The response says that EA will not change “people in EA roles [will] … choose not to”, that making constructive critiques is a waste of time “[not a] productive ways to channel your energy” and that the critique should have been better “I wish that posts like this were clearer” “you should try harder” “[maybe try] politely suggesting”.
This response seems to be putting all the burden of making progress in EA onto those trying to constructively critique the movement, those who are putting their limited spare time into trying to be helpful, and removing the burden away from those who are actively paid to work on improving this movement. I don’t think you understand how hard it is to write something like this, how much effort must have gone into making each of these critiques readable and understandable to the EA community. It is not their job to try harder, or to be more polite. It is our job, your job, my job, as people in EA orgs, to listen and to learn and to consider and if we can to do better.
Rather than saying the original post should be better maybe the response should be that those reading the original post should be better at considering the issues raised.
I cannot think of a more dismissive or disheartening response. I think this response will actively dissuade future critiques of EA (I feel less inclined to try my had at critical writing seeing this as the top response) and as such make the community more insular and less epistemically robust. Also I think this response will make the authors of this post feel like their efforts are wasted an unheard.
I think this is a weird response to what Buck wrote. Buck also isn’t paid either to reform EA movement, or to respond to criticism on EA forum, and decided to spend his limited time to express how things realistically look from his perspective.
I think it is good if people write responses like that, and such responses should be upvoted, even if you disagree with the claims. Downvotes should not express ‘I disagree’, but ‘I don’t want to read this’.
Even if you believe EA orgs are horrible and should be completely reformed, in my view, you should be glad that Buck wrote his comment as you have better idea what people like him may think.
It’s important to understand the alternative to this comment is not Buck will write 30 page detailed response. The alternative is, in my guess, just silence.
Thank you for the reply Jan. My comment was not about whether I disagree with any of the content of what Buck said. My comment was objecting to what came across to me as a dismissive, try harder, tone policing attitude (see the quotes I pulled out) that is ultimately antithetical to the kind, considerate and open to criticism community that I want to see in EA. Hopefully that explains where I’m coming from.
This response seems to be putting all the burden of making progress in EA onto those trying to constructively critique the movement, those who are putting their limited spare time into trying to be helpful, and removing the burden away from those who are actively paid to work on improving this movement. I don’t think you understand how hard it is to write something like this, how much effort must have gone into making each of these critiques readable and understandable to the EA community. It is not their job to try harder, or to be more polite. It is our job, your job, my job, as people in EA orgs, to listen and to learn and to consider and if we can to do better.
From my perspective, it feels like the burden of making progress in EA is substantially on the people who actually have jobs where they try to make EA go better; my take is that EA leaders are making the correct prioritization decision by spending their “time for contemplating ways to improve EA” budget mostly on other things than “reading anonymous critical EA Forum posts and engaging deeply”.
I think part of my model is that it’s totally normal for online critiques of things to not be very interesting or good, while you seem to have a strong prior that online critiques are worth engaging with in depth. Like, idk, did you know that literally anyone can make an EA Forum account and start commenting and voting? Public internet forums are famously bad; why do you believe that this one is worth engaging extensively with?
(I feel less inclined to try my had at critical writing seeing this as the top response)
I consider this a good outcome—I would prefer an EA Forum without your critical writing on it, because I think your critical writing has similar problems to this post (for similar reasons to the comment Rohin made here), and I think that posts like this/yours are fairly unhelpful, distracting, and unpleasant. In my opinion, it is fair game for me to make truthful comments that cause people to feel less incentivized to write posts like this one (or yours) in future (though I can imagine changing my mind on this).
I understand that my comment poses some risk of causing people who would have made useful criticisms feel discouraged from doing so. My current sense is that at the margin, this cost is smaller than the other benefits of my comment?
Also I think this response will make the authors of this post feel like their efforts are wasted an unheard.
Remember that I thought that their efforts were already wasted and unheard (by anyone who will realistically do anything about them); don’t blame the messenger here. I recommend instead blaming all the people who upvoted this post and who could, if they wanted to, help to implement many of the shovel-ready suggestions in this post, but who will instead choose not to do that.
I consider this a good outcome—I would prefer an EA Forum without your critical writing on it, because I think your critical writing has similar problems to this post (for similar reasons to the comment Rohin made here), and I think that posts like this/yours are fairly unhelpful, distracting, and unpleasant. In my opinion, it is fair game for me to make truthful comments that cause people to feel less incentivized to write posts like this one (or yours) in future (though I can imagine changing my mind on this).
