Newer EAs are too junior to have good takes yet. Itâs just that the growth rate has increased so thereâs a higher proportion of them.
People who have better thoughts get hired at EA orgs and are too busy to post. There is anticorrelation between the amount of time people have to post on EA Forum and the quality of person.
Although we want more object-level discussion, everyone can weigh in on meta/âcommunity stuff, whereas they only know about their own cause areas. Therefore community content, especially shallow criticism, gets upvoted more. There could be a similar effect for posts by well-known EA figures.
Contests like the criticism contest decrease average quality, because the type of person who would enter a contest to win money on average has worse takes than the type of person who has genuine deep criticism. There were 232 posts for the criticism contest, and 158 for the Cause Exploration Prizes, which combined is more top-level posts than the entire forum in any month except August 2022.
EA Forum is turning into a place primarily optimized for people to feel welcome and talk about EA, rather than impact.
All of this is exacerbated as the most careful and rational thinkers flee somewhere else, expecting that they wonât get good quality engagement on EA Forum
So napkin math suggests that the per-post cost of a contest post is something like 1% of the per-post cost of a RP publication. A typical RP publication is probably much higher quality. But maybe sometimes getting a lot of shallow explorations quickly is whatâs desired. (Disclaimer: I havenât been reading the forum much, didnât read many contest posts, and donât have an opinion about their quality. But I did notice the organizers of the ELK contest were âsurprised by the number and quality of submissionsâ.)
A related point re: quality is that smaller prize pools presumably select for people with lower opportunity costs. If Iâm a talented professional who commands a high hourly rate, I might do the expected value math on e.g. the criticism prize and decide itâs not worthwhile to enter.
Itâs also not clear if the large number of entries will persist in the longer term. Not winning can be pretty demoralizing. Supposing a talented professional goes against their better judgement and puts a lot of time into their entry, then loses and has no idea why. Will they enter the next contest they see? Probably not. Theyâre liable to interpret lack of a prize as âthe contest organizers didnât think it was worth my time to make a submissionâ.
Hey just want to weigh in here that you canât divide our FTE by our total publication count, since that doesnât include a large amount of work weâve produced that is not able to be made public or is not yet public but will be. Right now I think a majority of our output is not public right now for one reason or another, though weâre working on finding routes to make more of it public.
I do think your general point though that the per-post cost of a contest post is less /â much less than an RP post is accurate though.
BTW, I hope it doesnât seem like it was picking on youâit just occurred to me that I could do math for Rethink Priorities because your salaries are public. I have no reason to believe a cost-per-public-report estimate would be different for any other randomly chosen EA research organization in either direction. And of course most EA organizations correctly focus on making a positive impact rather than maximizing publication count.
We also seem to get a fair number of posts that make basically the same point as an earlier article, but the author presumably either didnât read the earlier one or wanted to re-iterate it.
I think there are many people who have very high bars for how good something should be to post on the forum. Thus the forum becomes dominated by a few people (often people who arenât aware of or care about forum norms) who have much lower bars to posting.
This is a plausible mechanism for explaining why content is of lower quality than one would otherwise expect, but it doesnât explain differences in quality over time (and specifically quality decline), unless you add extra assumptions such that the proportion of people with low bars to posting has increased recently. (Cf. Ryanâs comment)
often people who arenât aware of or care about forum norms
EA has grown a lot recently, so I think there are more people recently who arenât aware of or care about the âhigh barâ norm. This is in part due to others explicitly saying the bar should be lower, which (as others here have noted) has a stronger effect on some than on others.
Edit: I donât have time to do this right now, but I would be interested to plot the proportion of posts on the EA forum from people who have been on the forum for less than a year over time. I suspect that it would be trending upwards (but could be wrong). This would be a way to empirically verify part of my claim.
Iâm interested in learning how plausible people find each of these mechanisms, so I created a short (anonymous) survey. Iâll release the results in a few days [ETA: see below]. Estimated completion time is ~90 seconds.
