Propose and vote on potential EA Wiki entries

by MichaelA2 min read4th Aug 2020306 comments


Effective Altruism ForumCommunity infrastructureCommunity

(I have no association with the EA Forum team or CEA, and this idea comes with no official mandate. I'm open to suggestions of totally different ways of doing this.)

Update: Aaron here. This has our official mandate now, and I'm subscribed to the post so that I'll be notified of every comment. Please suggest tags!

2021 update: Michael here again. The EA's tag system is now paired with the EA Wiki, and so proposals on this post are now for "entries", which can mean tags, EA Wiki articles, or (most often) pages that serve both roles.

The EA Forum now has tags, and users can now make tags themselves. I think this is really cool, and I've now made a bunch of tags. 

But I find it hard to decide whether some tag ideas are worth including, vs being too fine-grained or too similar to existing tags. I also feel some hesitation about taking too much unilateral action. I imagine some other forum users might feel the same way about tag ideas they have, some of which might be really good! (See also this thread.)

So I propose that this post becomes a thread where people can comment with a tag idea there's somewhat unsure about, and then other people can upvote it or downvote it based on whether they think it should indeed be its own tag. Details:

  • I am not saying you should always comment here before making a tag. I have neither the power nor the inclination to stop you just making tags you're fairly confident should exist!
  • I suggest having a low bar for commenting here, such as "this is just a thought that occurred to me" or "5% chance this tag should exist". It's often good to be open to raising all sorts of ideas when brainstorming, and apply most of the screening pressure after the ideas are raised.
    • The tag ideas I've commented about myself are all "just spitballing".
  • Feel free to also propose alternative tag labels, propose a rough tag description, note what other tags are related to this one, note what you see as the arguments for and against that tag, and/or list some posts that would be included in this tag. (But also feel free to simply suggest a tag label.)
  • Feel free to comment on other people's ideas to do any of the above things (propose alternative labels, etc.).
  • Make a separate comment for each tag idea.
  • Probably upvote or downvote just based on the tag idea itself; to address the extra ideas in the comment (e.g., the proposed description), leave a reply.
  • Maybe try not to hold back with the downvotes. People commenting here would do so specifically because they want other people's honest input, and they never claimed their tag idea was definitely good so the downvote isn't really disagreeing with them.

Also feel free to use this as a thread to discuss (and upvote or downvote suggestions regarding) existing tags that might not be worth having, or might be worth renaming or tweaking the scope of, or what-have-you. For example, I created the tag Political Polarisation, but I've also left a comment here about whether it should be changed or removed.


306 comments, sorted by Highlighting new comments since Today at 11:03 PM
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Political Polarisation

I already made this tag, but maybe it should be removed.

Arguments against its existence: 

  • Not currently a very commonly discussed topic in EA
  • Arguably related to the tag Policy Change
  • Maybe there's some other tag that would do a better job covering this and related matters. Super rough ideas: Cultural Forces; Culture, Politics, & Norms; Institutions & Norms

Arguments for its existence:

  • Some EAs seem quite interested in this
  • Interest may be increasing: There were 3 posts on the topic just this year, which each got decent to large amounts of attention
  • There may also be a lot of interest in this on LessWrong? If so, this may ultimately spill over to more interest here?
  • My shortform collection of posts on the topic got 17 karma

UPDATE: I've proposed the change to the tag.

Proposal: Change the EA Global tag to EA Conferences.

Since many of the tagged posts are relevant to EA Student Summit, EAGx's etc. and the description itself is conference posts. 

I like Lists, so get me a List of Lists for my tag List.

There are a number of good posts that are basically lists of links to different articles (like this one). It would be nice to be able to easily access them.

6MichaelA1yI very much share this affection for lists. I think Collection and Resources [] might cover this? E.g., those reading lists from Richard Ngo have each been given that tag. Do you think there's still a gap for a List tag, or a way the description of the Collection and Resources tag should be adjusted?
6Larks1yAhh yes, that covers it. I looked through the list of tags to check if there was already something on there; I guess I missed that one.

Now vs Later, or Optimal Timing, or Optimal Timing for Altruists, or some other name.

This would be intended to capture posts relevant to the debate over "giving now vs later" and "patient vs urgent longtermism", as well as related debates like whether to do direct work now vs build career capital vs movement-build, and how much to give/work now vs later, and when to give/work if not now ("later" is a very large category!). 

This tag would overlap with Hinge of History, but seems meaningfully distinct from that.

Not sure what the best name would be. 

... (read more)
9JP Addison1yPatient Philanthropy seems like the general category. Not all of it will be about the debate as to whether it's right, but it seems like a tag that encompasses questions like, "given that I want to give later, how do I do that" seems good.
4MichaelA1yThanks for highlighting patient philanthropy as an option, and good point that it'd be good for this tag to not just be about the debate but also how to implement the patient approach. I've now made this tag, though with the name Patient Altruism []. I haven't heard that term used, but it makes sense to me as a generalisation of patient philanthropy to also account for how to use work, not just how to use donations. I've now also written a shortform post [] arguing for the term. One worry I have is that by saying Patient Altruism rather than Patient vs Urgent Altruism, this tag puts virtuous connotations on one side but not the other. But the version with "vs Urgent" is longer, it perhaps doesn't as naturally include posts about how to take the patient approach, and I've only heard the term "urgent longtermism", not "urgent philanthropy" (though I do suggest use of the terms "urgent philanthropy" and "urgent altruism" in that shortform post [] ).

When tags were introduced, the post said to "submit new tag ideas to us using this form." I made a bunch of suggestions (don't remember what they were) and probably some other people did too. Could someone who has access to results of that form paste all those suggestions here?

4MichaelA1yThat sounds like a great idea! I think ideally they’d be pasted as separate comments, so they can each be voted up or down separately. (Not saying you were suggesting otherwise.)

Career profiles (or maybe something like "job posts"?)

Basically, writeups of specific jobs people have, and how to get those jobs. Seems like a useful subset of the "Career Choice" tag to cover posts like "How I got an entry-level role in Congress", and all the posts that people will (hopefully) write in response to this.

2EdoArad5dWhat about posts that discuss personal career choice processes (like this [] )?
2MichaelA5dMy personal, quick reaction is that that's a decently separate thing, that could have a separate tag if we feel that that's worthwhile. Some posts might get both tags, and some posts might get just one. But I haven't thought carefully about this. I also think I'd lean against having an entry for that purpose. It seems insufficiently distinct from the existing tags for career choice or community experiences, or from the intersection of the two.
2MichaelA6dYeah, this seems worth having! And I appreciate you advocating for people to write these and for us to have a way to collect them, for similar reasons to those given in this earlier shortform of mine [] . I think career profiles is a better term for this than job posts, partly because: * The latter sounds like it might be job ads or job postings * Some of these posts might not really be on "jobs" but rather things like being a semi-professional blogger, doing volunteering, having some formalised unpaid advisory role to some institution, etc. OTOH, career profiles also sounds somewhat similar to 80k's career reviews. This could be good or bad, depending on whether it's important to distinguish what you have in mind from the career review format. (I don't have a stance on that, as I haven't read your post yet.)
2MichaelA6dActually, having read your post, I now think it does sound more about jobs (or really "roles", but that sounds less clear) than about careers. So I now might suggest using the term job profiles.
4Aaron Gertler3dThanks, have created this []. (The "Donation writeup" tag is singular, so I felt like this one should also be, but LMK if you think it should be plural.)
2Pablo5dEither looks good to me. I agree that this is worth having.

Update: I've now made this entry.

Consultancy (or maybe Consulting or Consultants or Consultancies)

Things this would cover:

... (read more)
6Pablo21dYeah, I made a note to create an entry on this topic soon after Luke published his post. Feel free to create it, and I'll try to expand it next week (I'm a bit busy right now).

Effective Altruism on Facebook and Effective Altruism on Twitter (and more - maybe Goodreads, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc). Alternatively Effective Altruism on Social Media, though I probably prefer tags/entries on particular platforms.

A few relevant articles: (read more)

2MichaelA2moAt first glance, I'd prefer to have Effective altruism on social media, or maybe actually just Social media, rather than the more fine-grained ones. (Also, I do think something in this vicinity is indeed worth having.) Reasoning: * I'm not sure if any of the specific platforms warrant an entry * If we have entries for the specific platforms, then what about posts relevant to effective altruism on some other platform? * We shouldn't just create an entry for every other platform there's at least one post relevant to, nor should we put them all under one of the other single-platform-focused tags. * But having an entry for Facebook, another for Twitter, and another for social media as a whole seems like too much? * Regarding dropping "Effective altruism on" and just saying "Social media": * Presumably there are also posts on things like the effects of social media, the future trajectory of it, or ways to use it for good or intervene in it that aren't just about writing about EA on it? * E.g., [] * And it seems like it'd be good to capture those posts under the same entry? * Though maybe an entry for social media and an entry for effective altruism on social media are both warranted? Though also note that there's already a tag for effective altruism in the media [], which has substantial overlap with this. But I think that's probably ok - social media seems a sufficiently notable subset of "the media" to warrant its own entry. (Btw, for the sake of interpreting the upvotes as evidence: I upvoted your comment, though as I noted I disagree a bit on the

Maybe we should have a tag for each individual EA Fund, in addition to the existing tag Effective Altruism Funds tag? The latter could then be for posts relevant to EA Funds as a whole.

There are now 60 posts with the Effective Altruism Funds tag, and many readers may only be interested in posts relevant to one or two of the funds.

4Pablo2moYes, good idea. Feel free to create them, otherwise I'll do it myself later today or tomorrow.

Markets for Altruism or Market Mechanisms for Altruism or Impact Certificates or Impact Purchases (or some other name)

Tentatively proposed description: 

The Markets for Altruism tag is for posts relevant to actual or potential market-like mechanisms for altruistic or charitable activities. An example would be certificates of impact

See also EA Funding.

The posts listed here would fit this tag. Some other posts tagged EA Funding might fit as well.

I'm unsure precisely what the ideal scope and name of this tag would be. 

2JP Addison8moI like it. Impact Certificates is more recognizable, but Markets for Altruism is more general. I think I agree with your favoring it.
2MichaelA8moCool, thanks for the input - given that, I've now made the tag, with the name Markets for Altruism :)

I think it wouldbe useful to be able to see all the posts from a particular organisation all at once on the forum. For the most part, individuals from those organisations post, rather than a single organisation account it can be difficult to see e.g. all of Rethink Priorities' research on a given topic

Curious to hear if people think it's better to have tags or sequences for group these posts?

2vaidehi_agarwalla6moNew issue: How do we deal with name changes ? (E.g. EAF became CLR, .impact became rethink charity) I think it's nice to have a single tag (the new name) for continuity but sometimes an org had a different focus or projects associated with the old name. Maybe it's enough to mention in the tag description "previously called X"?
2MichaelA8moUpdate: I've now made tags for Rethink Priorities, Future of Humanity Institute, and Global Priorities Institute. I believe I've tagged all RP posts. I wasn't very thorough in tagging FHI or GPI posts. Other people can tag additional FHI and GPI posts, and/or add tags for other orgs.
2MichaelA9moI think something like this would be a good idea :) Some thoughts: * One downside could be that we might end up with quite a few of these tags, which then clutter up the tags page. * Maybe it'd be best if the Forum team can set it up so there's a separate, collapsable part of the tags page just for all the organisation tags? * That might also make it easier for someone who's looking for org tags in general (without knowing what specific orgs might have tags) to find them. * Most EA organisations probably already have pages on their site where you can find all/most their research outputs. E.g., Rethink Priorities' publications page []. * But one thing tags allows you to do is (from the home page of the forum) filter by multiple tags at once. So you could e.g. filter by both the Rethink Priorities tag and the Wild Animal Welfare tag, to find all of Rethink's posts related to that topic. * That said, I've never actually used the approach of filtering by multiple tags myself. * And the lists of publications on an org's site may often be organised by broad topic area anyway. Though this could still be useful if you want to see if an org wrote something related to a concept/topic they probably wouldn't organise their pages by (perhaps because it's cross-cutting, slightly obscure, or wasn't the main focus of the post) - e.g., if you want to see whether Rethink has written anything related to patient altruism []. * I think tags might be better than sequences for this purpose. One reason is the above-mentioned benefit of allowing for filtering by both org and some tag. Another reason is that these posts usually won't really be sequences in the usual sense - it won't be the case that the order of publication is the most natural or
2vaidehi_agarwalla9moI agree that tags seem better than sequences. I think rather than specific tags, it may be better to just have them regular tags. This would solve the issue about which organisations get org tags. I think it's okay for people to tag their own early stage projects or orgs even if they aren't very big (I'm biased here as I have some projects which I would like to be able to link people to). I don't think there's a lot of risk - having a tag doesn't mean your project is endorsed by EA or anything, it's just a organisational tool. I think this is probably the best strategy! Also congrats on starting at Rethink :)
0JP Addison9moA possibility would be to add the organization as a coauthor for all official posts.

I've added a Meta-Science tag. I'd love for some help with clarifying the distinction between it and Scientific Progress.  

Generally, I imagine meta-science as being more focused on specific aspects of the academic ecosystem and scientific progress to be related more to the general properties of scientific advances. There is clearly an overlap there, but I'm not sure where exactly to set the boundaries. 

2vaidehi_agarwalla9moI think the overlap would be a if say, in the field of survey methodology, someone discovers a new way to measure bias in surveys - this would be a meta-science improvement but also scientific progress in the field of survey methodology

I'm surprised that "cost-effectiveness evaluation" doesn't exist yet.

Some others that it's weird enough that they don't exist yet: "meta-charities", "advocacy", "pandemic preparedness".

A couple of tags that would apply to all of my posts: "aging research", "scientific research".

