I think these are good points, and the points made in the second half of your shortform are things I hadn’t considered.
The rest of this comment says relatively unimportant things which relate only to the first half of your shortform.
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If people read only this shortform, without reading my post or the comments there, there are two things I think they should know to help explain the perspective of the critical commenter(s):
It wasn’t just “a list of EA-related books [I’d] read” but a numbered, ranked list.
That seems more able to produce echo-chamber-like effects than merely a list, or a list with my reviews/commentary but without a numbered ranking
See also 80,000 Hours’ discussion of their observation that people have sometimes overly focused on the handful of priorities paths 80,000 Hours explicitly highlight, relative to figuring out additional paths using the principles and methodologies 80,000 Hours
I don’t immediately recall the best link for this, but can find one if someone is interested
“the authors weren’t very [demographically] diverse” seems like an understatement; in fact, all 50+ of them (some books had coauthors) were male, and I think all were white and from WEIRD societies.
And I hadn’t explicitly noticed that before the commenters pointed that out
I add “demographically” because I think there’s a substantial amount of diversity among the authors in terms of things like worldviews, but that’s not the focus for this specific conversation
I think it’s also worth highlighting that a numbered list has a certain attention-grabbing, clickbait-y quality, which I think slightly increases the “risk” of it having undue influence.
All that said, I do agree with you that the post (a) seems less likely to be remembered and have a large influence that a couple critical commenters seemed to expect, and (b) seems less likely to cause a net increase in ideological homogeneity (or things like that) than those commenters seemed to expect.
I don’t know how much karma it had when the “echo chamber” comments were made, but it finished with 70 (as I write this), outside the top 10 posts for February.
Interestingly, the strong downvote was one of the first handful of votes on the post (so it was at relatively low karma then), and the comment came around then. Though the I guess what was more relevant is how much karma/attention it’d ultimately get. But even then, I think the best guess at that point would’ve been something like 30-90 karma (based in part on only 1 of my previous posts exceeding 90 karma).
If Will MacAskill published a list of book ratings, I could understand this kind of concern (though I still think we should generally trust people not to immediately adopt Will’s opinions). Michael Aird is a fantastic Forum contributor, but he doesn’t have the same kind of influence.
Fingers crossed I’ll someday reach Will’s heights of community-destruction powers! (Using them only for good-as-defined-unilaterally-by-me, of course.)
I think these are good points, and the points made in the second half of your shortform are things I hadn’t considered.
The rest of this comment says relatively unimportant things which relate only to the first half of your shortform.
---
If people read only this shortform, without reading my post or the comments there, there are two things I think they should know to help explain the perspective of the critical commenter(s):
It wasn’t just “a list of EA-related books [I’d] read” but a numbered, ranked list.
That seems more able to produce echo-chamber-like effects than merely a list, or a list with my reviews/commentary but without a numbered ranking
See also 80,000 Hours’ discussion of their observation that people have sometimes overly focused on the handful of priorities paths 80,000 Hours explicitly highlight, relative to figuring out additional paths using the principles and methodologies 80,000 Hours
I don’t immediately recall the best link for this, but can find one if someone is interested
“the authors weren’t very [demographically] diverse” seems like an understatement; in fact, all 50+ of them (some books had coauthors) were male, and I think all were white and from WEIRD societies.
And I hadn’t explicitly noticed that before the commenters pointed that out
I add “demographically” because I think there’s a substantial amount of diversity among the authors in terms of things like worldviews, but that’s not the focus for this specific conversation
I think it’s also worth highlighting that a numbered list has a certain attention-grabbing, clickbait-y quality, which I think slightly increases the “risk” of it having undue influence.
All that said, I do agree with you that the post (a) seems less likely to be remembered and have a large influence that a couple critical commenters seemed to expect, and (b) seems less likely to cause a net increase in ideological homogeneity (or things like that) than those commenters seemed to expect.
[Some additional, even less important remarks:]
Interestingly, the strong downvote was one of the first handful of votes on the post (so it was at relatively low karma then), and the comment came around then. Though the I guess what was more relevant is how much karma/attention it’d ultimately get. But even then, I think the best guess at that point would’ve been something like 30-90 karma (based in part on only 1 of my previous posts exceeding 90 karma).
Fingers crossed I’ll someday reach Will’s heights of community-destruction powers! (Using them only for good-as-defined-unilaterally-by-me, of course.)