This was a disappointing comment to read from a well-respected researcher, and negatively updates me against encouraging people to working and collaborating with you in the future, because I think it reflects a callousness as well as insensitivity towards power dynamics which I would not want to see in a manager or someone running an AI alignment organization. In my opinion, it is fair game for me to make truthful comments that cause you to feel less incentivized to write comments like this in future (though I can imagine changing my mind on this).
I do not actually endorse this comment above. It is used as an illustration of why a true statement alone might not mean it is “fair game”, or a constructive way to approach what you want to say. Here is my real response:
In terms of whether it is “fair game” or not: consider some junior EA who made a comment to you, “I would prefer an EA forum without your critical writing on it”. This has basically zero implications for you. No one is going to take them seriously, unless they provide receipts and point out what they disliked. But this isn’t the case in reverse. So I think if you are someone seen to be a “powerful EA”, or someone whose opinion is taken pretty seriously, you should take significant care when making statements like this, because some people might update simply based on your views. I haven’t engaged with much of weeatquince’s work, but EA is a sufficiently small enough community that these kinds of opinions can probably a harmful impact on someone’s involvement in EA-I don’t think the disclaimers around “I no longer do grantmaking for the EAIF” are particularly reassuring on this front. For example, I imagine if Holden came and made a comment in response to someone “I find your posts unhelpful, distracting, and unpleasant. I would prefer an EA forum without your critical writing on it”, this could lead to information cascades and reputational repercussions that don’t accurately reflect weeatquince’s actual quality of work. You are not Holden, but it would be reasonable for you to expect your opinions to have sway in the EA community.
FWIW, your comment will negatively update people towards posting under their main accounts, and I think a forum environment where people feel even more inclined to make alt accounts because they are worried about reputational repercussions from someone like you coming along with a comment like “I would prefer an EA Forum without your critical writing on it” is intimidating and not ideal for community engagement. Because you haven’t provided any justification for your claim aside from Robin’s post which points at strawmanning to some extent, I don’t know what this means for my work and whether my comments will pass your bar. Why not just let other users downvote low quality comments, and if you have a particular quality bar for posts that you think the downvotes don’t capture, just filter your frontpage so you only see posts with >50 or >100 karma? If you disagree with the way people running the forum are using the karma system, or their idea for who should post and what the signal:noise ratio should be, you should take that to the EA forum folks. Because if I was a new EA member, I’d be deleting my draft posts after reading a comment like this, and find it disconcerting that I’m being encouraged to post by the mods but might bump into senior EA members who say this about my good-faith contributions.
I do not actually endorse this comment above. It is used as an illustration of why a true statement alone might not mean it is “fair game”, or a constructive way to approach what you want to say. Here is my real response:
As a random aside, I thought that your first paragraph was totally fair and reasonable and I had no problem with you saying it.
Thanks for your comment. I think your comment seems to me like it’s equivocating between two things: whether I negatively judge people for writing certain things, and whether I publicly say that I think certain content makes the EA Forum worse. In particular, I did the latter, but you’re worrying about the former.
I do update on people when they say things on this forum that I think indicate bad things about their judgment or integrity, as I think I should, but for what it’s worth I am very quick to forgive and don’t hold long grudges. Also, it’s quite rare for me to update against someone substantially from a single piece of writing of theirs that I disliked. In general, I think people in EA worry too much about being judged negatively for saying things and underestimate how forgiving people are (especially if a year passes or if you say particularly reasonable things in the meantime).
@Buck – As a hopefully constructive point I think you could have written a comment that served the same function but was less potentially off-putting by clearly separating your critique between a general critique of critical writing on the EA Forum and critiques of specific people (me or the OP author).
I do update on people when they say things on this forum that I think indicate bad things about their judgment or integrity, as I think I should
I agree! But given this, I think the two things you mention often feel highly correlated, and it’s hard for people to actually know that when you make a statement like that, that there’s no negative judgement either from you, nor from other readers of your statement. It also feels a bit weird to suggest there’s no negative judgement if you also think the forum is a better place without their critical writing?
In general, I think people in EA worry too much about being judged negatively for saying things and underestimate how forgiving people are
I also agree with this, which is why I wanted to push back on your comment, because I think it would be understandable for someone to read your comment and worry more about being judged negatively, and if you think people are poorly calibrated, you should err on the side of giving people reasons to update in the right direction, instead of potentially exacerbating the misconception.