6JP Addison10moI'd be in favor of all of those tags, except "pandemic preparedness" which I currently think is too overlapping with "Biosecurity".
3MichaelA10moI'd say "scientific research" is probably covered by Scientific Progress [], Research Methods [], and tags about specific areas scientific research can be done in?
3MichaelA10moI think I'm in favour of a Cost-Effectiveness Evaluation tag. (Or maybe Cost-Effectiveness Analysis? I think that's the more common term?) That seems similar to Impact Assessment (a tag I made last month), so some of my thoughts on that tag [] might also be relevant. But I think Cost-Effectiveness Analysis is probably different enough from existing tags to be worth having.

Would be good if tags always had descriptions/definitions of the things they're for.

4MichaelA10moAgreed. I think people creating tags should probably always add those descriptions/definitions. One thing I'd note is that anyone can add descriptions/definitions for tags, even if they didn't create them. This could be hard if you're not sure what the scope was meant to be, but if you think you know what the scope was meant to be, you could consider adding a description/definition yourself.

(Update: I've now made this tag.)


Arguments against

Arguments for:

  • I'd guess there are at least 5 relevant posts
    • Some posts with the above-mentioned tags might be relevant
  • I'd guess there'll be more relevant posts in future
  • I'd guess at least a few EA forum users would appreciate seeing a collection of posts on this

Update: I've now made this tag.

[Something about war, armed conflict, or great power conflict]

Arguments against:

Arguments for:

  • Arguably a very important subset of International Relations, which might warrant a tag of its own.
  • Arguably not entirely a subset of International Relations, as things like civil/intrastate armed conflicts could also be important. (But maybe any EA Forum post that covers that would in practice also cover other Internatio
... (read more)

David Pearce (the tag will be removed if others think it’s not warranted)

Arguments against:

  • One may see David Pearce much more related to transhumanism (even if to the most altruistic “school” of transhumanism) than to EA (see e.g. Pablo’s comment).
  • Some of Pearce’s ideas goes against certain established notions in EA: e.g. he thinks sentience of classical digital computers is impossible under the known laws of physics, that minimising suffering should take priority over increasing happiness of the already well-off, that environmental interventions alone,
... (read more)

Michael is correct that the inclusion criteria for entries of individual people hasn't been made explicit. In deciding whether a person was a fit subject for an article, I haven't followed any conscious procedure, but merely relied on my subjective sense of whether the person deserved a dedicated article. Looking at the list of people I ended up including, a few clusters emerge:

  1. people who have had an extraordinary positive impact, and that are often discussed in EA circles (Arkhipov, Zhdanov, etc.)
  2. people who have attained eminence in their fields and who are connected to EA to a significant degree (Pinker, Hassabis, Boeree, etc.)
  3. academics who have conducted research of clear EA relevance (Ng, Duflo, Parfit, Tetlock, etc.)
  4. historical figures that may be regarded as proto-EAs or that are seen as having inspired the EA movement (Bentham, Mill, Russell, etc.)
  5. "core figures" in the EA community (Shulman, Christiano, Tomasik, etc.)

Some people, such Bostrom, MacAskill, Ord, fit into more than one of these clusters. My sense is that David Pearce doesn't fit into any of the clusters. It seems relatively uncontroversial that he doesn't fit into clusters 1-4, so the relevant question—at least i... (read more)

2MichaelA2moFWIW, I think your comment is already a good step! I think I broadly agree that those people who fit into at least one of those clusters should typically have entries, and those who don't shouldn't. And this already makes me feel more of a sense of clarity about this. I still think substantial fuzziness remains. This is mostly just because words like "eminence" could be applied more or less strictly. I think that that's hard to avoid and maybe not necessary to avoid - people will probably generally agree, and then we can politely squabble about the borderline cases and thereby get a clearer sense of what we collectively think the "line" is. But I think "people who have had an extraordinary positive impact, and that are often discussed in EA circles (Arkhipov, Zhdanov, etc.)" may require further operationalisation, since what counts as extraordinary positive impact can differ a lot based on one's empirical, moral, epistemological, etc. views. E.g., I suspect that nil might think Pearce has been more impactful than most people who do have an entry, since Pearce's impacts are more targeted at suffering reduction. (nil can of course correct me if I'm wrong about their views.) So maybe we should say something like "people who are widely discussed in EA and who a significant fraction of EAs see as having had an extraordinary positive impact (Arkhipov, Zhdanov, etc.)"? (That leaves the fuzziness of "significant fraction", but it seems a step in the right direction by not just relying on a given individual's view of who has been extraordinarily impactful.) Then, turning back to the original example, there's the question: Would a significant fraction of EAs see Pearce as having had an extraordinary positive impact? I think I'd lean towards "no", though I'm unsure, both because I don't have a survey and because of the vagueness of the term "significant fraction".

I think there's a relatively clear sense in which Arkhipov, Borlaug, and similar figures (e.g. winners of the Future of Life Award, names included in Scientists Greater than Einstein, and related characters profiled in Doing Good Better or the 80,000 Hours blog)  count as having had an extraordinary positive impact and Pearce does not, namely, the sense in which also Ord, MacAskill, Tomasik, etc. don't count. I think it's probably unnecessary to try to specify in great detail what the criterion is, but the core element seems to be that the former are all examples of do-gooding that is extraordinary from both an EA and a common-sense perspective, whereas if you wanted to claim that e.g. Shulman or Christiano are among humanity's greatest benefactors, you'd probably need to make some arguments that a typical person would not find very persuasive. (The arguments for that conclusion would also likely be very brittle and fail to persuade most EAs, but that doesn't seem to be so central.)

So I think it really boils down to the question of how core a figure Pearce is in the EA movement, and as noted, my impression is that he just isn't a core enough figure. I say this, incidentally, as someone who admires him greatly and who has been profoundly influenced by his writings (some of which I translated into Spanish a long time ago), although I have also developed serious reservations about various aspects of his work over the years.

2MichaelA2mo1. If you mean that the vast majority of EAs would agree that Arkhipov, Borlaug, Zhdanov, and similar figures count as having had an extraordinary positive impact, or that that's the only reasonable position one could hold, I disagree, for reasons I'll discuss below. 2. But if you just mean that a significant fraction of EAs would agree that those figures count as having had an extraordinary impact, I agree. And, as noted in my previous comment, I think that using a phrasing like "people who are widely discussed in EA and who a significant fraction of EAs see as having had an extraordinary positive impact (Arkhipov, Zhdanov, etc.)" would probably work. 1. And that phrasing also seems fine if I'm wrong about (1), so maybe there's no real need to debate (1)? 2. (Relatedly, I also do ultimately agree that Arkhipov etc. should have entries.) Expanding on (1): * This is mostly due to crucial considerations that could change the sign or (relative) magnitude of the moral value of the near-term effects that these people are often seen as having had. For example: * It's not obvious that a US-Russia nuclear war during the Cold War would've caused a negative long-term future trajectory change. * I expect it would, and, for related reasons, am currently focused on nuclear risk research myself. * But I think one could reasonably argue that the case for this view is brittle and the case for e.g. the extraordinary positive impact of some people focused on AI is stronger (conditioning on strong longtermism). * Some EAs think extinction risk reduction is or plausibly is net negative. * Some EAs think population growth is or plausibly is net negative, e.g. for reasons related to the meat-eater problem [] or to differential progress [https:
6nil2moFor those who may want to see the deleted entry, I'm posting it below:
5Pablo2moThanks again, nil, for taking the time to create this entry and outline your reasoning. After reviewing the discussion, and seeing that no new comments have been posted in the past five days, I've decided to delete the article, for the reasons I outlined previously. Please do not let this dissuade you from posting further content to the Wiki, and if you have any feedback, feel free to leave it below or to message me privately [].
0nil2moI'm sorry to hear this, Pablo, as I haven't been convinced that Pearce isn't relevant enough for effective altruism. Also, I really don’t see how the persons below have contributed more or are more relevant to effective altruism than Pearce (that is not necessarily to say that their entities aren’t warranted!). May it be correct to infer that at least some of these entries received less scrutiny than Pearce’s nomination? * Dylan Matthews [] * David Chalmers [] And perhaps: * Demis Hassabis [] * K. Eric Drexler [] May I ask why five days since the last comment were deemed enough for proceeding to the deletion? Is this part of the wiki’s rules? (If so, it must be my fault that I didn't have time to reply in time.) I also wanted to say that despite the disagreement, I appreacite that the wiki has a team commiteed to it.


I tried to outline some criteria in an earlier comment. Chalmers and Hassabis fall under the category of "people who have attained eminence in their fields and who are connected to EA to a significant degree". Drexler, and perhaps also Chalmers, fall under the category of "academics who have conducted research of clear EA relevance".  Matthews doesn't fall under any of the categories listed, though he strikes me as someone worth including given his leading role at Future Perfect—the only explicitly EA project in mainstream journalism—and his long-standing involvement with the EA movement.

As the example of Matthews shows, the categories I identified aren't exhaustive. That was just my attempt to retroactively make sense of the tactic criterion I had followed in selecting these particular people. Despite still not having a super clear sense of the underlying categories, I felt reasonably confident that Pearce didn't qualify because (1) it seemed that there was no other potential category he could fall under besides that of "EA core figure" and (2)  ... (read more)

FWIW, I agree that Hassabis and Drexler meet your proposed criteria and warrant entries, and that Chalmers and Caplan probably do (along with Hanson and Beckstead). But Matthews does seem roughly on par with Pearce to me. (Though I don't know that much about either of their work.) 

I also agree that Pearce seems to be a similar case to de Grey, so we might apply a similar principle to both.

Maybe it'd be useful to try switching briefly from the discussion of specific entries and criteria to instead consider: What are the pros and cons of having more or much more entries (and especially entries on people)? And roughly how many entries on people do we ultimately want? This would be similar to the inclusionism debate on Wikipedia, I believe. If we have reason to want to avoid going beyond like 50 or 100 or 200 or whatever entries on people, or we have reason to be quite careful about adding less prominent or central people to the wiki, or if we don't, then that could inform how high a "bar" we set.

5nil2moFirst, I want to make it clear that I don’t question that any of the persons I listed in my previous comment [] should be removed from the wiki. I just disagree that not including Pearce is justified. Again, I honestly don’t think that it is true that Chalmers and Drexler are “connected to EA to a significant degree” while Pearce isn’t. Especially Chalmers: from what I know, he isn’t engaged w/ effective altruism, besides once agreeing for being interviewed [] at the 80,000 Hours podcast. As for the “attained eminence in their fields” condition, I do see that it may be harder to resolve for Pearce’s case since he isn’t an academic but rather an independent philosopher, writer, and advocate. But if Pearce’s field as suffering abolitionism [], then the “attained eminence in their fields” condition does hold, in my view: he both is the founder of the “abolitionist project” [] and has written extensively on why’s and how’s of the project. Also, as I mentioned in the original comment [] proposing the entry, Pearce’s work has inspired many EAs, including Brain Tomasik, the Qualia Research Institute’s Andrés Gómez Emilsson, and the Center for Reducing Suffering’s Magnus Vinding, and the nascent field of welfare/compassionate biology []. Also, Invincible Wellbeing [] research group has been inspired by Pearce's work as well. I don’t have any new arguments to make, and I don’t expect anyone involved to change their minds anyway. I only hope it may be worth time of others to contribute their pers
8Pablo2moHey nil, Chalmers was involved with EA in various ways over the years, e.g. by publishing a paper on the intelligence explosion and then discussing it at one of the Singularity Summits, briefly participating in LessWrong discussions, writing about mind uploading, interacting (I believe) with Luke Muehlhauser and Buck Shlegeris about their illusionist account of consciousness, etc. In any case, I agree with you (and Michael) that it may be more productive to consider the underlying reasons for restricting the number of entries on individual people. I generally favor an inclusionist stance, and the main reason for taking an exclusionist line with entries for individuals is that I fear things will get out of control if we adopt a more relaxed approach. I'm happy, for instance, with having entries for basically any proposed organization, as long as there is some reasonable link to EA, but it would look kind of weird if we allowed any EA to have their own entry. An alternative is to take an intermediate position where we require a certain degree of notability, but the bar is set lower, so as to include people like Pearce, de Grey, and others. We could, for instance, automatically accept anyone who already has their own Wikipedia entry, as long as they have a meaningful connection to EA (of roughly the same strength as we currently demand for EA orgs). Pearce would definitely meet this bar. How do others feel about this proposal?

I personally feel that the proposal would allow for the inclusion of a number of people (not Pearce) who intuitively should not have their own Wiki entry, so I'm somewhat reluctant to adopt it. More generally, an advantage of having a more exclusionist approach for individuals is that the class of borderline cases is narrower, and so is therefore the expected number of discussions concerning whether a particular person should or should not be included. Other things equal, I would prefer to have few of these discussions, since it can be tricky to explicitly address whether someone deserves an entry (and the unpleasantness associated with having to justify an exclusionist position specifically—which may be perceived as expressing a negative opinion of the person whose entry is being considered—may unduly bias the discussion in an inclusionist direction).

0nil2moPerhaps voting on cases where there is a disagreement could achieve a wider inclusiveness or at least less controversy? Voters would be e.g. the moderators (w/ an option to abstain) and several persons who are familiar w/ the work of a proposed person. It may also help if inclusion criteria are more specific and are not hidden until a dispute arises.

I think discussion will probably usually be sufficient. Using upvotes and downvotes as info seems useful, but probably not letting them be decisive. 


This might just be a case where written communication on the internet makes the tone seem off, but "hidden" sounds to me unfair and harsh. That seems to imply Pablo already knew what the inclusion criteria should be, and was set on them, but deliberately withheld them. This seems extremely unlikely. 

I think it's more like the wiki is only a few months old, and there's (I think) only one person paid to put substantial time into it, so we're still figuring out a lot of policies as we go - I think Pablo just had fuzzier ideas, and then was prompted by this conversation to make them more explicit, and then was still clearly open to feedback on those criteria themselves (rather than them already being set).

I do agree that it will help now that we have possible inclusion criteria written up, and it would be even better to have them shown more prominently somewhere (though with it still being clear that they're tentative and open to revision). Maybe this is all you meant?