Re 3, âThere is anticorrelation between the amount of time people have to post on EA Forum and the quality of person.â - this makes me wince. A language point is that I think talking about how âgood qualityâ people are overall is unkind and leads to people feeling bad about themselves for not having such-and-such an attribute. An object level point is I donât think there is an anticorrelationâI think being a busy EA org person does make it more likely that theyâll have valuable takes, but not being a busy-EA-org-person doesnât make it less likelyâthere arenât that many busy-EA-org-person jobs, and some people arenât a good fit for busy jobs (eg because of their health or family commitments) but they still have interesting ideas.
Re 7: Iâm literally working on a post with someone about how lots of people feel too intimidated to post on the Forum because of its perceived high standards! So I think though the Forum team are trying to make people feel welcome, itâs not true that itâs (yet) optimized for this, imo.
Thereâs a kind of general problem whereby any messaging or mechanism thatâs designed to dissuade people from posting low-quality things will (a) just not work on some peopleâsome people just have a lot of confidence in their not-very-good opinions, shrug, and (b) dissuade people who would post high-quality things, but who have impostor syndrome or are perfectionist or over self-critical. I think the number of people that the mechanism works as intended onâie people who would have posted a low quality post but are now dissuaded from itâis probably pretty low. Since there are lots of people in EA with impostor syndrome/âperfectionism/âover-scrupulosity, Iâm pretty in favour of the Forum having a âwelcomingâ vibe over a We Are Very Serious and Important vibe.⊠because Iâd rather have more good takes and more bad takes, than get rid of the bad takes and also get rid of good takes from impostors.
I think itâs fairly clear which of these are the main factors, and which are not. Explanations (3-5) and (7) do not account for the recent decline, because they have always been true. Also, (6) is a weak explanation, because the quality wasnât substantially worse than an average post.
On the other hand, (1-2) +/â- (8) fit perfectly with the fact that volume has increased over the last 18 months, over the same period as community-building has happened on a large scale. And I canât think of any major contributors outside of (1-8), so I think the main causes are simply community dilution + a flood of newbies.
Though the other factors could still partially explain why the level (as opposed to the trend) isnât better, and arguably the level is what weâre ultimately interested in.
I wouldnât be quick to dismiss (3-5) and (7) as factors we should pay attention to. These sorts of memetic pressures are present in many communities, and yet communities vary dramatically in quality. This is because things like (3-5) and (7) can be modulated by other facts about the community:
How intrinsically susceptible are people to clickbait?
Have they been taught things like politics is the mind-killer and the dangers of platforms where controversial ideas outcompete broadly good ones?
What is the variance in how busy people are?
To what degree do people feel like they can weigh in on meta? To what degree can they weigh in on cause areas that are not their own?
Are the people on EA Forum mostly trying for impact, or to feel like theyâre part of a community (including instrumentally towards impact)?
So even if they cannot be solely reponsible for changes, they could have been necessary to produce any declines in quality weâve observed, and be important for the future.
I agree that (4) could be modulated by the character of the community. The same is true for (3,5), except that, the direction is wrong. Old-timers are more likely to be professional EAs, and know more about the community, so their decreased prevalence should reduce problems from (3,5). And (7) seems more like an effect of the changing nature of the forum, rather than a cause of it.
Eternal September is a slightly different hypothesis that those listed. Itâs that if new people come into the community then there is an erosion of norms that make the community distinctive.
So as I see it the main phenomenon is that thereâs just much more being posted on the forum. I think thereâs two factors behind that 1) community growth and 2) strong encouragement to post on the Forum. Eg thereâs lots of encouragement to post on the forum from: the undergraduate introductory/âonboarding fellowships, the AGI/âetc âFundamentalsâ courses, the SERI/âCERI/âetc Summer Fellowships, or this or this (h/ât John below).
The main phenomenon is that there is a lot more posted on the forum, mostly from newer/âmore junior people. It could well be the case that the average quality of posts has gone down. However, Iâm not so sure that the quality of the best posts has gone down, and Iâm not so sure that there are fewer of the best posts every month. Nevertheless, spotting the signal from the noise has become harder.
