Newer EAs are too junior to have good takes yet. It’s just that the growth rate has increased so there’s 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/community 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 won’t 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 what’s desired. (Disclaimer: I haven’t been reading the forum much, didn’t read many contest posts, and don’t have an opinion about their quality. But I did notice the organizers of the ELK contest were “surprised by the number and quality of submissions”.)
A related point re: quality is that smaller prize pools presumably select for people with lower opportunity costs. If I’m a talented professional who commands a high hourly rate, I might do the expected value math on e.g. the criticism prize and decide it’s not worthwhile to enter.
It’s 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. They’re liable to interpret lack of a prize as “the contest organizers didn’t think it was worth my time to make a submission”.
Hey just want to weigh in here that you can’t divide our FTE by our total publication count, since that doesn’t include a large amount of work we’ve 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 we’re 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 / much less than an RP post is accurate though.
BTW, I hope it doesn’t seem like it was picking on you—it 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 didn’t 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 aren’t 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 doesn’t 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. Ryan’s comment)
often people who aren’t aware of or care about forum norms
EA has grown a lot recently, so I think there are more people recently who aren’t aware of or care about the “high bar” 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 don’t 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.
I’m interested in learning how plausible people find each of these mechanisms, so I created a short (anonymous) survey. I’ll release the results in a few days [ETA: see below]. Estimated completion time is ~90 seconds.
Re 3, ‘There is anticorrelation between the amount of time people have to post on EA Forum and the quality of person.’ - this makes me wince. A language point is that I think talking about how ‘good quality’ 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 don’t think there is an anticorrelation—I think being a busy EA org person does make it more likely that they’ll have valuable takes, but not being a busy-EA-org-person doesn’t make it less likely—there aren’t that many busy-EA-org-person jobs, and some people aren’t a good fit for busy jobs (eg because of their health or family commitments) but they still have interesting ideas.
Re 7: I’m 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, it’s not true that it’s (yet) optimized for this, imo.
There’s a kind of general problem whereby any messaging or mechanism that’s designed to dissuade people from posting low-quality things will (a) just not work on some people—some 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 on—ie people who would have posted a low quality post but are now dissuaded from it—is probably pretty low. Since there are lots of people in EA with impostor syndrome/perfectionism/over-scrupulosity, I’m pretty in favour of the Forum having a ‘welcoming’ vibe over a We Are Very Serious and Important vibe.… because I’d 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 it’s 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 wasn’t substantially worse than an average post.
On the other hand, (1-2) +/- (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 can’t 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) isn’t better, and arguably the level is what we’re ultimately interested in.
I wouldn’t 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 they’re 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 we’ve 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. It’s 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 there’s just much more being posted on the forum. I think there’s two factors behind that 1) community growth and 2) strong encouragement to post on the Forum. Eg there’s lots of encouragement to post on the forum from: the undergraduate introductory/onboarding fellowships, the AGI/etc ‘Fundamentals’ courses, the SERI/CERI/etc Summer Fellowships, or this or this (h/t John below).
The main phenomenon is that there is a lot more posted on the forum, mostly from newer/more junior people. It could well be the case that the average quality of posts has gone down. However, I’m not so sure that the quality of the best posts has gone down, and I’m 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 “signal”—producing really high-quality content—and its certainly got harder to find that. But another purpose is more instrumental—its for more junior people to demonstrate their writing/reasoning ability to potential employees. Or its to act as an incentive/endgoal for them to do some research—where the benefit is more that they see whether its a fit for them or not, but they wouldn’t actually do the work if it wasn’t structured towards writing something public.
So the main thing that those of us who are looking for “signal” need to do is find better/new ways to do so. The curated posts are a postive step in this direction, as are the weekly summaries and the monthly summaries.
I’d 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? I’m not sure which ones are out there, other than LW and Alignment Forum for AI alignment research.
E.g. I’m 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 thing—the work produced by their on-staff researchers. It sounds like you’re wanting a space that’s like the EA forum, but has a higher concentration of impact-focused research especially by independent researchers? Or maybe that you’d 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. It’s just that the growth rate has increased so there’s 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/community 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 won’t 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 posts—see 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 – $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 what’s desired. (Disclaimer: I haven’t been reading the forum much, didn’t read many contest posts, and don’t have an opinion about their quality. But I did notice the organizers of the ELK contest were “surprised by the number and quality of submissions”.)