7nil2moI didn't have in mind to sound harsh. Thanks for pointing this out: it now seems obvious to me that that part sounds uncharitable. I do appologise, belatedly :( What I meant is that currently these new, evolving inclusion criteria are difficult to find. And if they are used in dispute resolutions (from this case onwards), perhaps they should be referenced for contributors as part of the introduction [] text, for example.
4Pablo2moThanks for the feedback. I have made a note to update the Wiki FAQ, or if necessary create a new document. Feel free to ping me if you don't see any updates within the next week or so.
5Pablo1moHi nil, I've edited the FAQ [] to make our inclusion criteria more explicit.
1nil1moThanks, Pablo. The criteria will help to avoid some future long disputes (and thus save time for more important things), although it wouldn't have prevented my creating the entry for David Pearce, for he does fit the second condition, I think. (We disagree, I know.)
4MichaelA2mo[Just responding to one specific thing, which isn't central to what you're saying anyway. No need to respond to this.] For what it's worth, I think I agree with you re Chalmers (I think Pearce may be more connected to EA than Chalmers is), but not Drexler. E.g., Drexler has worked at FHI for a while, and the FHI office is also shared by GovAI (part of FHI, but worth listing separately), GPI, CEA, and I think Forethought. So that's pretty EA-y. Plus he originated some ideas that are quite important for a lot of EAs, e.g. related to nanotech, CAIS, and Paretotopia. (I'm writing quickly and thus leaning on acronyms and jargon, sorry.)
3nil2moI should have been more clear about Drexler: I don't dispute that he is “connected to EA to a significant degree”. But so is Pearce, in my view, for the reasons outlined in this thread.

(I think it's weird and probably bad that this comment of nil's has negative karma. nil is just clarifying what they were saying, and what they're saying is within the realm of reason, and this was said politely.)

4Michael Huang2moTo add to arguments for inclusion, here’s an excerpt from an EA Forum post about key figures in the animal suffering focus area. David Pearce’s work on suffering and biotechnology would be more relevant now than in 2013 due to developments in genome editing and gene drives [].
4MichaelA2moI'm roughly neutral on this, since I don't have a very clear sense of what the criteria and "bars" are for deciding whether to make an entry about a given person. I think it would be good to have a discussion/policy regarding that. I think some people like Nick Bostrom and Will MacAskill clearly warrant and entry, and some people like me clearly don't, and there's a big space in between - with Pearce included in it - where I could be convinced either way. (This has to do with relevance and notability in the context of the EA Forum Wiki, not like an overall judgement of these people or a popularity contest.) Some other people who are perhaps in that ambiguous space: * Nick Beckstead (no entry atm) * Elie Hassenfeld (no entry atm, but an entry for GiveWell) * Max Tegmark (no entry atm, but an entry for FLI) * Brian Tomasik (has an entry) * Stuart Russell (has an entry) * Hilary Greaves (has an entry) (I think I'd lean towards each of them having an entry except Hassenfeld and maybe Tegmark. I think the reason for The Hassenfeld Exception is that, as far as I'm aware, the vast majority of his work has been very connected with GiveWell. So it's very important and notable, but doesn't need a distinct entry. Somewhat similar with Tegmark inasmuch as he relates to EA, though he's of course notable in the physics community for non-FLI-related reasons. But I'm very tentative with all those views.)
1nil2moThis makes sense to me, although one who is more familiar w/ their work may find their exclusion unwarranted. Thanks for clarifying! In this light I still think an entry for Pearce is justified, to a degree scientifically grounded proposals for abolishing suffering is an EA topic (and this is the main theme of Pearce's work). But I'm just one input of course. Regarding Tomasik, we have different intuitions here: if an entry for Tomasik may not be justified, then I would say this sets a high bar which only original EA founders could reach. (For Tomasik himself is a founder of an EA charity - the Foundational Research Institute / Center on Long-Term Risk - has written [] extensively on many topics highly relevant to EA, and an advisor [] at the Center for Reducing Suffering, another EA org.) Anyway, this difference doesn't probably matter in practice since you added that you lean towards Tomasik's having an entry.
9Pablo2moI agree with you that a Tomasik entry is clearly warranted. I would say that his entry is as justified as one on Ord or MacAskill; he is one of half a dozen or so people who have made the most important contributions to EA, in my opinion. I will respond to your main comment later, or tomorrow.
5MichaelA2moAs noted, I do lean towards Tomasik having an entry, but "co-founder of an EA org" + "written extensively on many topics highly relevant to EA" + "is an advisor for another EA org", or 1 or 2 of those things plus 1 or 2 similar things, includes a fair few people, including probably like 5 people I know personally and who probably shouldn't have their own entries. I do think Tomasik has been especially prolific and his writings especially well-regarded and influential, which is a big part of why I lean towards an entry for him, but the criteria and cut offs do seem fuzzy at this stage.
3Aaron Gertler2moAs the head of the Forum, I'll second Pablo in thanking you for creating the entry. While I defer to Pablo on deciding what articles belong in the wiki, I thought Pearce was a reasonable candidate. I appreciate the time you took to write out your reasoning (and to acknowledge arguments against including him).
1nil2moThank you for appreciating the contribution. Since Pablo is trusted w/ deciding on the issue, I will address my questions about the decision directly to him in this thread.

Academia or something like that

This could cover things like how (in)efficient academia is, what influences it has had and could have, the best ways to leverage or direct academia, whether people should go into academic or academia-related careers, etc.

E.g., Open Phil's post(s) on field-building and this post on How to PhD.

Related entries

field-building | meta-science | research methods | research training programs | scientific progress


It's possible that this is made redundant by other tags we already have? 

And my current suggested name and scope are... (read more)

4Pablo3moI think this would be a valuable article. Perhaps the title could be refined, but at the moment I can't think of any alternatives I like. So feel free to create it, and we can consider possible name variants in the future.
4MichaelA3moOk, done []!
4Pablo3moMakes sense. I created [] it (no content yet).

Update: I've now made this tag.

Charitable pledges or Altruistic pledges or Giving pledges (but that could be confused with the Giving Pledge specifically) or Donation pledges or similar

Maybe the first two names are good in that they could capture pledges about resources other than money (e.g., time)? But I can't off the top of my head think of any non-monetary altruistic pledges. 

This could serve as an entry on this important-seeming topic in general, and as a directory to a bunch of other entries or orgs on specific pledges (e.g., Giving Pledge, GWWC... (read more)

What do you think about a tag for posts that include Elicit predictions? I'd like to see all posts that include them and it might be a tiny further reminder to use them more.

4MichaelA6moThis seems plausibly useful to me. Obviously it’d overlap a lot with the Forecasting tag. But if it’s the case that several posts include Elicit forecasts but most posts tagged Forecasting don’t include Elicit forecasts, then I imagine a separate tag for Elicit forecasts could be useful. (Basically, what I’m thinking about is whether there would be cases in which it’d be useful for someone to find / be sent a collection of links to just posts with Elicit forecasts, with the Forecasting tag not covering their needs well.) But maybe a better option would be to mirror LessWrong in having a tag for posts about forecasting and another tag for posts that include actual forecasts (see here [])? (Or maybe the latter tag should only include posts that quite prominently include forecasts, rather than just including them in passing here and there.) Because maybe people would also want to see posts with Metaculus forecasts in them, or forecasts from Good Judgement Inc, or just forecasts from individual EAs but not using those platforms. And I’d guess it’d make more sense to have one tag where all of these things can be found than to try to have a separate tag for each. (That’s just my quick thoughts in a tired state, though.) It could also be handy to have a tag for posts relevant to “Ought / Elicit” - I think it’d probably be good to bundle them together but note Elicit explicitly - similarly to how there’s now tags for posts relevant to each of a few other orgs (e.g. Rethink Priorities, FHI, GPI, QURI). So maybe the combination of a tag for posts that contain actual forecasts and a tag for Ought / Elicit would serve the role a tag for posts containing Elicit forecasts would?

Update: I've now made this entry.

Requests for proposals or something like that

To cover posts like 

This would be analogous to the Job listings tags, and sort of the inverse of the Funding requests tag.

This overlaps in some ways with Get involved and Requests (open), but seems like a sufficiently distinct thing that might be sufficiently useful to collect in one place that it's worth having a tag for this.

This could also be an entry t... (read more)

Update: I've now made this entry.

Semiconductors or Microchips or Integrated circuit or something like that

The main way this is relevant to EA is as a subset of AI governance / AI risk issues, which could push against having an entry just for this.

That said, my understanding is that a bunch of well-informed people see this as a fairly key variable for forecasting AI risks and intervening to reduce those risks, to the point where I'd say an entry seems warranted.

Meta: perhaps this entry should be renamed 'Propose and vote on potential entries' or 'Propose and vote on potential tags/Wiki articles'? We generally use the catch-all term 'entries' for what may be described as either a tag or a Wiki article.

2MichaelA1moYeah, I considered that a few weeks ago but then (somewhat inexplicably) didn't bother doing it. Thanks for the prod - I have now done it :)

Update: I've now made this entry

career advising or career advice or career coaching or something like that

We already have career choice. But that's very broad. It seems like it could be useful to have an entry with the more focused scope of things like:

  • How useful do various forms of career advising tend to be?
  • What are best practices for career advising?
  • What orgs work in that space?
    • E.g., 80k, Animal Advocacy Careers, Probably Good, presumably some others
  • How can one test fit for or build career capital in career advising?

This would be analogous to how we hav... (read more)

Charter cities or special economic zones or whatever the best catchall term for those things + seasteading is

From a quick search for "charter cities" on the Forum, I think there aren't many relevant posts, but there are:

... (read more)
4Pablo1moYes, definitely. I already had some scattered notes on this. There's also the 80k podcast episode: Wiblin, Robert & Keiran Harris (2019) The team trying to end poverty by founding well-governed ‘charter’ cities [] , 80,000 Hours, March 31. An interview with Mark Lutter and Tamara Winter from the Charter Cities Institute.

Maybe we should have an entry for each discipline/field that's fairly relevant to EA and fairly well-represented on the Forum? Like how we already have history, economics, law, and psychology research. Some other disciplines/fields (or clusters of disciplines/fields) that could be added:

  • political science
  • humanities
    • I think humanities disciplines/fields tend to be somewhat less EA-relevant than e.g. economics, but it could be worth having one entry for this whole cluster of disciplines/fields
  • social science
    • But (unlike with humanities) it's probably better to h
... (read more)
2Pablo2moI'm overall in favor. I wonder if we should take a more systematic approach to entries about individual disciplines. It seems that, from an EA perspective, a discipline may be relevant in a number of distinct ways, e.g. because it is a discipline in which young EAs may want to pursue a career, because conducting research in that discipline is of high value, because that discipline poses serious risks, or because findings in that discipline should inform EA thinking. I'm not sure how to translate this observation into something actionable for the Wiki, though, so I'm just registering it here in case others have thoughts along these lines.
2MichaelA2moYeah, I do think it seems worth thinking a bit more about what the "inclusion criteria" for a discipline should be (from the perspective of making an EA Wiki entry about it), and that the different things you mention seem like starting points for that. Without clearer inclusion criteria, we could end up with a ridiculously large number of entries, or with entries that are unwarranted or too fine-grained, or with entries that are too coarse-grained, or with hesitation and failing to create worthwhile entries. I don't immediately have thoughts, but endorse the idea of someone generating thoughts :D
2Stefan_Schubert2moI agree that humanities disciplines tend to be less EA-relevant than the social sciences. But I think that the humanities are quite heterogeneous, so it feels more natural to me to have entries for particular humanities disciplines, than humanities as a whole. But I'm not sure any such entries are warranted; it depends on how much has been written.

Update: I've now made this entry

Charity evaluation or (probably less good) Charity evaluator

We already have an entries donation choice, intervention evaluation, and cause prioritisation. But charity evaluation is a major component of donation choice for which we lack an entry. This entry could also cover things about charity evaluation orgs like GiveWell, e.g. how useful a role they serve, what the best practices for them are, and whether there should be one for evaluating longtermist charities or AI charities or whatever.

Downside of this name: Really it m... (read more)

4Pablo2moI think this should clearly exist.

Update: I've now made this entry.

Effective altruism outreach in schools or High school outreach or something like that

Overlaps with , but that entry is broader, and it seems like now there's a decent amount of activity or discussion about high school outreach specifically. E.g.:

... (read more)
4Pablo2moI'm in favor.

Barriers to effective giving or Psychology of (in)effective giving or something like that


Why aren’t people donating more effectively? | Stefan Schubert | EA Global: San Francisco 2018

EA Efficacy and Community Norms with Stefan Schubert [see description for why this is relevant]

[Maybe some other Stefan Schubert stuff]

[Probably some stuff by Lucius Caviola, David Reinstein, and others]

Related entries

cognitive bias | cost-effectiveness | donation choice | diminishing returns | effective giving | market efficiency of philanthropy | rationality | sc... (read more)

Yeah, I think Psychology of effective giving is probably the best name. Stefan, Lucius and others have published a bunch of stuff on this, which would be good to cover in the article.