But then the forum serves several purposes. To take two of them: One (which is the one commenters here are most focussed on) is âsignalââproducing really high-quality contentâand its certainly got harder to find that. But another purpose is more instrumentalâits for more junior people to demonstrate their writing/âreasoning ability to potential employees. Or its to act as an incentive/âendgoal for them to do some researchâwhere the benefit is more that they see whether its a fit for them or not, but they wouldnât actually do the work if it wasnât structured towards writing something public.
So the main thing that those of us who are looking for âsignalâ need to do is find better/ânew ways to do so. The curated posts are a postive step in this direction, as are the weekly summaries and the monthly summaries.
Iâd reframe this slightly, though I agree with all your key points. EA forum is finding a new comparative advantage. There are other platforms for deep, impact-focused research. Some of the best research has crystallized into founding efforts.
There will always be the need for an onboarding site and watering hole, and EA forum is filling that niche.
There are other platforms for deep, impact-focused research.
Could you name them? Iâm not sure which ones are out there, other than LW and Alignment Forum for AI alignment research.
E.g. Iâm not sure where else is a better place to post research on forecasting, research on EA community building, research on animal welfare, or new project proposals. There are private groups and slacks, but sometimes what you want is public or community engagement.
I was thinking about our biggest institutions, OpenPhil, 80k, that sort of thingâthe work produced by their on-staff researchers. It sounds like youâre wanting a space thatâs like the EA forum, but has a higher concentration of impact-focused research especially by independent researchers? Or maybe that youâd like to see the new work other orgs are doing get aggregated in one place?
EA forum content might be declining in quality. Here are some possible mechanisms:
Newer EAs have worse takes on average, because the current processes of recruitment and outreach produce a worse distribution than the old ones
Newer EAs are too junior to have good takes yet. Itâs just that the growth rate has increased so thereâs a higher proportion of them.
People who have better thoughts get hired at EA orgs and are too busy to post. There is anticorrelation between the amount of time people have to post on EA Forum and the quality of person.
Controversial content, rather than good content, gets the most engagement.
Although we want more object-level discussion, everyone can weigh in on meta/âcommunity stuff, whereas they only know about their own cause areas. Therefore community content, especially shallow criticism, gets upvoted more. There could be a similar effect for posts by well-known EA figures.
Contests like the criticism contest decrease average quality, because the type of person who would enter a contest to win money on average has worse takes than the type of person who has genuine deep criticism. There were 232 posts for the criticism contest, and 158 for the Cause Exploration Prizes, which combined is more top-level posts than the entire forum in any month except August 2022.
EA Forum is turning into a place primarily optimized for people to feel welcome and talk about EA, rather than impact.
All of this is exacerbated as the most careful and rational thinkers flee somewhere else, expecting that they wonât get good quality engagement on EA Forum
Another possible mechanism is forum leadership encouraging people to be less intimidated and write more off-the-cuff postsâsee e.g. this or this.
Side note: It seems like a small amount of prize money goes a long way.
E.g. Rethink Priorities makes their salaries public: they pay senior researchers $105,000 â $115,000 per year.
Their headcount near the end of 2021 was 24.75 full-time equivalents.
And their publications page lists 30 publications in 2021.
So napkin math suggests that the per-post cost of a contest post is something like 1% of the per-post cost of a RP publication. A typical RP publication is probably much higher quality. But maybe sometimes getting a lot of shallow explorations quickly is whatâs desired. (Disclaimer: I havenât been reading the forum much, didnât read many contest posts, and donât have an opinion about their quality. But I did notice the organizers of the ELK contest were âsurprised by the number and quality of submissionsâ.)
A related point re: quality is that smaller prize pools presumably select for people with lower opportunity costs. If Iâm a talented professional who commands a high hourly rate, I might do the expected value math on e.g. the criticism prize and decide itâs not worthwhile to enter.
Itâs also not clear if the large number of entries will persist in the longer term. Not winning can be pretty demoralizing. Supposing a talented professional goes against their better judgement and puts a lot of time into their entry, then loses and has no idea why. Will they enter the next contest they see? Probably not. Theyâre liable to interpret lack of a prize as âthe contest organizers didnât think it was worth my time to make a submissionâ.
