This resonated with me. I get some internal strife and anxiety about posting on here. I think it’s a combo of caring a lot about the kind of things being discussed here (suffering, global poverty, animal welfare, xrisk), and having thoughts about these things, and wanting to share them, but then finding the negative incentive of [being criticised in the comments] outweighs the positive incentives of [temporary status amongst strangers on the internet], plus some sort of [happiness at being able to express myself].
It seems for me the emotional drive to post has to outweigh the emotional drive to not post, and this sometimes only happens on very emotionally charged subjects, such as criticism of EA or the various recent scandals. I don’t think I’m alone in this, and I would cite for evidence the comment count on articles about scandals in the community, vs on other articles.
I don’t think the EA forum is unique in having this kind of not-great incentive structure. Some ways the EA forum might be worse than most internet forums:
The featured posts here are really high quality. Of course, that’s a good thing. But if all the frontpage posts are by someone with a phd, and the the post is a write up of their research, and they’ve been paid by an EA organisation so they can do that research full time and put many hours into making a quality post… it can be easy to compare what you were going to write against that, and be disappointed.
There’s a strong culture of searching for truth and encouraging good epistemic. Again, this is a very good thing, and I wouldn’t change this. But it can seem that unless your post is long and detailed, and has citations you’ll get criticised for it.
And some ways the EA forum is better:
People go out of their way to say thanks for the article, or praise the writing. This seems to happen a lot when someone is actually criticising; there’s almost a norm of including a clunky ‘thanks for writing this, I like some things but....’ which I actually quite like.
There are stronger norms of not being needlessly rude. The mod team seem to be more on it than e.g. a reddit forum. I’m guessing the ratio of mods/posters here is higher than on reddit, plus the mods here get paid to do it.
The EA forum team seem to actively promote posting not-perfect stuff, there’s the Shortform option, the option to share a draft with other users, the Draft Amnesty day, and workshops at EAG events on writing EA forum posts
I slightly worry the EA forum could become a place where only people who have a paid job at an EA org, or who enjoy disagreement, post. Nothing against enjoying disagreement, and it could be something to cultivate as part of developing a ‘Scout Mindset’, but I think there’s people that are more sensitive to disagreement that might be put off posting.
More food for thought: the 1% rule; I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from it.
This resonated with me. I get some internal strife and anxiety about posting on here. I think it’s a combo of caring a lot about the kind of things being discussed here (suffering, global poverty, animal welfare, xrisk), and having thoughts about these things, and wanting to share them, but then finding the negative incentive of [being criticised in the comments] outweighs the positive incentives of [temporary status amongst strangers on the internet], plus some sort of [happiness at being able to express myself].
It seems for me the emotional drive to post has to outweigh the emotional drive to not post, and this sometimes only happens on very emotionally charged subjects, such as criticism of EA or the various recent scandals. I don’t think I’m alone in this, and I would cite for evidence the comment count on articles about scandals in the community, vs on other articles.
I don’t think the EA forum is unique in having this kind of not-great incentive structure. Some ways the EA forum might be worse than most internet forums:
The featured posts here are really high quality. Of course, that’s a good thing. But if all the frontpage posts are by someone with a phd, and the the post is a write up of their research, and they’ve been paid by an EA organisation so they can do that research full time and put many hours into making a quality post… it can be easy to compare what you were going to write against that, and be disappointed.
There’s a strong culture of searching for truth and encouraging good epistemic. Again, this is a very good thing, and I wouldn’t change this. But it can seem that unless your post is long and detailed, and has citations you’ll get criticised for it.
And some ways the EA forum is better:
People go out of their way to say thanks for the article, or praise the writing. This seems to happen a lot when someone is actually criticising; there’s almost a norm of including a clunky ‘thanks for writing this, I like some things but....’ which I actually quite like.
There are stronger norms of not being needlessly rude. The mod team seem to be more on it than e.g. a reddit forum. I’m guessing the ratio of mods/posters here is higher than on reddit, plus the mods here get paid to do it.
There’s a monthly cash prize competition for forum posts
The EA forum team seem to actively promote posting not-perfect stuff, there’s the Shortform option, the option to share a draft with other users, the Draft Amnesty day, and workshops at EAG events on writing EA forum posts
I slightly worry the EA forum could become a place where only people who have a paid job at an EA org, or who enjoy disagreement, post. Nothing against enjoying disagreement, and it could be something to cultivate as part of developing a ‘Scout Mindset’, but I think there’s people that are more sensitive to disagreement that might be put off posting.
More food for thought: the 1% rule; I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from it.
edit: added penultimate paragraph.