9Pablo2moThis is one of many emerging areas of research at the intersection of psychology and effective altruism: - psychology of effective giving (Caviola et al. 2014; Caviola, Schubert & Nemirow 2020; Burum, Nowak & Hoffman 2020) - psychology of existential risk (Shubert, Caviola & Faber 2019) - psychology of speciesism (Caviola 2019; Caviola, Everett & Faber 2019; Caviola & Capraro 2020) - psychology of utilitarianism (Kahane et al. 2018; Everett & Kahane 2020) I was thinking of covering all of this research in a general entry on the psychology of effective altruism, but we can also have separate articles for each.
4MichaelA2moI forgot that there was already an EA Psychology tag [], so I've now just renamed that, added some content, and copied this comment of Pablo's on that Discussion page. (It could still make sense for someone to also create entries on those other topics and/or on moral psychology - I just haven't done so yet.)
2Pablo2moGreat, thanks.
2MichaelA2moApparently there's a new review article by Caviola, Schubert, and Greene called "The Psychology of (In)Effective Altruism" [], which pushes in favour of roughly that as the name. I also think that, as you suggest, that can indeed neatly cover "psychology of effective giving" (i.e., that seems a subset of "psychology of effective altruism"), and maybe "psychology of utilitarianism". But I'm less sure that that neatly covers the other things you list. I.e., the psychology of speciesism and existential risk are relevant to things other than how effective people will be in their altruism. But we can just decide later whether to also have separate entries for those, and if so I do think they should definitely be listed in the Related entries section from the "main entry" on this bundle of topics (and vice versa). So I think I currently favour: * Haven't an entry called psychology of (in)effective altruism * With psychology of effective altruism as a second-to-top pick * Probably not currently having a separate entry for psychology of (in)effective giving * But if people think there's enough distinctive stuff to warrant an entry/tag for that, I'm definitely open to it * Maybe having separate entries for the other things you mention

Psychology of (in)effective altruism is adequate for a paper, where authors can use humor, puns, and other informal devices, but inappropriate for an encyclopedia, which should keep a formal tone.

(To elaborate:  by calling the field of study e.g. the 'psychology of effective giving' one is not confining attention only to the psychology of those who give particularly effectively: 'effective giving' is used to designate a dimension of variation, and the field studies the underlying psychology responsible for causing people to give with varying degrees of effectiveness, ranging from very effectively to very ineffectively. By analogy, the psychology of eating is meant to also study the psychology of people who do not eat, or who eat little. A paper about anorexia may be called "The psychology of (non-)eating", but that's just an informal way of drawing attention to its focus; it's not meant to describe a field of study called "The psychology of (non-)eating", and that's not an appropriate title for an encyclopedia article on such a topic.)

9RyanCarey2moYeah, the ultra-pedantic+playful parenthetical is a very academic thing. "Psychology of effective altruism" seems to cover giving/x-risk/speciesism/career choice - i.e. it covers everything we want.
2MichaelA2moGiven the fact you both say this and the upvotes on those comments, I think we should probably indeed go with "psychology of effective giving" rather than "psychology of (in)effective giving".[1] I still don't think that actually totally covers psychology of speciesism, since speciesism is not just relevant in relation to altruism. Likewise, I wouldn't say the psychology of racism or of sexism are covered by the area "psychology of effective altruism". But I do think the entry on psychology of effective altruism should discuss speciesism and so on, and that if we later have an entry for psychology of speciesism they should link to each other. [1] But FWIW: * I don't naturally interpret the "(in)" device as something like humour, a pun, or an informal device * I think "psychology of effective altruism" and "psychology of ineffective altruism" do call to mind to distinct focuses, even if I'd expect each thing to either cover (with less emphasis) or "talk to" work on the other thing * Somewhat analogously, areas of psychology that focus on what makes for an especially good life (e.g., humanist psychology) are meaningfully distinct from those that focus on "dysfunction" (e.g., psychopathology), and I believe new terms were coined primarily to highlight that distinction But I don't think this matters much, and I'm totally happy for "psychology of effective giving" to be used instead.
2MichaelA2mo(Oh, just popping a thought here before I go to sleep: "moral psychology" is a relevant nearby thing. Possibly it'd be better to have that entry than "psychology of effective altruism"? Or to have both?)
4Pablo2moThanks. Coincidentally this was published [] yesterday. But I haven't done any tagging yet.
4MichaelA2moAh, nice. Maybe I searched for the entry shortly before it was published. I've now tagged those 3 posts I mentioned, but haven't checked and tagged other things that come up when you search "Our World in Data".
2Pablo2moThere are lots of hits for 'EA updates'. The three results that I thought deserved to be tagged were precisely the ones you had already identified. I haven't looked at this exhaustively, though, so if you find other relevant articles, feel free to add the tag to those, too.

Some orgs it might be worth making entries about:

2Pablo2moThanks, I'm in the process of compiling a master list of EA orgs and creating entries for the missing ones. Would you be interested in looking at the spreadsheet?
2MichaelA2moYeah, I'll send you a DM

I think there should either be an entry for each of Accident risk, Misuse risk, and Structural risk, or a single entry that covers all three, or something like that.

Maybe these entries should just focus on AI, since that's where the terms were originally used (as far as I'm aware). On the other hand, I think the same concepts also make sense for other large-scale risks from technologies.

If the entries do focus on AI, maybe they should have AI in the name (e.g. AI accident risk or Accident risk from AI), or maybe not.

In this case, the reason I'm posting thi... (read more)

2Pablo3moThere's an accidental harm [] article, which is meant to cover the risk of causing harm as an unintended effect of trying to do good, as discussed e.g. here []. What you describe is somewhat different, since the risk results not so much from "attempts to do good" but from the development of a technology in response to consumer demand (or other factors driving innovation not directly related to altruism). Furthermore, misuse risk can involve deliberate attempts to cause harm, in addition to unintended harm. I guess all of these risks are instances of the broader category of "downside risk", so maybe we can have an article on that?
2MichaelA3moI think there are indeed overlaps between all these things. But I do think that the application of these terms to technological risk specifically or AI risk specifically is important enough to warrant its own entry or set of entries. Maybe if you feel their distinctive scope is at risk of being unclear, that pushes in favour of sticking with the original AI-focused framing of the concepts, and maybe just mentioning in one place in the entry/entries that the same terms could also be applied to technological risk more broadly? Or maybe it pushes in favour of having a single entry focused on this set of concepts as a whole and the distinctions between them (maybe calledAccident, misuse, and structural risks)? I also wouldn't really want to say misuse risk is an instance of downside risk. One reason is that it may not be downside risk from the misuser's perspective, and another is that downside risk is often/usually used to mean a risk of a downside from something that is or is expected to be good overall. More on this from an older post of mine []: Also, I think I see "accidental harm" as sufficiently covering standard uses of the term "downside risk" that there's not a need for a separate entry. (Though maybe a redirect would be good?)

EA vs Non-EA Orgs

Proposed tag description:

The EA vs Non-EA Orgs tag is for posts that include arguments for or against pursuing jobs at organisations that explicitly identify with the "effective altruism" label, relative to jobs at other organisations. The tag is also for posts that include discussion of whether and why members of the EA community may be biased in one direction or the other on this question, and how to address that (e.g., how to raise the status - within the EA community - of high-impact work at non-EA orgs). 

This tag is not intended

... (read more)
4JP Addison4moI like it. Maybe "Working at EA vs Non-EA Orgs?"
2MichaelA4moCool, done []. I think that that name is clearer, but thought brevity was substantially preferred for tag names. But I'm personally more inclined towards clarity than brevity here, so I'll use your suggested name. Someone can change it later anyway.

Scalably Using People or Scalably Using Labour or Task Y or something like that

Proposed description:

There are often discussions of how good or bad EA is at efficiently allocating many people to valuable work, the consequences of EA's strengths or weaknesses on that front, how to improve, and how this all might change as EA grows. 

See also Career Choice, Get Involved, Movement Strategy, Community Tools, Criticism (EA Movement), EA Hiring, and Markets for Altruism. 

Notes on that description:

  • I'll obviously add the links to the "See also" tags if I a
... (read more)
4JP Addison4moI'm pro. I'd call it Task Y, though I wouldn't be surprised if there was a reason not to.
2MichaelA4moCool, given that, I've now made the tag []. I've called it Scalably Using People rather than Task Y, with the key reason being that Alex originally described Task Y as being a single task. More generally, I think that the description of Task Y wouldn't neatly cover things like the vetting-constrained discussion or Jan's discussion of hierarchical network structures [] , and I'm hoping for this tag to cover things like that as well. So I see Task Y as a subset of what I'm hoping this tag will cover. I'm definitely open to people suggesting alternative names, though.

Industrial Revolution

We already have a variety of related tags, like History, Economic Growth, and Persistence of Political/Cultural Variables. But the Industrial Revolution does seem like perhaps the single most notable episode of history for many/all EA cause areas, so maybe we should have a tag just for it?

Some posts that would warrant the tag:

... (read more)
2JP Addison4moMy guess is that a better tag would be "History of Economic Growth". Because I can't picture a case where someone wants to find things about the industrial revolution but not all of economic growth. (Unless they're doing a specific research project, but that sounds pretty niche.) But even still, I'd tentatively lean towards economic growth being enough. But I think that depends on how fine-grained our tagging system should be, which I don't have a strong opinion on.
2MichaelA4moThis seems reasonable. I was also unsure about my suggestion, hence popping it here rather than making it. I'll hold off for now, at least.

Cultural Evolution

One relevant post:

I haven't searched my memory or the Forum for other relevant posts yet.

This would overlap somewhat with the tags for Memetics and Persistence of Political/Cultural Variables.

2JP Addison4moI'm in favor.
2MichaelA4moCool - done [].

Update: I've now made this tag.

Persistence of Political/Cultural Variables (or Cultural Persistence, or Cultural, Political, and Moral Persistence, or something like that)

First pass at a description: 

It's often important to have a sense of the persistence of political/cultural variables - such as democracy, authoritarianism, concern for human rights, a concern for animal welfare, or norms conducive to scientific progress or free markets. This can inform our predictions of what the future will be like and our views on the importance of changing those v

... (read more)
4Aaron Gertler4moSeems reasonable to me. Want to go ahead and create it?
2MichaelA4moDone! []

One consideration I just thought of, which I do not recall seeing mentioned elsewhere, is that the optional number of tags depends somewhat on the typical tag use case.

  • Clicking on an article's tags to find other related articles
    • As only a small % of tags apply to any given article, and this % will fall as the number of tags increases, article tag spaces will not become too 'busy'. 
    • Hence there should be many tags, so that each article can be tagged as usefully as possible.
  • Clicking on the tag list to find a specific topic
    • There are already so many tags it
... (read more)
2MichaelA5moGood points. Maybe the ideal for future will be to have hierarchies/categories of Forum tags? LessWrong now does this [] (though I haven't looked at their system in detail).

Update: I've now made this tag.

Fellowships or EA-Aligned Fellowships or Research Fellowships or something like that

Stefan Schubert writes:

It could be good if someone wrote an overview of the growing number of fellowships and scholarships in EA (and maybe also other forms of professional EA work). It could include the kind of info given above, and maybe draw inspiration from Larks' overviews of the AI Alignment landscape. I don't think I have seen anything quite like that, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Maybe this would be partially addressed via a tag ... (read more)

(Update: I've now made this tag.)

Institutions for Future Generations

This is arguably a subset of Institutional Decision-Making and/or Policy Change. It also overlaps with Longtermism (Philosophy) and Moral Advocacy / Values Spreading. But it seems like this is an important category that various people might want to learn about in particular (i.e., not just as part of learning about institutional decision-making more broadly), and like there are many EA Forum posts about this in particular.

(Update: I've now made this tag.)

China (or maybe something broader like BRICS or Rising Powers)

Rough proposed description:

The China tag is for posts that are about China, that address how China is relevant to various issues EAs care about, or that are relevant to how one could have an impact by engaging with China.

See also Global Outreach and International Relations.

It seems perhaps odd to single China out for a tag while not having tags for e.g. USA, Southeast Asia, ASEAN, United Nations, Middle Powers. But we do have a tag for posts relevant to the Europ... (read more)

Update: I've created the tag "Discussion Norms"

Community Norms/Discussion Norms

Very Bad Description: Posts that discuss norms on how EAs to interact with each other. 

Posts this tag could apply to: 

... (read more)
2MichaelA9moMy quick, personal take is that: 1. A tag for Discussion Norms seems useful and distinct from the other tags you mention. It also wouldn't have to only be about discussion norms for intra-EA interactions - it could also be about discussion norms in other contexts. 2. "Community Norms" and "Posts that discuss norms on how EAs to interact with each other" feel very broad to me, and it's harder for me to see precisely what that's trying to point at that isn't captured by one of the first three other tags you mention. 3. But I have a feeling that something like Community Norms/Discussion Norms could have a clear scope that's useful and distinct from the other tags. Maybe if you just try flesh out what you mean a little more in the description it'd be clear to me? 4. Maybe what you have in mind will often relate to things like being welcoming, supportive, and considerate? If so, maybe adjusting the tag label or description in light of that could help?
2vaidehi_agarwalla8moI think Discussion Norms makes sense! Discussion Norms: Posts about suggested or encouraged norms within the EA community on how to interact with other EAs, which may often relate to being supportive, welcoming and considerate. It's still not great, if you had any feedback I'd be keen to hear it!

Anyone have thoughts on this tag? I'm skeptical, but might be more inclined if I saw more applications that were good. Also if it had a description that described it's naturalness as a category in the EA-sphere. (If this were a business forum it would obviously be good, and maybe it is in this Forum — I'm not sure.)

2MichaelA9moMy quick take is that it does seem like it at least needs a description that explains why it warrants an EA Forum tag. I'd wonder, for example, whether it's meant to just be about scaling organisations (e.g., EA orgs), or also about scaling things like bednet distribution programs. (Or maybe those two things are super similar anyway?)

Do we need both Longtermism (Philosophy) and Long-Term Future?

4MichaelA10moPersonally, I think those two tags have sufficiently large and separate scopes for it to make sense for the forum to have both tags. (I didn't create either tag, by the way.) But the Longtermism (Philosophy) tag has perhaps been used too liberally, including for posts that should've only been given tags like Long-Term Future or Existential Risk. Perhaps this is because the Longtermism (Philosophy) tag was around before Long-Term Future was created (not sure if that's true), and/or because the first two sentences of the Longtermism (Philosophy) tag didn't explicitly indicate that its scope was limited to philosophical aspects of longtermism only. Inspired by your comment, I've now edited the tag description to hopefully help a bit with that. The tag description used to be: The tag description is now: (The second sentence could perhaps be cut.) For comparison, the tag description of Long-Term Future is:

(Update: I've now made this tag.)

