I actually did that earlier, then realized I should clarify what you were trying to claim. I will copy the results in below, but even though they support the view that FTX was not a huge deal I want to disclaim that this methodology doesn’t seem like it actually gets at the important thing.
But anyway, my original comment text:
As a convenience sample I searched twitter for “effective altruism”. The first reference to FTX doesn’t come until tweet 36, which is a link to this. Honestly it seems mostly like a standard anti-utilitarianism complaint; it feels like FTX isn’t actually the crux.
In contrast, I see 3 e/acc-type criticisms before that, two “I like EA but this AI stuff is too weird” things (including one retweeted by Yann LeCun??), two “EA is tech-bro/not diverse” complaints and one thing about Whytham Abbey.
I just tried to reproduce the Twitter datapoint. Here is the first tweet when I sort by most recent:
Most tweets are negative, mostly referring to the OpenAI thing. Among the top 10 I see three references to FTX. This continues to be quite remarkable, especially given that it’s been more than a year, and these tweets are quite short.
I don’t know what search you did to find a different pattern. Maybe it was just random chance that I got many more than you did.
Top was mostly showing me tweets from people that I follow, so my sense is it was filtered in a personalized way. I am not fully sure how it works, but it didn’t seem the right type of filter.
Yeah, makes sense. Although I just tried doing the “latest” sort and went through the top 40 tweets without seeing a reference to FTX/SBF.
My guess is that this filter just (unsurprisingly) shows you whatever random thing people are talking about on twitter at the moment, and it seems like the random EA-related thing of today is this, which doesn’t mention FTX.
Probably you need some longitudinal data to have this be useful.
I actually did that earlier, then realized I should clarify what you were trying to claim. I will copy the results in below, but even though they support the view that FTX was not a huge deal I want to disclaim that this methodology doesn’t seem like it actually gets at the important thing.
But anyway, my original comment text:
As a convenience sample I searched twitter for “effective altruism”. The first reference to FTX doesn’t come until tweet 36, which is a link to this. Honestly it seems mostly like a standard anti-utilitarianism complaint; it feels like FTX isn’t actually the crux.
In contrast, I see 3 e/acc-type criticisms before that, two “I like EA but this AI stuff is too weird” things (including one retweeted by Yann LeCun??), two “EA is tech-bro/not diverse” complaints and one thing about Whytham Abbey.
And this (survey discussed/criticized here):
I just tried to reproduce the Twitter datapoint. Here is the first tweet when I sort by most recent:
Most tweets are negative, mostly referring to the OpenAI thing. Among the top 10 I see three references to FTX. This continues to be quite remarkable, especially given that it’s been more than a year, and these tweets are quite short.
I don’t know what search you did to find a different pattern. Maybe it was just random chance that I got many more than you did.
I used the default sort (“Top”).
(No opinion on which is more useful; I don’t use Twitter much.)
Top was mostly showing me tweets from people that I follow, so my sense is it was filtered in a personalized way. I am not fully sure how it works, but it didn’t seem the right type of filter.
Yeah, makes sense. Although I just tried doing the “latest” sort and went through the top 40 tweets without seeing a reference to FTX/SBF.
My guess is that this filter just (unsurprisingly) shows you whatever random thing people are talking about on twitter at the moment, and it seems like the random EA-related thing of today is this, which doesn’t mention FTX.
Probably you need some longitudinal data to have this be useful.