A related point re: quality is that smaller prize pools presumably select for people with lower opportunity costs. If I’m a talented professional who commands a high hourly rate, I might do the expected value math on e.g. the criticism prize and decide it’s not worthwhile to enter.
It’s 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. They’re liable to interpret lack of a prize as “the contest organizers didn’t think it was worth my time to make a submission”.
Hey just want to weigh in here that you can’t divide our FTE by our total publication count, since that doesn’t include a large amount of work we’ve 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 we’re 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 / much less than an RP post is accurate though.
-Peter (Co-CEO of Rethink Priorities)
Thanks for the correction!
BTW, I hope it doesn’t seem like it was picking on you—it 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 didn’t read the earlier one or wanted to re-iterate it.
I’ll 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 aren’t 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 doesn’t 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. Ryan’s comment)
You’re quite right, it was left too implicit.
EA has grown a lot recently, so I think there are more people recently who aren’t aware of or care about the “high bar” 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 don’t 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.
I’m interested in learning how plausible people find each of these mechanisms, so I created a short (anonymous) survey. I’ll 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, ‘There is anticorrelation between the amount of time people have to post on EA Forum and the quality of person.’ - this makes me wince. A language point is that I think talking about how ‘good quality’ 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 don’t think there is an anticorrelation—I think being a busy EA org person does make it more likely that they’ll have valuable takes, but not being a busy-EA-org-person doesn’t make it less likely—there aren’t that many busy-EA-org-person jobs, and some people aren’t a good fit for busy jobs (eg because of their health or family commitments) but they still have interesting ideas.
Re 7: I’m 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, it’s not true that it’s (yet) optimized for this, imo.
There’s a kind of general problem whereby any messaging or mechanism that’s designed to dissuade people from posting low-quality things will (a) just not work on some people—some 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 on—ie people who would have posted a low quality post but are now dissuaded from it—is probably pretty low. Since there are lots of people in EA with impostor syndrome/perfectionism/over-scrupulosity, I’m pretty in favour of the Forum having a ‘welcoming’ vibe over a We Are Very Serious and Important vibe.… because I’d 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 it’s 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 wasn’t substantially worse than an average post.
On the other hand, (1-2) +/- (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 can’t 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) isn’t better, and arguably the level is what we’re ultimately interested in.
I wouldn’t 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 they’re 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 we’ve 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. It’s 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 there’s just much more being posted on the forum. I think there’s two factors behind that 1) community growth and 2) strong encouragement to post on the Forum. Eg there’s lots of encouragement to post on the forum from: the undergraduate introductory/onboarding fellowships, the AGI/etc ‘Fundamentals’ courses, the SERI/CERI/etc Summer Fellowships, or this or this (h/t John below).
The main phenomenon is that there is a lot more posted on the forum, mostly from newer/more junior people. It could well be the case that the average quality of posts has gone down. However, I’m not so sure that the quality of the best posts has gone down, and I’m 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 “signal”—producing really high-quality content—and its certainly got harder to find that. But another purpose is more instrumental—its for more junior people to demonstrate their writing/reasoning ability to potential employees. Or its to act as an incentive/endgoal for them to do some research—where the benefit is more that they see whether its a fit for them or not, but they wouldn’t actually do the work if it wasn’t structured towards writing something public.
So the main thing that those of us who are looking for “signal” need to do is find better/new 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 you’ve seen newer EAs post?
Small formatting thought: making these numbered instead of bulleted will make it easier to have conversations about them
Done
I’d 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? I’m not sure which ones are out there, other than LW and Alignment Forum for AI alignment research.
E.g. I’m 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 thing—the work produced by their on-staff researchers. It sounds like you’re wanting a space that’s like the EA forum, but has a higher concentration of impact-focused research especially by independent researchers? Or maybe that you’d like to see the new work other orgs are doing get aggregated in one place?