You are also welcome to check Twitter mentions or do other analysis of people talking publicly about EA. I don’t think this is a “journalist only” thing. I will take bets you will see a similar pattern.
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.
You are also welcome to check Twitter mentions or do other analysis of people talking publicly about EA. I don’t think this is a “journalist only” thing. I will take bets you will see a similar pattern.
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.