Cooperation & Coordination or [just one of those terms] or Moral Trade

(I think I lean towards the first option and away from Moral Trade.)

Proposed description: 

The Cooperation & Coordination tag is for posts about whether, when, and how people - especially effective altruists and others aiming to do good - should cooperate and coordinate. Such posts will often draw on ideas related to game theory, moral trade, moral uncertainty, and how to think about and measure counterfactual impact. 

See also Movement St

... (read more)
4JP Addison1yI lightly think both is better than either one on its own.
2MichaelA1yOk, I've now made this tag [] and used the name that includes both terms :)

(Update: I've now made this tag.)

Improving Institutional Decision-Making (or similar)

Argument against:

  • Arguably overlaps somewhat with the existing tags Forecasting, Policy Change, Political Polarisation, International Relations, Direct Democracy, and European Union
  • It might make more sense to instead change the name and description of Policy Change so it more clearly covers improving institutional decision-making as well

Arguments for:

  • Seems substantially distinct from any of the above tags, including Policy Change
  • A major topic in EA (e.g., one of 80k's main
... (read more)

(Update: I've now made this tag, with the name Epistemic Humility and a description noting it can be about other, broadly related things as well.)

Social Epistemology & Epistemic Humility or [just one of those terms] or [some other label]

Some posts that might fit this tag:

2JP Addison1yI really like Social Epistemology except for the crucial flaw that I haven't heard it called that before. Without the ability for people to recognize it, I think it's worse than Epistemic Humility. (Normally I'd prefer the more general term, rather than a term for one strategy within the space.)
2MichaelA1yDo you mean you haven't heard the term social epistemology, or that you haven't heard epistemic humility specifically (or debates around that) referred to by the term social epistemology? I'd envision this tag including not just things like "How epistemically humble should we be, and how should we update given other people's statements/beliefs?", but also things like when we should give just our conclusions vs also our reasoning if we're concerned about information cascades [], and to what extent publicly stating explicit estimates will cause anchoring [] by others. Those things could arguably be seen as about epistemic humility in that they're about how to communicate given how other people might handle epistemic humility, but saying they're about social epistemology (or something else) seems more natural to me. (That said, I think I'm only familiar with the term social epistemology from how it's occasionally used by EAs, and the Wikipedia article's lead section makes me uncertain if they're using the term in the standard way.) Maybe the best tag label would be Epistemic Humility & Social Epistemology, to put the term that's more common in EA first? That's a longer label than average, though. FWIW, both my suggestion of this tag and my suggestion of the term social epistemology for it were prompted by the following part of Owen Cotton-Barratt's recent post [] :
2JP Addison1yI have now read the post that contains Social Epistemology. I also wasn't clear before, but I was biasing towards one shorter label or another.

Global priorities research and macrostrategy.

I wanted to use these tags when asking this question, but they don't seem to exist.

There is a tag on cause prioritization. But I think it'd be more useful if that tag was focused on content that is directly relevant for prioritizing between causes, e.g. "here is why I think cause A is more tractable than cause B" or "here's a framework for assessing the neglectedness of a cause". Some global priorities or macrostrategy research has this property, but not all of it. E.g. I think... (read more)

4MichaelA7moI've now made a tag for Global Priorities Research []. I currently think that anything we would've wanted to give a Macrostrategy tag to can just be given a Global Priorities Research tag instead, such that we don't need a Macrostrategy tag, but feel free to discuss that in the "Discussion" page attached to the GPR tag.
2MichaelA1yI'm tentatively in favour of Macrostrategy. A big issue is that I don't have a crisp sense of what macrostrategy is meant to be about, and conversations I've had suggests that a lot of people who work on it feel the same. So I'd have a hard time deciding what to give that tag to. But I do think it's a useful concept, and the example post you mention does seem to me a good example of something that is macrostrategy and isn't cause prioritisation. I feel like a tag for Global Priorities Research is probably unnecessary once we have tags for both Cause Prioritisation and Macrostrategy? But I could be wrong. (Also I'm just offering my views as inputs; I have no gate-keeping role and anyone can make whatever tags they want.)

(Update: I've now made this tag.)

Moral Uncertainty

Argument against:

Argument for:

  • Arguably an important subset of Moral Philosophy
  • I'd estimate there's at least 10 posts on the topic
4JP Addison1yI'd be in favor.
2JP Addison1yWhat's the intended difference between Meta-Ethics and Moral Philosophy?
2MichaelA1yAs I understand it, ethics is often split into the branches meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. I'm guessing the Moral Philosophy tag is meant to cover all of those branches, or maybe just the latter two. Meta-Ethics would just cover questions about "the nature, scope, and meaning of moral judgment" (Wikipedia []). So some questions that wouldn't fit in Meta-Ethics, but would fit in Moral Philosophy, include: * Should we be deontologists or consequentialists? * What should be considered intrinsically valuable (e.g., suffering, pleasure, preference satisfaction, achievement, etc.)? * What beings should be in our moral circles [] ? Whereas Meta-Ethics could include posts on things like arguments for moral realism vs moral antirealism. (I'm not sure whether those posts should also go in Moral Philosophy.)

I noticed there's no Consciousness tag, so I was going to create one, but then I saw the Sentience tag. Perhaps that should be renamed "Sentience / Consciousness", and/or its description should be tweaked to mention consciousness?

(I'm putting this here so it can be up- or down-voted to inform whether this change should be made. I think the tag pages will later have the equivalent of Wikipedia's "Talk" pages, at which point I'd put comments like this there instead.) 

(Update: This got 2 upvotes, and continues to seem to me like a good idea, so I updated

... (read more)

I've edited this post to include our official mandate at the top. Thanks for creating it, MichaelA!

[Any 80,000 problem areas and career paths - or the additional problem areas and career ideas they mention - that are not directly covered by existing tags]

I haven't yet looked through these problem areas and career paths/ideas with this in mind, to see what's not covered by existing tags and what the arguments for and against creating new tags for these things would be. 

(Feel free to comment yourself with specific tag ideas drawn from the 80k problem areas and career paths, or the additional ones they mention.)

8MichaelA1y(Update: I've now made this tag [].) Nanotechnology or Atomically Precise Manufacturing Arguments against: * Maybe a little niche? * Somewhat well-covered by Existential Risk []? Arguments for: * Not super niche * 80k highlight this a potentially important area (though it's not one of their top priorities) * The small set of (maybe-not-trustworthy) estimates we have [] suggest nanotech/APM is decently likely to be among the top 10 largest existential risks we know of (given usual ways of classifying things), and perhaps smaller only than AI and bio
2MichaelA1moUpdate: I've now made this entry [] Grantmaking Overlaps with EA funding and probably some other entries. But that entry is quite broad, and this entry could also cover things like how useful grantmaking is, how to test fit for it, best practices for grantmaking, etc. (which I'm not sure fit perfectly in EA funding). Would overlap with vetting constraints if we make that entry (I proposed it elsewhere on this post).
2Pablo1moI think this entry makes sense. Maybe effective altruism funding should be made more precise, but that's a separate issue.
2MichaelA2moJust want to note that: * I still think it'd probably be good for someone to go through 80k articles and see which topics covered warrant a Forum wiki entry * In many cases, the entry's name and scope might differ a little from the 80k one. E.g. we might want to go with academia and think tanks rather than 80k's academic research and think tank research * I now realise that, while doing that, it'd also be cool if the person could add 80k links in the Bibliography / Further reading sections of relevant entries * E.g., I just added a link to an 80k article from our Academia entry
2MichaelA2moThink tanks Could draw on and link to this 80k article:
2MichaelA1y(Update: I've now made this tag [] .) Space (or maybe Space Governance, or Space Governance & Colonisation, or something along those lines) "Governance of outer space" is mentioned by 80k here [] . Would perhaps just be a subset of Long-Term Future. But perhaps a sufficiently large and important subset to warrant its own tag. Some posts this should include: * Will we eventually be able to colonize other stars? Notes from a preliminary review [] * Space governance is important, tractable and neglected [] * Off-Earth Governance [] * An Informal Review of Space Exploration [] * Maybe Lunar Colony [] * Maybe Does Utilitarian Longtermism Imply Directed Panspermia? []

(Update: I've now created this tag.)


Argument against: This is arguably a subset of the tag Moral Philosophy.

Arguments for: This seems like an important subset, which there are several Forum posts about, and which some people might appreciate a specific tag about (e.g., if they're beginning to grapple with meta-ethics and are less focused on moral philosophy as a whole right now).

Some posts this should include:

... (read more)

It might be worth going through the Effective Altruism Hub's resource collections and the old attempts to build EA Wikis (e.g., the Cause Prioritization wiki), to:

  • See if that inspires useful new entries/tags
    • E.g., they might cover some topic that we then realise is worth having an entry for
  • Find resources that can be given a relevant tag, or listed in Bibliography / Further reading / External links sections

I assume some of this has been done already, but someone doing it thoroughly seems worthwhile.

5cafelow3moThanks Michael! I manage the EA Hub Resources [], but much of the content has been slowly getting outdated. I think the best action will be to incorporate the content in the Learn and Take Action sections of the EA Hub Resources into the EA Forum wiki, and redirect Hub visitors to the wiki. I'm unlikely to have the time to do this soon, so I would be delighted if someone else was keen to do this. Get in touch if you are keen to do this and I can assist + set up redirects when ready! Message me through the forum private messaging. The rest of the resources are designed for EA group organisers and my current plan is to keep this outside of the wiki (but I'm happy for folks to try to change my mind!). I plan to move this content onto a new website in the next few months as the EA Hub team have decided to narrow their focus to the community directories.
2Pablo3moI did this systematically for all the relevant wikis I was aware of, back when I started working on this project in mid 2020. Of course, it's likely that I have missed some relevant entries or references.
2MichaelA3moAh, nice. What about for the EA Hub stuff? E.g., they've got a bunch of stuff on how to talk about EA, running EA-related events, and movement-building. And also curated collections for cause areas. And I don't think I've seen those things linked to from tag pages?
4Pablo3moI actually wasn't aware of their resources [] section (EA Hub has changed a lot over the years and I haven't stayed abreast of the latest changes). They used to have a wiki [] , which I did review, though some pages were not indexed by the Internet Archive. I wonder if they have migrated their old wiki content to the new resources page. In any case, I've made a note to investigate this further.
5cafelow3moHey Pablo! You are right that the wiki is long dead. The current resources section was written independently from the wiki. As I just commented up the thread [] , with the new EA Forum wiki (which is wonderful!), I think the content on the EA Hub intended for all EAs should be merged into the wiki, and then I can retire those pages and set up redirects. More than happy to chat more about this!
2Pablo3moThanks for your message! Can you email me at [] preceded by MyName@, or share an email address where I can reach you? (EDIT: We have now contacted each other.)
2MichaelA3moGreat that you two have connected! In the other thread, Catherine says: Yeah, I don't think the EA Forum Wiki needs to eat everything else - other options include: * Just include a link in Further reading or Bibliography to the external collection of resources * See e.g. the link to my own collection of resources from here [] * Look through the collection, give the appropriate tag to the Forum posts that are in that collection, and maybe include links to some other specific things in the Further reading or Bibliography section
2MichaelA3moSounds good!

Mind uploads, or Whole brain emulation, or maybe Digital minds

I think that:

  • These concepts overlap somewhat with artificial sentience
  • But these concepts (or at least mind uploads and WBE) are also meaningfully distinct from artificial sentience

But I could be wrong about either of those things.

Further reading

Age of Em

Related entries

artificial sentience | consciousness research | intelligence and neuroscience | long-term future | moral patienthood | non-humans and the long-term future | number of futur... (read more)

4Pablo3moDefinitely. I already was planning to have an entry on whole brain emulation and have some notes on it... wait, I now see the tag already exists. Mmh, it seems we missed it because it was "wiki only". Anyway, I've removed the restriction now. Feel free to paste the 'further reading' and 'related entries' sections (otherwise I'll do it myself; I just didn't want to take credit for your work).
4MichaelA3moCool, I've now added those related entries and the "roadmap" report (Age of Em was already cited).

Non-longtermist arguments for GCR reduction, or Non-longtermist arguments for prioritising x-risks, or similar but with "reasons" instead of arguments, or some other name like that

The main arguments I have in mind are the non-longtermist 4 of the 5 arguments Toby Ord mentions in The Precipice, focusing on the past, the present, civilizational virtues, and cosmic significance.