I also agree with this, which is why I wanted to push back on your comment, because I think it would be understandable for someone to read your comment and worry more about being judged negatively, and if you think people are poorly calibrated, you should err on the side of giving people reasons to update in the right direction, instead of potentially exacerbating the misconception.
I think you and Buck are saying different things:
you are saying “people in EA should worry less about being judged negatively, because they won’t be judged negatively”,
Buck is saying “people in EA should worry less about being judged negatively, because it’s not so bad to be judged negatively”.
I think these points have opposite implications about whether to post judgemental comments, and about what impact a judgemental comment should have on you.
Oh interesting-I hadn’t noticed that interpretation, thanks for pointing it out. That being said I do think it’s much easier for someone in a more established senior position, who isn’t particularly at risk of bad outcomes from negative judgements, to suggest that negative judgements are not so bad or use that as a justification for making negative judgements.
I would prefer an EA Forum without your critical writing on it, because I think your critical writing has similar problems to this post (for similar reasons to the comment Rohin made here), and I think that posts like this/yours are fairly unhelpful, distracting, and unpleasant.
I think this is somewhat unfair. I think it is unfair to describe this OP as “unpleasant”, it seems to be clearly and impartially written and to go out of its way to make it clear it is not picking on individuals. Also I feel like you have cherry picked a post from my post history that was less well written, some of my critical writing was better received (like this). If you do find engaging with me to be unpleasant, I am sorry, I am open to feedback so feel free to send me a DM with constructive thoughts.
By “unpleasant” I don’t mean “the authors are behaving rudely”, I mean “the content/framing seems not very useful and I am sad about the effect it has on the discourse”.
I picked that post because it happened to have a good critical comment that I agreed with; I have analogous disagreements with some of your other posts (including the one you linked).
Thanks for your offer to receive critical feedback.
“the content/framing seems not very useful and I am sad about the effect it has on the discourse”
I think we very strongly disagree on this. I think critical posts like this have a very positive effect on discourse (in EA and elsewhere) and am happy with the framing of this post and a fair amount (although by no means all) of the content.
I think my belief here is routed in quite strong lifetime experiences in favour of epistemic humility, human overconfidence especially in the domain of doing good, positive experiences of learning from good faith criticisms, and academic evidence that more views in decision making leading to better decisions. (I also think there have been some positive changes made as a result of recent criticism contests.)
I think it would be extremely hard to change my mind on this. I can think of a few specific cases (to support your views) where I am very glad criticisms were dismissed (e.g. the effective animal advocacy movement not truly engaging with abolitionist animal advocate arguments) but this seems to be more the exception than the norm. Maybe if my mind was changed on this it would be though more such case studies of people doing good really effectively without investing in the kind of learning that comes from well-meaning criticisms.
Also, I wonder if we should try (if we can find the time) cowriting a post on giving and receiving critical feedback on EA. Maybe we diverge in views too much and it would be a train wreck of a post but it could be an interesting exercise to try, maybe try to pull out toc. I do agree there are things that both I think I and the OP authors (and those responding to the OP) could do better
I strongly downvoted this response.
The response says that EA will not change “people in EA roles [will] … choose not to”, that making constructive critiques is a waste of time “[not a] productive ways to channel your energy” and that the critique should have been better “I wish that posts like this were clearer” “you should try harder” “[maybe try] politely suggesting”.
This response seems to be putting all the burden of making progress in EA onto those trying to constructively critique the movement, those who are putting their limited spare time into trying to be helpful, and removing the burden away from those who are actively paid to work on improving this movement. I don’t think you understand how hard it is to write something like this, how much effort must have gone into making each of these critiques readable and understandable to the EA community. It is not their job to try harder, or to be more polite. It is our job, your job, my job, as people in EA orgs, to listen and to learn and to consider and if we can to do better.
Rather than saying the original post should be better maybe the response should be that those reading the original post should be better at considering the issues raised.
I cannot think of a more dismissive or disheartening response. I think this response will actively dissuade future critiques of EA (I feel less inclined to try my had at critical writing seeing this as the top response) and as such make the community more insular and less epistemically robust. Also I think this response will make the authors of this post feel like their efforts are wasted an unheard.
I think this is a weird response to what Buck wrote. Buck also isn’t paid either to reform EA movement, or to respond to criticism on EA forum, and decided to spend his limited time to express how things realistically look from his perspective.
