content means more users reading content means more users writing content. 
• More money means more comfortable features means more engagement means (in modern social networks) more money. 

And so on. 

Common suggestions to sacrifice an element of the snowball effect without explaining what would balance it out:

1. "We won't optimize for engagement"
   1. Or "By optimizing for engagement plus something else, we will get more engagement than someone optimizing only for engagement"
2. "We won't charge money"
3. "We won't show ads (and so we'll make less money)"
4.  "We will charge money from the users directly" (which means more friction for getting users, which means less users)
5. "We will only allow high quality content"
   1. This probably means less content
   2. TL;DR of my "moderation is expensive" rant [skip if obvious]
      1. If writing a machine learning algorithm that could recognize low-quality or false arguments would be easy: then somebody would have done it and made billions of dollars, which means a lot of people are already working on it. If you solve that: that's your startup right there.
      2. Similarly true for "hiring and managing 10,000 moderators"
      3. Similarly true for gamification, but that's a whole other rant
      4. this (Scott Alexander on Moderation)

Why would anybody join a social network that hardly has anyone in it?

AKA "initial critical mass".

Q: Isn't advertising enough? People will see the vision and high quality content and all join!

A: This is called B2C marketing and we have priors for how well it works. TL;DR: Incredibly expensive.

The standard trick for getting critical mass, btw, is starting with a niche, like Facebook started with a specific university, or Amazon started specifically with books. The reason is that the specific interesting question is not "how many users exist in the platform", but instead "if I'll enter the platform, what's the chance I'll find something I want?" - so if the social network only has a few people but they're all my close friends, then that's probably good enough. [I can elaborate on marketplaces]

Which leads to "do you know your users or are you building something based on your imagination of them?"

But that is already a typical startup question.

Maybe join others like yourself?

People are already building:

• The Fediverse (an open source decentralized social network)
• The EA Forum / Lesswrong (seem very promising to me due to very high quality discussions and a critical mass of people that resonate with me a lot)
• And others

I would really try to avoid planning to do the same thing like one of these platforms, only with less development time, less users, less content, and so on. Imagining you have lots of users and a lot of high quality content is not enough, you've got to design some snowball effect to lead there (or at least that's my claim).

Better answers, I think:

• "There is a specific critical feature that I think the other social networks are lacking and [because of reasons] I think will make a big difference"
• "Good idea, I want to join them and build my idea as a feature in one of those platforms!", for example I happen to know that CEA want to build some features for connecting people, maybe that's your idea?

Great answers!

I hope this was useful!

Please argue with me and help me improve both my opinions and my writing's usefulness

<3

[Personal fit within software] is neglected in EA. Need to write about that sometime

TL;DR:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gbPthwLw3NovHAJdp/new-80-000-hours-career-review-software-engineering?commentId=tb9xwBTymmpS8QuqF

Meta Grant Making Idea

TL;DR: Get others to predict the grant maker's answer. But not with a prediction market.

Longer:

Today an EA told me their funding request got rejected and they got no feedback about it. (Frustrating!)

They asked me to help them guess why they were rejected, and I offered some different ideas (one was "this specific fund doesn't know how to vet [some aspect of your idea]".

Wouldn't it be great if the original grant maker could review what I wrote, and respond with correct/incorrect, or maybe mark the part that was most correct if any?

This way,

1. The applicant would get some feedback
2. We'd find out if I can correctly predict what grant makers would say (which would suggest maybe I could be a grant maker)

I would personally submit 10 such guesses (on tech ideas), just as a way to test my ability, for the small chance I'd be any good.

Would some grant maker comment on this? I know nothing about your domain (except that it's confusing)

Thx!