Ideally, the entry would cover both (a) such arguments and (b) reasons why those arguments might be much weaker than the longtermist arguments and thus might not by themselves justify ... (read more)

2Pablo3moI think this would be a very useful article to have. It seems challenging to find a name for it, though. How about short-termist existential risk prioritization? I am not entirely satisfied with it, but I cannot think of other alternatives I like more. Another option, inspired by the second of your proposals, is short-termist arguments for prioritising existential risk. I think I prefer 'risk prioritization' over 'arguments for prioritizing' because the former allows for discussion of all relevant arguments, not just arguments in favor of prioritizing.
2MichaelA3moHmm, I don't really like "short-termist" (or "near-termist"), since that only seems to cover what Ord calls the "present"-focused "moral foundation" for focusing on x-risks, rather than also the past, civilizational virtue, or cosmic significance perspectives. Relatedly, "short-termist" seems like it implies we're still assuming a broadly utilitarianian-ish perspective but just not being longtermist, whereas I think it'd be good if these tags could cover more deontological and virtue-focused perspectives. (You could have deontological and virtue-focused perspectives that prioritise x-risk in a way that ultimately comes down to effects on the near-term, but not all such perspectives would be like that.) Some more ideas: * Existential risk prioritization for non-longtermists * Alternative perspectives on existential risk prioritization * I don't really like tag names that say "alternative" in a way that just assumes everyone will know what they're alternative to, but I'm throwing the idea out there anyway, and we do have some other tags with names like that
2Pablo3moThe reasons for caring about x-risk that Toby mentions are relevant from many moral perspectives, but I think we shouldn't cover them on the EA Wiki, which should be focused on reasons that are relevant from an EA perspective. Effective altruism is focused on finding the best ways to benefit others (understood as moral patients []), and by "short-termist" I mean views that restrict the class of "others" to moral patients currently alive, or whose lives won't be in the distant future. So I think short-termist + long-termist arguments exhaust the arguments relevant from an EA perspective, and therefore think that all the arguments we should cover in an article about non-longtermist arguments are short-termist arguments.
2Pablo3moIt's not immediately obvious that the EA Wiki should focus solely on considerations relevant from an EA perspective. But after thinking about this for quite some time, I think that's the approach we should take, in part because providing a distillation of those considerations is one of the ways in which the EA Wiki could provide value relative to other reference works, especially on topics that already receive at least some attention in non-EA circles.
2MichaelA3moHmm. I think I agree with the principle that "the EA Wiki should focus solely on considerations relevant from an EA perspective", but have a broader notion of what considerations are relevant from an EA perspective. (It also seems to me that the Wiki is already operating with a broader notion of that than you seem to be suggesting, given that e.g. we have an entry for deontology [].) I think the three core reasons I have this view are: 1. effective altruism is actually a big fuzzy bundle of a bunch of overlapping things 2. we should be morally uncertain 3. in order to do good from "an EA perspective", it's in practice often very useful to understand different perspectives other people hold and communicate with those people in terms of those perspectives On 1 and 2: * I think "Effective altruism is focused on finding the best ways to benefit others (understood as moral patients [/tag/moral-patienthood])" is an overly strong statement. * Effective altruism could be understood as a community of people or as a set of ideas, and either way there are many different ways one could reasonably draw the boundaries. * One definition that seems good to me is this one from MacAskill (2019) [] : * "Effective altruism is: (i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize the good with a given unit of resources, tentatively understanding ‘the good’ in impartial welfarist terms, and (ii) the use of the findings from (i) to try to improve the world. [...] * The definition is: [...] Tentatively impartial and welfarist. As a tentative hypothesis or a first approximation, doing good is about promoting wellbeing, with everyone’s wellbeing counting equally." (emphasis added, and formatting tweaked)
4Pablo3moI'll respond quickly because I'm pressed with time. 1. I don't think EA is fuzzy to the degree you seem to imply. I think the core of EA is something like what I described , which corresponds to the Wikipedia definition (a definition which is itself an effort to capture the common features of the many definitions that have been proposed). 2. I don't understand your point about moral uncertainty. You mention the fact that Will wrote a book about moral uncertainty, or the fact that Beckstead is open to non-consequentialism, as relevant in this context, but I don't see their relevance. EA, in the sense captured by the above Wikipedia definition, is not committed to welfarism, consequentialism, or any other moral view. (Will uses the term 'welfarism', but I don't think he is using it in a moral sense, since he states explicitly that his definition is non-normative.) (ADDED: there is one type of moral uncertainty that is relevant for EA, namely uncertainty about population axiology, because it concerns the class of beings whom EA is committed to helping, at least if we interpret 'others' in "helping others effectively" as "whichever beings count morally". Relatedly, uncertainty about what counts as a person's wellbeing is also relevant, at least if we interpret 'helping' in "helping others effectively" as "improving their wellbeing". So it would be incorrect to say that EA has no moral commitments; still, it is not committed to any particular moral theory.) 3. I agree it often makes sense to frame our concerns in terms of reasons that make sense to our target audience, but I don't see that as the role of the EA Wiki. Instead, as noted above, one key way in which the EA Wiki can add value is by articulating the distinctively EA perspective on the topic of interest. If I consult a Christian encyclopedia, or a libertarian encyclopedia, I want the entries to describe the reasons C
6MichaelA3moI think you make some good points, and that my earlier comment was a bit off. But I still basically think it should be fine for the EA Wiki to include articles on how moral perspectives different from the main ones in EA intersect with EA issues. --- Yeah, I think the core of EA is something like what you described, but also that EA is fuzzy and includes a bunch of things outside that core. I think the "core" of EA, as I see it, also doesn't include anti-ageing work, and maybe doesn't include a concern for suffering subroutines, but the Wiki covers those things and I think that it's good that it does so. (I do think a notable difference between that and the other moral perspectives is that one could arrive at those focus areas while having a focus on "helping others". But my basic point here is that the core of EA isn't the whole of EA and isn't all that EA Wiki should cover.) Going back to "the EA Wiki should focus solely on considerations relevant from an EA perspective", I think that that's a good principle but that those considerations aren't limited to "the core of EA". --- Was the word "not" meant to be in there? Or did you mean to say the opposite? If the "not" is intended, then this seems to clash with you saying that discussion from an EA perspective would omit moral perspectives focused on the past, civilizational virtue, or cosmic significance? If discussion from an EA perspective would omit those things, then that implies that the EA perspective is committed to some set of moral moral views that excludes those things. Maybe you're just saying that EA could be open to certain non-consequentialist views, but not so open that it includes those 3 things from Ord's book? (Btw, I do now recognise that I made a mistake in my previous comment - I wrote as if "helping others" meant the focus must be welfarist and impartial, which is incorrect.) --- I think moral uncertainty is relevant inasmuch as a bit part of the spirit of EA is trying to do good, wha
4Pablo3mo(Typing from my phone; apologies for any typos.) Thanks for the reply. There are a bunch of interesting questions I'd like to discuss more in the future, but for the purposes of making a decision on the issue that triggered this thread, on reflection I think it would be valuable to have a discussion of the arguments you describe. The reason I believe this is that existential risk is such a core topic within EA that an article on the different arguments that have been proposed to mitigate these risks is of interest even from a purely sociological or historical perspective. So even if we may not agree on the definition of EA, the relevance of moral uncertainty or other issues, luckily that doesn't turn out to be an obstacle for agreeing on this particular issue. Perhaps the article should be simply called arguments for existential risk prioritization and cover all the relevant arguments, including longtermist arguments, and we could in addition have a longer discussion of the latter in a separate article, though I don't have strong views on this. (As it happens, I have a document briefly describing about 10 such arguments that I wrote many years ago, which I could send if you are interested. I probably won't be able to work on the article within the next few weeks, though I think I will have time to contribute later.)
4MichaelA3moOk, I've gone ahead and made the tag, currently with the name Moral perspectives on existential risk reduction [] . I'm still unsure what the ideal scope and name would be, and have left a long comment on the Discussion page, so we can continue adjusting that later.
2Pablo3moGreat, I like the name.

Longtermism (Cause Area)

We have various tags relevant to longtermism or specific things that longtermists are often interested in (e.g., Existential Risk). But we don't have a tag for longtermism as a whole. Longtermism (Philosophy) and Long-Term Future don't fit that bill; the former is just for "posts about philosophical matters relevant to longtermism", and the latter is "meant for discussion of what the long-term future might actually look like".

One example of a post that's relevant to longtermism as a cause area but that doesn't seem to neatly fit in ... (read more)

2EdoArad8moAgreed. Perhaps Longtermism(Philosophy) is redundant because it could be Longetrmism (Cause Area) + Moral Philosophy - if so, I'd suggest changing the name instead of opening a new tag
4MichaelA8moHmm, I think I'd agree that most things which fit in both Longtermism (Cause Area) and Moral Philosophy would fit Longtermism (Philosophy). (Though there might be exceptions. E.g., I'm not sure stuff to do with moral patienthood/status/circles would be an ideal fit for Longtermism Philosophy - it's relevant to longtermism, but not uniquely or especially relevant to longtermism. But those things tie in to potential longtermist interventions.) But now that you mention that, I realise that there might not be a good way to find and share posts at the intersection of two tags (which would mean that tags which are theoretically redundant are currently still practically useful). I've just sent the EA Forum team the following message about this: So I'll hold off on making a Longtermism (Cause Area) tag or converting the Longtermism (Philosophy) tag into that until I hear back from the Forum team, and/or think more or get more input on what the best approach here would be.

Change My View!

I found r/ChangeMyView recently and I think it's the bee's knees. "A place to post an opinion you accept may be flawed, in an effort to understand other perspectives on the issue."

There are already a good deal of questions and posts inviting criticism on this forum, and this tag could organize them all for the people who enjoy a good, clean disagreement/discussion. It could be used especially (or only) for ideas with <50% certainty.

The subreddit itself is a cool place to go, but many issues are more fruitfully discusse... (read more)

(Update: I've now made this tag.)


Some posts this could cover:

  • Introducing the Legal Priorities Project
  • Various posts tagged International Relations, Global Governance, AI Governance (e.g., posts by GovAI and/or Cullen O'Keefe), Policy Change, Improving Institutional Decision-Making, or European Union

Arguments for:

  • I have a sense it could be useful to have a tag for each major field/discipline that many EAs are from and/or that is relevant to many EA areas.
    • The key reason is that this could maybe help people find posts relevant to their backgrounds, and thin
... (read more)


The Economics tag would be for posts focusing on topics in the domain of economics, making particularly heavy use of concepts or tools from economics, or highlighting ways for people with economics backgrounds to do good.

Some posts that would fit:

... (read more)
1evelynciara6moYeah, this would work. A general econ tag could focus on values other than economic growth, including equity and preventing hyperinflation.

How about a tag for global governance and/or providing global public goods? This is arguably one of the most pressing problems there is, because many of the problems EA works on are global coordination problems, including existential risk (since existential security is a global public good).

3MichaelA1yI'd agree that a tag for Global Governance would be good (thanks for suggesting it!). This could cover things like: * how much various moves towards more global governance would help with existential risks and other global and/or transgenerational public goods issues * E.g., these [] two posts [] * how much various moves towards more global governance could increase risks of totalitarianism * how to best implement or prevent various moves towards global governance * etc. Personally, I don't see much value in a tag for something like providing global public goods. This is partly because that matter is common to so many different EA issues. Relatedly, I don't think many posts are especially focused on global public goods provision, relative to a huge portion of other posts. But that's just my tentative two cents. If no one suggests otherwise or does it themselves, I'll probably create a Global Governance tag in a couple days.
2MichaelA1yUpdate: I've now made this tag [].

Please separate global development from global health.

Global health is one part of global development, which can include political, economic and humanitarian interventions. I write on politics in developing countries, but I'm probably the only one on the forum so I don't need my own tag.

2Pablo3moI agree this should be separated. I've made a note to split the articles (and rearrange the content/tags accordingly).


Arguments against:

  • Perhaps somewhat niche?
  • My current independent impression is that cluelessness, or some of the ideas or implications that people associate with it, is a confused and not especially useful idea, and that we shouldn't really worry about it
    • (I definitely think we're very uncertain about a lot of things and should take that very seriously, but that doesn't require the term "cluelessness")
    • (See also)

Arguments for:

  • Many smart longtermist and/or philosophically minded EAs seem to think cluelessness is a really important idea, and I think
... (read more)

Update: I've now made this entry.

Alternative foods or resilient foods or something like that

A paragraph explaining what I mean (from Baum et al., 2016):

nuclear war, volcanic eruptions, and asteroid impact events can block sunlight, causing abrupt global cooling. In extreme but entirely possible cases, these events could make agriculture infeasible worldwide for several years, creating a food supply catastrophe of historic proportions. This paper describes alternative foods that use non-solar energy inputs as a solution for these catastrophes. For example,

... (read more)
4Pablo1moI'm in favor. Very weak preference for alternative foods until resilient foods becomes at least somewhat standard.

I now feel that a number of unresolved issues related to the Wiki ultimately derive from the fact that tags and encyclopedia articles should not both be created in accordance with the same criterion. Specifically, it seems to me that a topic that is suitable for a tag is sometimes too specific to be a suitable topic for an article.

I wonder if this problem could be solved, or at least reduced, by allowing article section headings to also serve as tags. I think this would probably be most helpful for articles that cover particular disciplines, such as psycho... (read more)

2Aaron Gertler20dThese are reasonable concerns, but adding hundreds of additional tags and applying them across relevant posts seems like it will take a lot of time. As a way to save time and reduce the need for new tags, how many of your use cases do you think would be covered if multi-tag filtering was supported? That is, someone could search for posts with both the "psychology" and "career choice" tags and see posts about careers in psychology. This lets people create their own "fine-grained taxonomy" without so many tags needing to have a bunch of sub-tags.
2MichaelA1moI think something along these lines feels promising, but I feel a bit unsure precisely what you have in mind. In particular, how will users find all posts tagged with an article section heading tag? Would there still be a page for (say) social psychology like there is for psychology, and then it's just clear somehow that this page is a subsidiary tag of a larger tag? Inspired by that question, I think maybe a more promising variant (or maybe it's what you already had in mind) is for some article section headings to be hyperlinked to a page whose title is the other page's section heading and whose contents is that section from the other page, below which is shown all the tags with that section heading tag. Then if a user edits the section or the "section's own page", the edit automatically occurs in the other place as well. And from "the section's own page" there's something at the top that makes it clear that this entry is a subsidiary entry of a larger entry and people can click through to get back to the larger one. Maybe the "something at the top" would look vaguely like the headers of posts that are in sequences? Maybe then you could even, like with sequences, click an arrow to the right or left to go to the page corresponding to the previous or following section of the overarching entry? Stepping back, this seems like just one example of a way we could move towards more explicitly having a nested hierarchy of entries where the different layers are in some ways linked together. I imagine there are other ways to do that too, though I haven't brainstormed any yet.

I am considering turning a bunch of relevant lists into Wiki entries. Wikipedia allows for lists of this sort (see e.g. the list of utilitarians) and some (e.g. Julia Wise) have remarked that they find lists quite useful. The idea occurred to me after a friend suggested a few courses I may want to add to my list of effective altruism syllabi. It now seems to me that the Wiki might be a better place to collect this sort of information than some random blog. Thoughts?

