Debate weeks every other week and we vote on what the topic is.
I think if the forum had a defined topic (especially) in advance, I would be more motivated to read a number of post on that topic.
One of the benefits of the culture war posts is that we are all thinking about the same thing. If we did that on topics perhaps with dialogues from experts, that would be good and on a useful topic.
A crux for me at the moment is whether we can shape debate weeks in a way which leads to deep rather than shallow engagement. If we were to run debate weeks more often, I’d (currently) want to see them causing people to change their mind, have useful conversations, etc… It’s something I’ll be looking closely at when we do a post-mortem on this debate week experiment.
Also, every other week seems prima facie a bit burdensome for un-interested users. Additionally, I want top-down content to only be a part of the Forum. I wouldn’t want to over-shepherd discussion and end up with less wide-ranging and good quality posts.
Happy to explore other ways to integrate polls etc if people like them and they lead to good discussions though.
Hi Nathan! I like suggestions and would like to see more suggestions. But I don’t know what the theory of change is for the forum, so I find it hard to look at your suggestion and see if it maps onto the theory of change.
Re this: “One of the benefits of the culture war posts is that we are all thinking about the same thing.”
I’d be surprised if 5% of EAs spent more than 5 minutes thinking about this topic and 20% of forum readers spent more than 5 minutes thinking about it. I’d be surprised if there were more than 100 unique commenters on posts related to that topic. Why does this matter? Well, prioritising a minority of subject-matter interested people over the remaining majority could be a good way to shrink your audience.
Why is shrinking audience bad? If this forum focused more on EA topics and some people left I am not sure that would be bad. I guess it would be slightly good on expectation.
And to be clear I mean if we focused on “are AIs deserving of moral value” “what % of money should be spent on animal welfare”
I agree that there’s a lot of advantage of occasionally bringing a critical mass of attention to certain topics where this moves the community’s understanding forward vs. just hoping we end up naturally having the most important conversations.
Weird idea: What if some forum members were chosen as “jurors”, and their job is to read everything written during the debate week, possibly ask questions, and try to come to a conclusion?
I’m not that interested in AI welfare myself, but I might become interested if such “jurors” who recorded their opinion before and after made a big update in favor of paying attention to it.
To keep the jury relatively neutral, I would offer people the chance to sign up to “be a juror during the first week of August”, before the topic for the first week of August is actually known.
Suggestion.
Debate weeks every other week and we vote on what the topic is.
I think if the forum had a defined topic (especially) in advance, I would be more motivated to read a number of post on that topic.
One of the benefits of the culture war posts is that we are all thinking about the same thing. If we did that on topics perhaps with dialogues from experts, that would be good and on a useful topic.
Every other week feels exhausting, at least if the voting went in a certain direction.
I would pitch for every 2 months, but I like the sentiment of doing it a bit more.
A crux for me at the moment is whether we can shape debate weeks in a way which leads to deep rather than shallow engagement. If we were to run debate weeks more often, I’d (currently) want to see them causing people to change their mind, have useful conversations, etc… It’s something I’ll be looking closely at when we do a post-mortem on this debate week experiment.
Also, every other week seems prima facie a bit burdensome for un-interested users.
Additionally, I want top-down content to only be a part of the Forum. I wouldn’t want to over-shepherd discussion and end up with less wide-ranging and good quality posts.
Happy to explore other ways to integrate polls etc if people like them and they lead to good discussions though.
Hi Nathan! I like suggestions and would like to see more suggestions. But I don’t know what the theory of change is for the forum, so I find it hard to look at your suggestion and see if it maps onto the theory of change.
Re this: “One of the benefits of the culture war posts is that we are all thinking about the same thing.”
I’d be surprised if 5% of EAs spent more than 5 minutes thinking about this topic and 20% of forum readers spent more than 5 minutes thinking about it. I’d be surprised if there were more than 100 unique commenters on posts related to that topic. Why does this matter? Well, prioritising a minority of subject-matter interested people over the remaining majority could be a good way to shrink your audience.
Why is shrinking audience bad? If this forum focused more on EA topics and some people left I am not sure that would be bad. I guess it would be slightly good on expectation.
And to be clear I mean if we focused on “are AIs deserving of moral value” “what % of money should be spent on animal welfare”
I agree that there’s a lot of advantage of occasionally bringing a critical mass of attention to certain topics where this moves the community’s understanding forward vs. just hoping we end up naturally having the most important conversations.
Weird idea: What if some forum members were chosen as “jurors”, and their job is to read everything written during the debate week, possibly ask questions, and try to come to a conclusion?
I’m not that interested in AI welfare myself, but I might become interested if such “jurors” who recorded their opinion before and after made a big update in favor of paying attention to it.
To keep the jury relatively neutral, I would offer people the chance to sign up to “be a juror during the first week of August”, before the topic for the first week of August is actually known.