Hey just want to weigh in here that you canât divide our FTE by our total publication count, since that doesnât include a large amount of work weâve produced that is not able to be made public or is not yet public but will be. Right now I think a majority of our output is not public right now for one reason or another, though weâre working on finding routes to make more of it public.
I do think your general point though that the per-post cost of a contest post is less /â much less than an RP post is accurate though.
-Peter (Co-CEO of Rethink Priorities)
Thanks for the correction!
BTW, I hope it doesnât seem like it was picking on youâit just occurred to me that I could do math for Rethink Priorities because your salaries are public. I have no reason to believe a cost-per-public-report estimate would be different for any other randomly chosen EA research organization in either direction. And of course most EA organizations correctly focus on making a positive impact rather than maximizing publication count.
We also seem to get a fair number of posts that make basically the same point as an earlier article, but the author presumably either didnât read the earlier one or wanted to re-iterate it.
Iâll add another mechanism:
I think there are many people who have very high bars for how good something should be to post on the forum. Thus the forum becomes dominated by a few people (often people who arenât aware of or care about forum norms) who have much lower bars to posting.
This is a plausible mechanism for explaining why content is of lower quality than one would otherwise expect, but it doesnât explain differences in quality over time (and specifically quality decline), unless you add extra assumptions such that the proportion of people with low bars to posting has increased recently. (Cf. Ryanâs comment)
Youâre quite right, it was left too implicit.
EA has grown a lot recently, so I think there are more people recently who arenât aware of or care about the âhigh barâ norm. This is in part due to others explicitly saying the bar should be lower, which (as others here have noted) has a stronger effect on some than on others.
Edit: I donât have time to do this right now, but I would be interested to plot the proportion of posts on the EA forum from people who have been on the forum for less than a year over time. I suspect that it would be trending upwards (but could be wrong). This would be a way to empirically verify part of my claim.
Iâm interested in learning how plausible people find each of these mechanisms, so I created a short (anonymous) survey. Iâll release the results in a few days [ETA: see below]. Estimated completion time is ~90 seconds.
The results are below. The data is here.
I broadly agree with 5 and 6.
Re 3, âThere is anticorrelation between the amount of time people have to post on EA Forum and the quality of person.â - this makes me wince. A language point is that I think talking about how âgood qualityâ people are overall is unkind and leads to people feeling bad about themselves for not having such-and-such an attribute. An object level point is I donât think there is an anticorrelationâI think being a busy EA org person does make it more likely that theyâll have valuable takes, but not being a busy-EA-org-person doesnât make it less likelyâthere arenât that many busy-EA-org-person jobs, and some people arenât a good fit for busy jobs (eg because of their health or family commitments) but they still have interesting ideas.
Re 7: Iâm literally working on a post with someone about how lots of people feel too intimidated to post on the Forum because of its perceived high standards! So I think though the Forum team are trying to make people feel welcome, itâs not true that itâs (yet) optimized for this, imo.
Thereâs a kind of general problem whereby any messaging or mechanism thatâs designed to dissuade people from posting low-quality things will (a) just not work on some peopleâsome people just have a lot of confidence in their not-very-good opinions, shrug, and (b) dissuade people who would post high-quality things, but who have impostor syndrome or are perfectionist or over self-critical. I think the number of people that the mechanism works as intended onâie people who would have posted a low quality post but are now dissuaded from itâis probably pretty low. Since there are lots of people in EA with impostor syndrome/âperfectionism/âover-scrupulosity, Iâm pretty in favour of the Forum having a âwelcomingâ vibe over a We Are Very Serious and Important vibe.⊠because Iâd rather have more good takes and more bad takes, than get rid of the bad takes and also get rid of good takes from impostors.
I think itâs fairly clear which of these are the main factors, and which are not. Explanations (3-5) and (7) do not account for the recent decline, because they have always been true. Also, (6) is a weak explanation, because the quality wasnât substantially worse than an average post.