I think it is good if people write responses like that, and such responses should be upvoted, even if you disagree with the claims. Downvotes should not express ‘I disagree’, but ‘I don’t want to read this’.
Even if you believe EA orgs are horrible and should be completely reformed, in my view, you should be glad that Buck wrote his comment as you have better idea what people like him may think.
It’s important to understand the alternative to this comment is not Buck will write 30 page detailed response. The alternative is, in my guess, just silence.
Thank you for the reply Jan. My comment was not about whether I disagree with any of the content of what Buck said. My comment was objecting to what came across to me as a dismissive, try harder, tone policing attitude (see the quotes I pulled out) that is ultimately antithetical to the kind, considerate and open to criticism community that I want to see in EA. Hopefully that explains where I’m coming from.
From my perspective, it feels like the burden of making progress in EA is substantially on the people who actually have jobs where they try to make EA go better; my take is that EA leaders are making the correct prioritization decision by spending their “time for contemplating ways to improve EA” budget mostly on other things than “reading anonymous critical EA Forum posts and engaging deeply”.
I think part of my model is that it’s totally normal for online critiques of things to not be very interesting or good, while you seem to have a strong prior that online critiques are worth engaging with in depth. Like, idk, did you know that literally anyone can make an EA Forum account and start commenting and voting? Public internet forums are famously bad; why do you believe that this one is worth engaging extensively with?
I consider this a good outcome—I would prefer an EA Forum without your critical writing on it, because I think your critical writing has similar problems to this post (for similar reasons to the comment Rohin made here), and I think that posts like this/yours are fairly unhelpful, distracting, and unpleasant. In my opinion, it is fair game for me to make truthful comments that cause people to feel less incentivized to write posts like this one (or yours) in future (though I can imagine changing my mind on this).
I understand that my comment poses some risk of causing people who would have made useful criticisms feel discouraged from doing so. My current sense is that at the margin, this cost is smaller than the other benefits of my comment?
Remember that I thought that their efforts were already wasted and unheard (by anyone who will realistically do anything about them); don’t blame the messenger here. I recommend instead blaming all the people who upvoted this post and who could, if they wanted to, help to implement many of the shovel-ready suggestions in this post, but who will instead choose not to do that.
This was a disappointing comment to read from a well-respected researcher, and negatively updates me against encouraging people to working and collaborating with you in the future, because I think it reflects a callousness as well as insensitivity towards power dynamics which I would not want to see in a manager or someone running an AI alignment organization. In my opinion, it is fair game for me to make truthful comments that cause you to feel less incentivized to write comments like this in future (though I can imagine changing my mind on this).
I do not actually endorse this comment above. It is used as an illustration of why a true statement alone might not mean it is “fair game”, or a constructive way to approach what you want to say. Here is my real response:
In terms of whether it is “fair game” or not: consider some junior EA who made a comment to you, “I would prefer an EA forum without your critical writing on it”. This has basically zero implications for you. No one is going to take them seriously, unless they provide receipts and point out what they disliked. But this isn’t the case in reverse. So I think if you are someone seen to be a “powerful EA”, or someone whose opinion is taken pretty seriously, you should take significant care when making statements like this, because some people might update simply based on your views. I haven’t engaged with much of weeatquince’s work, but EA is a sufficiently small enough community that these kinds of opinions can probably a harmful impact on someone’s involvement in EA-I don’t think the disclaimers around “I no longer do grantmaking for the EAIF” are particularly reassuring on this front. For example, I imagine if Holden came and made a comment in response to someone “I find your posts unhelpful, distracting, and unpleasant. I would prefer an EA forum without your critical writing on it”, this could lead to information cascades and reputational repercussions that don’t accurately reflect weeatquince’s actual quality of work. You are not Holden, but it would be reasonable for you to expect your opinions to have sway in the EA community.
FWIW, your comment will negatively update people towards posting under their main accounts, and I think a forum environment where people feel even more inclined to make alt accounts because they are worried about reputational repercussions from someone like you coming along with a comment like “I would prefer an EA Forum without your critical writing on it” is intimidating and not ideal for community engagement. Because you haven’t provided any justification for your claim aside from Robin’s post which points at strawmanning to some extent, I don’t know what this means for my work and whether my comments will pass your bar. Why not just let other users downvote low quality comments, and if you have a particular quality bar for posts that you think the downvotes don’t capture, just filter your frontpage so you only see posts with >50 or >100 karma? If you disagree with the way people running the forum are using the karma system, or their idea for who should post and what the signal:noise ratio should be, you should take that to the EA forum folks. Because if I was a new EA member, I’d be deleting my draft posts after reading a comment like this, and find it disconcerting that I’m being encouraged to post by the mods but might bump into senior EA members who say this about my good-faith contributions.