2MichaelA1moQuick thoughts: * I think more lists/collections would be good [] * I think it's better if they're accessible via the Forum search function than if they're elsewhere * I think it's probably better if they're EA wiki entries than EA Forum posts or shortforms because that makes it easier for them to be collaboratively built up * And this seems more important for and appropriate to a list than an average post * Posts are often much more like a particular author's perspective, so editing beyond copyediting would typically be a bit odd (that said, a function for making suggestions could be cool - but that's tangential to the main topic here) * I don't think I see any other advantage of these lists being wiki entries rather than posts or shortforms * I think the only disadvantages of them being lists are that then we might have too many random or messy lists that have an air of official-ness or that the original list creator gets less credit for their contributions (their name isn't attached to the list) * But the former disadvantage can apply to entries in general and so we already need sufficient policies, other editors, etc. to solve it, so doesn't seem a big deal for lists specifically * And the former disadvantage can also apply to entries in general and so will hopefully be partially solved by things like edit counters, edit karma, "badges", or the like * So overall this seems worth doing Less important: * Various "collections" on my own shortform might be worth making into such entries * Though I think actually most of them are better fits for the bibliography pages of existing entries * (And ~ a month ago I added a link to those collections, or to all relevant items from the collections, to the associated entries th

Something like regulation

Intended to capture discussion of the Brussels effect, the California effect, and other ways regulation could be used for or affect things EAs care about.

Would overlap substantially with the entries on policy change and the European Union, as well as some other entries, but could perhaps be worth having anyway.

Update: I've now made this entry.

software engineering

Some relevant posts:

Related entries

artificial intelligence... (read more)

2Pablo2moLooks good to me.

Vetting constraints

Maybe this wouldn't add sufficient value to be worth having, given that we already have scalably using labour and talent vs. funding constraints.

4Pablo1moI think there should definitely be a place for discussing vetting constraints. My only uncertainty is whether this should be done in a separate article and, if so, whether talent vs. funding constraints should be split. Conditional on having an article on vetting constraints, it looks to me that we should also have articles on talent constraints and funding constraints. Alternatively, we could have a single article discussing all of these constraints.
2MichaelA1moI think I agree that we should either have three separate entries or one entry covering all three. I'm not sure which of those I lean towards, but maybe very weakly towards the latter?
4MichaelA1moJust discovered Vaidehi made a collection of discussions of constraints in EA [] , which could be helpful for populating whatever entries get created and maybe for deciding on scopes etc.

Mmh, upon looking at Vaidehi's list more closely, it now seems to me that we should have a single article: people have proposed various other constraints besides the three mentioned, and I don't think it would make sense to have separate articles for each of these, or to have an additional article for "other constraints". So I propose renaming talent vs. funding constraints constraints in effective altruism. Thoughts?

6MichaelA1moI think that that probably makes sense.
4Pablo1moDone. (Though I used the name constraints on effective altruism [], which seemed more accurate. I don't have strong views on whether the preposition should be 'in' or 'on', however, so feel free to change it.) The article should be substantially revised (it was imported from EA Concepts), I think, but at least its scope is now better defined.
4Pablo1moGreat. Let's have three articles then. Feel free to split the existing one, otherwise I'll do that tomorrow. [I know you like this kind of framing. ;) ]
4Stefan_Schubert2moVetting constraints dovetails nicely with talent vs. funding constraints. I'm not totally convinced by the scalably using labour entry, though. One possibility would be to just replace it by a vetting constraints entry. Alternatively, it could be retained but renamed/reconceptualised.
2Pablo2moYeah, scalably using labor just doesn't strike me as a natural topic for a Wiki entry, though I not sure exactly why. Maybe it's because it looks like the topic was generated by considering an interesting question—"how should the EA community allocate its talent?"—and creating an entry around it, rather than by focusing on an existing field or concept. I'd be weakly in favor of merging it with vetting constraints.
2MichaelA2moI'm currently in favour of keeping scalably using labour, though I also made the entry so this shouldn't be much of an update (it's not like a "second vote", just a repeat of the first vote after hearing the new arguments). One consideration I'd add is that maybe it's a more natural topic for a tag than a wiki entry? It seems to me like having a tag for posts relevant to a (sufficiently) interesting and recurring question makes sense?
4Stefan_Schubert2moFwiw, I think that "scalably using labour" doesn't sound quite like a wiki entry. I find virtually no article titles including the term "using" on Wikipedia. If one wants to retain the concept, I think that "Large-scale use of labour" or something similar would be better. There are may Wikipedia article titles including the term "use of [noun]". (Potentially nouns are generally better than verbs in Wikipedia article titles? Not sure.)

Intelligence assessment or Intelligence (military and strategy) or Intelligence agencies or Intelligence community or Intelligence or something

I don't really like any of those specific names. The first is what Wikipedia uses, but sounds 100% like it means IQ tests and similar. The second is my attempt to put a disambiguation in the name itself. The third and and fourth are both too narrow, really - I'd want the entry to not just be about the agencies or community but also about the type of activity they undertake. The fifth is clearly even more ambiguous t... (read more)

(Edit: I've now made this entry.)

Independent research

Proposed text:

Independent research is research conducted by an individual who is not employed by any organisation or institution, or who is employed but is conducting this research separately from that. This person may or may not have funding for this research (e.g., via grants). Research that is done by two or more people collaborating, but still separate from an organisation or institution, could arguably be considered independent research.

There are various advantages and disadvantages of independent r

... (read more)
2MichaelA2moSome text from the latest LTFF report [] that could be drawn on when discussing advantages and disadvantages within this entry:
4Pablo2moLooks good, thanks!

Edit: I've now made this entry.

Longtermist Entrepreneurship Fellowship

I think this is only mentioned in three Forum posts so far[1], and I'm not sure how many (if any) would be added in future. 

It's also mentioned in this short Open Phil page:

I'm also not sure if the name is fully settled - different links seem to use different names, or to not even use a capitalised name.

[1] (read more)

4Pablo2moI'm in favor, though there's so little public information at this stage that inevitably the entry won't have any substantive content for the time being.
4Pablo2moLooks good.
4MichaelA2moCool - given that, I've now made this [] (though without adding body text or tagging things, for time reasons).

Make entries for many of the concepts featured on Conceptually

I read the content on that site in 2019 and found it useful. I haven't looked through what concepts are on there to see which ones we already have and which ones might be worth adding, but I expect it'd be useful for someone to do so. So I'm noting it here in case someone else can do that (that'd be my preferred outcome!), or to remind myself to do it in a while if I have time. 

2Pablo3moI like Conceptually, and during my early research I went through their list of concepts one by one, to decide which should be covered by the EA Wiki, though I may have missed some relevant entries. Thoughts on which ones we should include, that aren't already articles or are listed in our list of projected entries?

Epistemic challenge, or The epistemic challenge, or Epistemic challenges, or any of those but with "to longtermism" added

Relevant posts include the following, and presumably many more:

Related entries

  • cluelessness
  • longtermism
  • expected value
  • forecasting
2MichaelA3moAnother idea: Long-range forecasting (or some other name covering a similar topic). See e.g. [] Related entries: cluelessness | estimation of existential risk | forecasting | longtermism Given how much the scope of this entry/tag would overlap with the scope of an epistemic challenge to longtermism tag, and how much both would overlap with other entries/tags we already have, I think we should probably only have one or the other. (I could be wrong, though. Maybe we should have both but with one being wiki-only. Or maybe we should have both later on, once the Wiki has a larger set of entries and is perhaps getting more fine-grained.)
4Pablo3moI agree with having this tag and subsuming epistemic challenge to longtermism under it. We do already have forecasting [] and AI forecasting [], so some further thinking may be needed to avoid overlap.
4MichaelA3moOk, I've now made a long-range forecasting [] tag, and added a note there that it should probably subsume/cover the epistemic challenge to longtermism as well. And yeah, I'm open to people adjusting things later to reduce how many entries/tags we have on similar topics.
2Pablo3moIs the "epistemic challenge to longtermism" something like "the problem of cluelessness, as applied to longtermism", or is it something different?
2MichaelA3moPeople in EA sometimes use the term "cluelessness" in a way that's pretty much referring to the epistemic challenge or the idea that it's really really hard to predict long-term-future effects. But I'm pretty sure the philosophers writing on this topic mean something more specific and absolute/qualitative, and a natural interpretation of the word is also more absolute ("clueless" implies "has absolutely no clue"). I think cluelessness could be seen as one special case / subset of the broader topic of "it seems really really hard to predict long-term future effects". I write about this more here [] and here [] . Here's an excerpt from the first of those links: Meanwhile, the epistemic challenge is the more quantitative, less absolute, and in my view more useful idea that: * effects probably get harder to predict the further in future they are * this might mean we should focus on the near-term if that gradual decrease in our predictive power outweighs the increased scale of the long-term future compared to the nearer-term. On that, here's part of the abstract of Tarsney's paper [] :

Update: I've now made this entry.

Fermi estimation or Fermi estimates

Overlaps with some other things in the Decision Theory and Rationality cluster of the Tags Portal.

4Pablo3moI agree that this should be added. I weakly prefer 'Fermi estimation'.

Demandingness objection

I'd guess there are at least a few Forum posts quite relevant to this, and having a place to collect them seems nice, but I could be wrong about either of those points.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
4Pablo3moI agree it's relevant. But we already have an article: demandingness of morality []. (It's likely you haven't seen it because many of these articles were Wiki-only until very recently.)
2MichaelA3moYeah, I just spotted that and the fact I had a new notification at the same time, and hoped it was anything other than a reply here so I could delete my shamefully redundant suggestion before anyone spotted it :D (I think what happened is that I used command+f on the tags portal before the page had properly loaded, or something.)

Antimicrobial resistance or Antibiotic resistance

Not sure enough EAs care about this and/or have written about this on the Forum for it to warrant an entry/tag?

(I don't personally have much interest in this topic, but I'm just one person.)

2MichaelA1moA couple relevant posts I stumbled upon: * [] * []

Update: I've now made this tag.

Something like Bayesianism

Arguments against having this entry/tag:

  • Maybe the topic is sufficiently covered by the entries on Epistemology and on Decision theory?
2Pablo3moYeah, perhaps name it Bayesian reasoning or Bayesian epistemology?

Cognitive biases/Cognitive bias, and/or entries for various specific cognitive biases (e.g. Scope neglect)

I feel unsure whether we should aim to have just a handful of entries for large categories of biases, vs one entry for each of the most relevant biases (even if this means having 5+ or 10+ entries of this type)

4Pablo3moMy sense is that it would be desirable to have both an overview article about cognitive bias, discussing the phenomenon in general (e.g. the degree to which humans can overcome cognitive bias, the debate over how desirable it is to overcome them, etc.) as well as articles about specific instances of it.
2MichaelA3moI think you mean it'd be desirable to have both a general article on cognitive bias and one article each for various specific instances of it? Rather than having just one general article that covers both the topic as a whole and specific instances of it? Given my assumed interpretation of what you meant, I've now made an entry for Cognitive biases and another for Scope neglect. People could later add more, or delete some, or whatever. (I've now copied the content of this thread to the Discussion page on the Cognitive biases entry []. If you or others would like to reply, please do so there.)

Update: I've now made this entry.

Instrumental vs. epistemic rationality

Some brief discussion here.

These terms may basically only be used on the LessWrong community, and may not be prominent or useful enough to warrant an entry here. Not sure.

2Pablo3moI think this would be useful to have.

Metaethical uncertainty and/or Metanormative uncertainty

These concepts are explained here.

I think it's probably best to instead have an entry on "Normative uncertainty" in general that has sections for each of those concepts, as well as sections that briefly describe (regular) Moral uncertainty and Decision-theoretic uncertainty and link to the existing tags on those concepts. (Also, the entry on Moral uncertainty could discuss the question of how to behave when uncertain what approach to moral uncertainty is best, which is metanormative uncertainty.) This... (read more)

Subjective vs. objective normativity

See here and here

Update: I've now made this entry.

Disentanglement research

Defined here:

Off the top of my head, I'm not sure how many posts would get this tag. But I know at least that one would, and I'd guess we'd find several more if we looked.

And in any case, this seems to be a useful concept that's frequently invoked in the EA community, so having a short wiki entry on it might be good (even ignoring tagging).

Related entries:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.... (read more)

2MichaelA3moAnother suggestion: Research distillation or Research debt or similar We could have: 1. an entry for this and another for disentanglement research (with links between them) 2. one entry covering both 3. one entry that's mainly on one topic but briefly mentions/links to the other 4. neither What I have in mind is what's discussed here: [] Off the top of my head, I'm not sure how many posts would get this tag. But maybe some would? And in any case, this seems to me to be a useful concept that's sometimes invoked in the EA community, so having a short wiki entry on it might be good (even ignoring tagging). But I'm less confident I've heard this mentioned a lot in EA than I am with disentanglement research. This is obviously very similar to the idea of a research summary []. But I think that these terms and the Distill article add some value. And the research summary tag is currently only for research summaries, not for discussion of the value of or best practices for distilling research or making summaries. Related entries: [] []

Tag portal question/suggestion:

Many tags are probably relevant for more than one of the categories/clusters used on the tag portal. For example, Economic growth is currently listed under global health & development, but it's also relevant to Long-Term Risk and Flourishing and to Economics & Finance and probably some other things.

Currently, I think each tag is only shown in one place on the portal. That might be the best move.

But maybe they should instead be mentioned in every place where they're (highly) relevant, and where people might expect to ... (read more)

Crypto or something like that

Some EAs are working on or interested in things like crypto and blockchain, either as investment opportunities or as tools that might be useful for accomplishing things EAs care about (e.g., mechanism design, solving coordination problems). Maybe there should be a tag for posts relevant to such things. I'd guess that there are at least 3 relevant Forum posts, though I haven't checked. 