On the other hand, (1-2) +/â- (8) fit perfectly with the fact that volume has increased over the last 18 months, over the same period as community-building has happened on a large scale. And I canât think of any major contributors outside of (1-8), so I think the main causes are simply community dilution + a flood of newbies.
Though the other factors could still partially explain why the level (as opposed to the trend) isnât better, and arguably the level is what weâre ultimately interested in.
I wouldnât be quick to dismiss (3-5) and (7) as factors we should pay attention to. These sorts of memetic pressures are present in many communities, and yet communities vary dramatically in quality. This is because things like (3-5) and (7) can be modulated by other facts about the community:
How intrinsically susceptible are people to clickbait?
Have they been taught things like politics is the mind-killer and the dangers of platforms where controversial ideas outcompete broadly good ones?
What is the variance in how busy people are?
To what degree do people feel like they can weigh in on meta? To what degree can they weigh in on cause areas that are not their own?
Are the people on EA Forum mostly trying for impact, or to feel like theyâre part of a community (including instrumentally towards impact)?
So even if they cannot be solely reponsible for changes, they could have been necessary to produce any declines in quality weâve observed, and be important for the future.
I agree that (4) could be modulated by the character of the community. The same is true for (3,5), except that, the direction is wrong. Old-timers are more likely to be professional EAs, and know more about the community, so their decreased prevalence should reduce problems from (3,5). And (7) seems more like an effect of the changing nature of the forum, rather than a cause of it.
My comment got detached, woops
Eternal September is a slightly different hypothesis that those listed. Itâs that if new people come into the community then there is an erosion of norms that make the community distinctive.
So as I see it the main phenomenon is that thereâs just much more being posted on the forum. I think thereâs two factors behind that 1) community growth and 2) strong encouragement to post on the Forum. Eg thereâs lots of encouragement to post on the forum from: the undergraduate introductory/âonboarding fellowships, the AGI/âetc âFundamentalsâ courses, the SERI/âCERI/âetc Summer Fellowships, or this or this (h/ât John below).
The main phenomenon is that there is a lot more posted on the forum, mostly from newer/âmore junior people. It could well be the case that the average quality of posts has gone down. However, Iâm not so sure that the quality of the best posts has gone down, and Iâm not so sure that there are fewer of the best posts every month. Nevertheless, spotting the signal from the noise has become harder.
But then the forum serves several purposes. To take two of them: One (which is the one commenters here are most focussed on) is âsignalââproducing really high-quality contentâand its certainly got harder to find that. But another purpose is more instrumentalâits for more junior people to demonstrate their writing/âreasoning ability to potential employees. Or its to act as an incentive/âendgoal for them to do some researchâwhere the benefit is more that they see whether its a fit for them or not, but they wouldnât actually do the work if it wasnât structured towards writing something public.
So the main thing that those of us who are looking for âsignalâ need to do is find better/ânew ways to do so. The curated posts are a postive step in this direction, as are the weekly summaries and the monthly summaries.
Are there examples of typical bad takes youâve seen newer EAs post?
Small formatting thought: making these numbered instead of bulleted will make it easier to have conversations about them
Done
Iâd reframe this slightly, though I agree with all your key points. EA forum is finding a new comparative advantage. There are other platforms for deep, impact-focused research. Some of the best research has crystallized into founding efforts.
There will always be the need for an onboarding site and watering hole, and EA forum is filling that niche.
Could you name them? Iâm not sure which ones are out there, other than LW and Alignment Forum for AI alignment research.
E.g. Iâm not sure where else is a better place to post research on forecasting, research on EA community building, research on animal welfare, or new project proposals. There are private groups and slacks, but sometimes what you want is public or community engagement.
I was thinking about our biggest institutions, OpenPhil, 80k, that sort of thingâthe work produced by their on-staff researchers. It sounds like youâre wanting a space thatâs like the EA forum, but has a higher concentration of impact-focused research especially by independent researchers? Or maybe that youâd like to see the new work other orgs are doing get aggregated in one place?