Will Howard🔹

Software Engineer @ Centre for Effective Altruism
1626 karmaJoined Working (0-5 years)Oxford, UK

Bio

I'm a software engineer on the CEA Online team, mostly working on the EA Forum.

You can contact me at will.howard@centreforeffectivealtruism.org

Sequences
1

What would effective charities actually do with your money?

Comments
147

Topic contributions
48

I donated to Charity Entrepreneurship! I think they have an incredibly high hit rate on a tight budget

Fixed now! Sorry about that

Consensual ways of affecting the size of some wild animal populations

What does "consensual" mean here (and to some extent above)? Consensual on the part of humans/institutions?

Update (I came across this while prepping voting for this year's election): I did add this random tie breaking in the system last year, and by default it will be used again this year

Thanks for reporting this! I've just deployed a fix so the graph should display correctly now

Will Howard🔹
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90% agree

It's OK to eat honey

I plead clueless

I haven't yet read the sequence, but I have it on my backlog to read based on finding your older post about this very interesting. I agree-voted "An FAQ about various objections" because I think the other two can be looked up/skimmed from the existing content, whereas I'm actually unfamiliar with the objections so that would be new info to me.

@Jeff Kaufman 🔸 it would be possible, we're currently using a library that claims to use heuristics based on the user's timezone and locale, but this doesn't seem to work very well. For the forum we use IP geolocation which is more reliable, so we can switch to that.

@Ian Turner unfortunately we do get some value out of non-GDPR-compatible analytics, and we want to try and optimise the site as a top-of-funnel intro to EA over time, so we think the banner is worth it for now.

Mini Forum update: Draft comments, and polls in comments

Draft comments

You can now save comments as permanent drafts:

After saving, the draft will appear for you to edit:

1. In-place if it's a reply to another comment (as above)

2. In a "Draft comments" section under the comment box on the post

3. In the drafts section of your profile

The reasons we think this will be useful:

  • For writing long, substantive comments (and quick takes!). We think these are the some of the most valuable comments on the forum, and want to encourage more of them
  • For starting a comment on mobile and then later continuing on desktop
  • To lower the barrier to starting writing a comment, since you know you can always throw it in drafts and then never look at it again

Polls in comments

We recently added the ability to put polls in posts, and this was fairly well received, so we're adding it to comments (... and quick takes!) as well.

You can add a poll from the toolbar, you just need to highlight a bit of text to make the toolbar appear:

And the poll will look like this...

Which feature will you find more valuable?
PR
RSR
I
draft comments
polls

You may be aware of this already, but you can set values other than 50% by using the "Other" field:

It's still a bit from-the-hip, but we don't have a way of specifically favouring variety unfortunately

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