As a random aside, I thought that your first paragraph was totally fair and reasonable and I had no problem with you saying it.
Thanks for your comment. I think your comment seems to me like it’s equivocating between two things: whether I negatively judge people for writing certain things, and whether I publicly say that I think certain content makes the EA Forum worse. In particular, I did the latter, but you’re worrying about the former.
I do update on people when they say things on this forum that I think indicate bad things about their judgment or integrity, as I think I should, but for what it’s worth I am very quick to forgive and don’t hold long grudges. Also, it’s quite rare for me to update against someone substantially from a single piece of writing of theirs that I disliked. In general, I think people in EA worry too much about being judged negatively for saying things and underestimate how forgiving people are (especially if a year passes or if you say particularly reasonable things in the meantime).
@Buck – As a hopefully constructive point I think you could have written a comment that served the same function but was less potentially off-putting by clearly separating your critique between a general critique of critical writing on the EA Forum and critiques of specific people (me or the OP author).
I agree! But given this, I think the two things you mention often feel highly correlated, and it’s hard for people to actually know that when you make a statement like that, that there’s no negative judgement either from you, nor from other readers of your statement. It also feels a bit weird to suggest there’s no negative judgement if you also think the forum is a better place without their critical writing?
I also agree with this, which is why I wanted to push back on your comment, because I think it would be understandable for someone to read your comment and worry more about being judged negatively, and if you think people are poorly calibrated, you should err on the side of giving people reasons to update in the right direction, instead of potentially exacerbating the misconception.
I think you and Buck are saying different things:
you are saying “people in EA should worry less about being judged negatively, because they won’t be judged negatively”,
Buck is saying “people in EA should worry less about being judged negatively, because it’s not so bad to be judged negatively”.
I think these points have opposite implications about whether to post judgemental comments, and about what impact a judgemental comment should have on you.
Oh interesting-I hadn’t noticed that interpretation, thanks for pointing it out. That being said I do think it’s much easier for someone in a more established senior position, who isn’t particularly at risk of bad outcomes from negative judgements, to suggest that negative judgements are not so bad or use that as a justification for making negative judgements.
I think this is somewhat unfair. I think it is unfair to describe this OP as “unpleasant”, it seems to be clearly and impartially written and to go out of its way to make it clear it is not picking on individuals. Also I feel like you have cherry picked a post from my post history that was less well written, some of my critical writing was better received (like this). If you do find engaging with me to be unpleasant, I am sorry, I am open to feedback so feel free to send me a DM with constructive thoughts.
By “unpleasant” I don’t mean “the authors are behaving rudely”, I mean “the content/framing seems not very useful and I am sad about the effect it has on the discourse”.
I picked that post because it happened to have a good critical comment that I agreed with; I have analogous disagreements with some of your other posts (including the one you linked).
Thanks for your offer to receive critical feedback.
Thank you Buck that makes sense :-)
I think we very strongly disagree on this. I think critical posts like this have a very positive effect on discourse (in EA and elsewhere) and am happy with the framing of this post and a fair amount (although by no means all) of the content.
I think my belief here is routed in quite strong lifetime experiences in favour of epistemic humility, human overconfidence especially in the domain of doing good, positive experiences of learning from good faith criticisms, and academic evidence that more views in decision making leading to better decisions. (I also think there have been some positive changes made as a result of recent criticism contests.)
I think it would be extremely hard to change my mind on this. I can think of a few specific cases (to support your views) where I am very glad criticisms were dismissed (e.g. the effective animal advocacy movement not truly engaging with abolitionist animal advocate arguments) but this seems to be more the exception than the norm. Maybe if my mind was changed on this it would be though more such case studies of people doing good really effectively without investing in the kind of learning that comes from well-meaning criticisms.
Also, I wonder if we should try (if we can find the time) cowriting a post on giving and receiving critical feedback on EA. Maybe we diverge in views too much and it would be a train wreck of a post but it could be an interesting exercise to try, maybe try to pull out toc. I do agree there are things that both I think I and the OP authors (and those responding to the OP) could do better