There are also at least two 80,000 Hours episodes that I think are relevant:

... (read more)
2EdoArad4moI would prefer Blockchain, as it is more general than cryptocurrency and doesn't confuse people with the field of cryptology
2MichaelA4moGood points. I've now created the tag and used the name Blockchain [].
2JP Addison4moReasonable because the generality, though I think the cryptography ship has long, long since sailed.
2JP Addison4moSeems good. Maybe we should crosspost one of the recent articles on Sam Bankman-Freid.
2MichaelA4moI've now created the tag []. Feel free to make those crossposts and give them the tag, of course :) (I won't do it myself, as I have little knowledge about or personal interest in blockchain stuff myself.)

Update: I've now made this entry

Non-Humans and the Long-Term Future

Why I propose this:

  • The following sorts of topics come up decently often:
    • Is longtermism focused only on humans?
    • Should longtermists focus on improving wellbeing for animals?
    • Should longtermists focus on improving wellbeing for artificial sentiences?
    • Are existential risks just about humans?
  • Topics like "Will most moral patients in the long-term future be humans? Other animals? Something else? By how large a margin?" also come up sometimes (though less often)
  • I think it'd be good to collect posts r
... (read more)

Update: I've now made this entry

Positive futures (or Utopias, or Ideal futures, or something like that)

Proposed description:

The positive futures tag is for posts that discuss things like what a particularly good long-term future might look like and what sorts of ideal long-term futures we might want to aim towards. Reasons to care about this topic include that: 

  • How positive the future might be influences how important reducing existential risk is
  • Positive visions for the future could motivate work to reduce existential risks
  • Thinking about what we want
... (read more)

Fermi Paradox

Arguments for having this tag:

  • Seems a potentially very important macrostrategy question
  • There are at least some posts relevant to it

Arguments against:

  • Not sure if there are more than a few posts highly relevant to this
  • Maybe this is not a prominent enough topic to get its own tag, rather than just being subsumed under the Space and Global Priorities Research tags
4Aaron Gertler5moThis is currently a wiki-only tag. I doubt many posts are relevant to this, and I suspect that "Space" should work for all of them, but we're still in the process of figuring out how useful a tag has to be to be worth adding to the tagging menu.

EA fellowships

I think it might be useful to have a post on EA fellowships, meaning things like the EA Virtual Programs, which "are opportunities to engage intensively with the ideas of effective altruism through weekly readings and small group discussions over the course of eight weeks. These programs are open to anyone regardless of timezone, career stage, or anything else." (And not meaning things like summer research fellowships, for which there's the Research Training Programs tag.)

I think this'd be a subset of the Event strategy tag.

But I'm not sure i... (read more)

Update: I've now made this tag.


Proposed description: 

The ITN tag is for posts about the Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness framework that is frequently used in effective altruism, or about highly related matters. This could include posts critiquing the ITN framework, discussing in abstract terms how it should and shouldn't be applied, and discussing other factors that could be considered alongside or instead of ITN. 

This tag is not necessarily meant to capture the much larger set of posts which in some way use the ITN framework. 


... (read more)

Advanced Military Technology (or some other related name)

Proposed description:

The Advanced Military Technology tag is for posts about military technologies that are on the cutting-edge, that are in the process of development, that appear to be on the horizon, or that could plausibly be developed in future. This could include both "entirely new" technologies and substantial advances in existing technologies.

See also Armed Conflict, Autonomous Weapons, and Differential Progress.

Other tags that this overlaps with include: AI Governance, Atomically Precise Man... (read more)

2JP Addison8moI agree with whoever upvoted the other of the two tags you made this day but not this one. I would want to see more posts that formed a natural cluster around this concept. The one example is good, but I can't recall any others.
2MichaelA8moYeah, that makes sense. I'll hold off unless I encounter additional relevant posts.

(Update: I've now made this tag.)

Impact Assessment (or maybe something like Impact Measurement or Measuring Impact)

Proposed rough description: 

The Impact Assessment tag is for posts relevant to "measuring the effectiveness of organisational activities and judging the significance of changes brought about by those activities" (source). This could include posts which include impact assessments; discuss pros, cons, and best practices for impact assessment; or discuss theories of change or forecasts of impacts, against which measured impacts could later b

... (read more)
2MichaelA1yIn addition to the three tags mentioned as “See also”, this tag would perhaps overlap a bit with the tags: * Forecasting * Org Update * Cause Prioritization * Community Projects * Criticism (EA Cause Areas) * Criticism (EA Movement) * Criticism (EA Orgs) * Data (EA Community) * EA Funding

Maybe some of the existing tags related to politics & policy should be deleted, and a tag for Politics & Policy should replace them?

Some relevant tags that might be on the chopping block: Improving Institutional Decision-Making, Policy Change, Political Polarisation,  International Relations, Direct Democracy, and Global Governance.

I think I'm moderately against this idea, as I think the sub-topics are large/important enough to warrant their own tags, even if there's a lot of overlap. But I thought I'd throw this idea out there anyway. 

1MichaelA1y(If you hate the above idea but also hate disrupting my delicious karma, feel free to downvote that comment and upvote this one to keep the universe in order. Or vice versa, I guess, if you're a maverick.)

Global Catastrophic Risk

Argument against:

  • Obviously very related to Existential Risk, and to various other tags like Civilizational Collapse & Recovery and Nuclear Weapons

Argument for:

Some posts that might fit this tag but not the Existential Risk tag:

... (read more)

Nonlinear Fund

Maybe it's too early to make a tag for that org?

"Economic Policy" or "Macroeconomic Stabilization"


  • Macroeconomic stabilization is one of the areas that Open Phil works on, but it's not frequently discussed in the EA community. This tag could be specific to macro stabilization or it could encompass all areas of economic policy (aside from economic growth, which already has a tag).
  • Land use reform already has a tag.


Simulation Argument

Arguments for having this tag:

  • Seems a potentially very important macrostrategy question
  • There are at least some posts relevant to it

Arguments against:

  • Not sure if there are more than a couple posts highly relevant to this
  • Maybe this is not a prominent enough topic to get its own tag, rather than just being subsumed under the Global Priorities Research tag
4Aaron Gertler5moThis is currently a wiki-only tag. I doubt many posts are relevant to this, but we might make it usable again — we're still in the process of figuring out how useful a tag has to be to be worth adding to the tagging menu.

Can I create a tag called "EA Philippines", for posts by people related to EA Philippines, such as about our progress or research?  I'd like to easily see a page compiling posts related to EA Philippines. I could create a sequence for this, but a sequence usually implies things are in a sequential order and more related to each other. But our posts will likely be not that related to each other, so a tag would likely be better.

A counterargument is I currently don't see any tags for any EA chapter, except for EA London updates, But these aren't about EA... (read more)

3MichaelA7moQuick thoughts: * There's been some discussion of "country-specific tags" (and region-specific tags) here [] * I think perhaps decisions about general principles for country-specific tags and general principles for EA-chapter-specific tags should be made in tandem * E.g., because it'd be a bit weird to have both a tag for the Philippines as a country (e.g., about the relevance of that country for EA cause areas) and a tag for EA Philippines * Maybe the best option would be to just have country- or region-specific tags that also serve sort-of like EA-chapter-specific tags, unless there are e.g. more than 10 posts relevant to that EA chapter specifically, or more than 20 posts that'd be in the whole tag? * (This is just one possible, quickly thought up principle) * But I'm not actually sure what the principles should be * E.g., if something like the above principle is adopted, I'm not sure what numbers should be used (I chose 10 and 20 pretty randomly) * And I'm not sure how that sort of principle should interact with the option of region-specific tags * E.g., maybe it'd be best to just have a tag like Southeast Asia, and let that play roles similar to that that would be played by country-specific and EA-chapter-specific tags for each country in that region? * Or maybe if there's a tag for Southeast Asia, that's so broad that it then becomes useful to have an EA Philippines tag (but without there being need for a Philippines tag)?
1BrianTan7moI think it's a good idea to go with a Philippines tag rather than an EA Philippines tag. Both are quite interchangeable because 100% of past posts (there's 5 of them) related to the Philippines are also written by people in EA Philippines, and 100% of past posts by EA Philippines are related to the Philippines. I think this will continue for quite a few years for ~80-100% of posts, since we expect only a few people to not be affiliated with EA Philippines but still be writing about the Philippines. I think that 90-100% of posts by EA Philippines will relate to the Philippines. I also agree that for national EA groups, rather than have an EA-chapter-specific tag as well as a country-specific tag, we should just have the country-specific tag. I don't understand how a post related specifically to an EA chapter wouldn't also be related to the country, so I think one country tag (rather than a country and a chapter tag) is enough. I would prefer to just have a Philippines tag already rather than a Southeast Asia tag. This is because: 1. I think we'll hit 10 posts soon, i.e. by the midpoint of 2021 1. We already have 5 past posts that could be tagged under Philippines 2. I have ~3 more posts coming up (likely this month) that would also be tagged under Philippines 2. Therefore rather than tagging these posts as under Southeast Asia, then having to move them to Philippines after we hit 10 posts, I'd rather we just have them tagged as under the Philippines already. I think the principle should be like "If there are 5 or more posts already for a specific country or EA national chapter, and if you would want to create a tag for easier visibility of posts related to that country/chapter, then you should create a tag for that specific country already." Let me know what you think of this principle!
3MichaelA7moThat sounds good to me :) (Though of course this is just one person's thoughts - I have no official role in the EA Forum; I'm just a nerd for tags.)
3BrianTan7moAlright. I've gone ahead and made the Philippines tag here [], along with a description for it. I've also tagged all 5 pasts posts on this topic already. The description I wrote could be a template for how other country-specific tags should be like. I felt that the description you wrote for China didn't apply as much to the Philippines tag. If you or anyone else wants to let me know if the description is alright, or if I should change anything, let me know!
3MichaelA7moThe description looks good to me! And I agree that it seems like it could be a useful example/template for other country-specific tags to draw on.

Country-specific tags

I just saw "creation of country specific content"as an example among the higher rated meta EA areas in the recent article What areas are the most promising to start new EA meta charities - A survey of 40 EAs. What do you think about introducing tags for specific countries? E.g. I'd already have a couple of articles in mind that would be specifically interesting for members of German/Austrian/Swiss communities.

3MichaelA7moPersonally, I think: * it probably makes sense to have at least some tags to mark that posts are relevant to particular countries/regions * but that this should probably be something like 2-20 tags, just in the cases where there are several posts for which the tag would be useful * Rather than e.g. a tag for every country (which I'm not saying you proposed!) Relevant prior tags and discussion There are already tags for China [] and the European Union []. The tag description for the China one (which I wrote) could perhaps be used as a model/starting point for other such tags: And when I proposed the China tag [] , I wrote:
1meerpirat7moYes, I also had something like 5-15 tags in mind. Your proposal for China makes sense to me, though I had a more "internal" perspective in mind, where EAs from the US/UK/Australia/Germany/Canada/etc. could get an overview of articles that are relevant for their specific country and are maybe indirectly encouraged to add something. So I'd write it as Looking at the EA Survey results [] on geographic distribution, I'd maybe do * US * UK * Austria-NZ * Germany-Austria-Switzerland * Canada * Netherlands * France * Scandinavia * Southeast Asia * Latin America

Should we have a tag for "Feedback Request"?

We in EA Philippines have made 2 posts (and have another upcoming one) already that were specifically for requesting feedback from the global EA community on an external document we wrote, before we post this document for the general public. See here and here as examples from EA PH, and this other example from a different author. 

I think it happens quite often that EAs or EA orgs ask for feedback on an external document or on a writeup they have rough thoughts on, so I think it's worth having this tag.

A pote... (read more)

1BrianTan7moAnother potential argument in favor of having a tag for Feedback Request is it might encourage EAs to share work with each other and get feedback more often, which is likely a good thing. In my workplace at First Circle, we have a process called "Request for Comment" or "RFC" where we write documents in a specific format and share them on an #rfc slack channel, so that people know we want feedback on a proposal or writeup in order to move forward with our work. This was very effective in getting people to share work, get feedback on work asynchronously rather than via a synchronous meeting, and to streamline and house one place for feedback requests. Maybe a tag for "Feedback Request" could also streamline things? For example, if an EA wants to see what they could give feedback on, they could click this tag to check out things they could give feedback on. It could also be good practice for authors of feedback requests to put a deadline on when they need feedback on something by. This is so people backreading know if they should still give feedback if a deadline has passed.
2EdoArad7moI made a tag for requests [], which I think applies here if there is a specific request for feedback with timeframe. I'll write a short post about it now.
2MichaelA7moYeah, I think I'd personally lean towards letting the thing Brian is describing be covered by the Requests (Open) tag. This is partly because, as Brian notes, "lots of authors (or most authors) would want feedback on their posts anyway, and it's hard separating which ones are feedback requests and which ones aren't." I'm also not really sure I understand the distinction, or the significance of the distinction, between that wanting feedback on an external doc before sharing it more beyond the EA community and wanting feedback on a post before that, or an adapted form of that, is shared beyond the EA community. (One part of my thoughts here is that I think a decent portion of posts may ultimately make their way into things shared beyond the EA community, and sometimes the authors won't be sure in advance which posts those are. E.g., MacAskill's hinge of history post [] is now an academic working paper.) That said, I've also appreciated the existence of Slack channels where people can solicit feedback from colleagues. (I've appreciated that both as an author and as a person who enjoys being helpful by giving feedback.) And the EA Editing & Review facebook group [] seems to demonstrate some degree of demand for this sort of thing in EA. So maybe there's a stronger case for the tag than I'm currently seeing. (OTOH, maybe the need could be well-met just by using the Requests (Open) tag and posting in EA Editing & Review?) If a Feedback Request tag is made, perhaps it'd be worth linking in the tag description to Giving and receiving feedback [] , Asking for advice [], and/or Discussion Norms [
1BrianTan7moOh cool, yeah I guess this works!

Sorry if offtopic but how do I remove a tag after wrongly using it?

5MichaelA1yIf you mean un-tagging a page, you vote down its relevance by hovering over the tag on the page and clicking the < arrow. If the relevance score gets to or below 0, the tag is removed. If you mean deleting a tag entirely (not just from one page), I think you'd have to message the EA Forum team? More info on tags here [] and here [] .