Not only that, it incentivizes detractors to go back and downvote your other stuff as well. When I was coming out against HBD, older things I had written also got downvoted (and I lost voting power). This doesn’t make sense on other forums but here it’s perfectly reasonable since with karma you’re not just deciding “how good is this post/comment?” but also “who gets voting power?”. So if you want the forum to remain dominated by your ingroup, better upvote your ingroup’s posts/comments while downvoting everything by the outgroup. Not necessarily because you want to, but just because that’s how the system is set up.
The only reason why I don’t go full disagree is because I could see a system akin to “liquid democracy” where you can give proxies or where once in a while we vote on which people will have more voting power for the next term.
In any case, we should expect some heavy survivorship bias here in favor of the status-quo since EAs or potential EAs who get turned off by the karma system will either fully or largely leave the forum (e.g. me).
More generally, perhaps it would be valuable to publicize the voting guide better? E.g. every time my mouse hovers over a voting widget, a random voting guideline could pop up, so over time I would learn all of the guidelines. @Sarah Cheng
I think the risk of groupthink death spirals is real, and I suspect I’ve been on the receiving end of it. “With great power comes great responsibility.”
In any case, we should expect some heavy survivorship bias here in favor of the status-quo since EAs or potential EAs who get turned off by the karma system will either fully or largely leave the forum (e.g. me).
Do you post on the EA subreddit? Everyone’s vote power is equal there:
IMO, the discussion quality on the subreddit is not great. I’m unsure if that’s because it lacks scaled vote power, or simply because it has fewer serious EAs and more random redditors. I wonder what would happen if serious EAs made a dedicated effort to post on the subreddit, and bring the random redditors up to speed more etc.
I appreciate the suggestion! :) I’ve added it to our backlog. My current guess is that, given the limited resources we have to spend, this probably won’t meet our bar for being cost-effective enough to implement.
Up to you. But I think voting does a tremendous amount to influence the forum’s culture. Nudging people towards voting wisely, and talking about how to vote, seems pretty high-leverage to me. Right now, my sense is we’re in a bit of a bad place, where people take karma scores too seriously given the low amount of thought that goes into them.
Do you post on the EA subreddit? Everyone’s vote power is equal there:
Yes, I do post there. It’s...fine. I don’t exactly love it, but it at least doesn’t give me an active feeling of disgust every time I use it (which the forum does).
Retributive downvoting appears to be a bannable offense, according to the forum guide:
This is unenforceable. In fact that whole section is unenforceable:
Additionally, please avoid:
Asking your friends or coworkers to vote on a post, especially if you might be biased (e.g. because the post is criticizing your work, or because your friend wrote the post)
We think sharing a post in a public channel and saying “Hey, I quite like this post that summarizes my organization’s work is cool, check it out” is fine. If you see a message like this, evaluate the post on its own merits; don’t just go upvote because someone you know wrote it.
But posting — or even worse, saying this on a call — “Hey, everyone, please go upvote this post that our organization just shared, we need everyone on the Forum to see it” is bad. Even worse is asking people to downvote criticism of something you work on.
Deferring entirely to someone else (your vote should be your own)
Additionally, please try to judge each post or comment on its own merits; don’t just vote based on whether or not you like the poster’s other activity.
Other than that, you can vote using your preferred criteria. Here are our suggestions:
Action
If…
Not if…
Strong-upvote
Reading this will help people do good.
You learned something important.
You think many more people might benefit from seeing it.
You want to signal that this sort of behavior adds a lot of value.
“I agree and want others to see this opinion first.”
Upvote
You think it adds something to the conversation, or you found it useful.
People should imitate some aspect of the behavior in the future.
You want others to see it.
You just generally like it.
“Oh, I like the poster, they’re cool.”
Downvote
There’s a relevant error.
The comment or post didn’t add to the conversation, and maybe actually distracted.
“There are grammatical errors in this comment.”
Strong-downvote
It contains many factual errors and bad reasoning
It’s manipulative or breaks our norms in significant ways (consider reporting it)
I agree that if everyone followed these norms there wouldn’t be a problem, however they aren’t, and there isn’t a way to make them. Worse, the incentives work against a lot of these norms:
If someone is spreading opinions you disagree with, then the karma system makes strong-downvoting them an excellent way to hinder their ability to do so. If your friend makes mediocre posts but he also upvotes all your mediocre posts, then upvoting them is a great way to ensure your posts get more exposure. If an HBDer sees me sharing studies that undermine HBD, then a great way to lessen my ability to do so is downvote other posts and comments I’ve written (and downvote the posts and comments I write in the future too). Worst case scenario, my reach decreases. Best case scenario, I start to self-censor or leave the forum (aka what happened).
Voting is anonymous, so unless you “mass” vote it will remain undetected. It’s good that they have written down these norms, but it’ll barely do anything even if it was better known. The karma system simply works against it. It’s not enough to say “pretty-please don’t act on the bad incentives we’ve created”, you have to actually give people good incentives.
We will try to maximally protect privacy and pseudonymity, as long as it does not seriously interfere with our ability to enforce important norms on the Forum.
This forum is fairly small. It seems relatively feasible for the admins to enforce norms manually.
But in any case, I encourage you to prove me wrong. I encourage you to reach out to the admins, and then report back here when nothing useful happens, as you seem to be predicting.
Voting activity is generally private (even admins don’t know who voted on what), but if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting (e.g. by mass-downvoting many of a different user’s comments and posts), we reserve the right to check what account is doing this.
That’s why I said:
Voting is anonymous, so unless you “mass” vote it will remain undetected.
The examples I gave—downvoting based on opinion not content, downvoting based on ideology, upvoting your ingroup, upvoting because they’re you friends—are all things that can be done while staying anonymous.
But in any case, I encourage you to prove me wrong. I encourage you to reach out to the admins, and then report back here when nothing useful happens, as you seem to be predicting.
You think I haven’t done that? I even send a comment to Ben West publicly and people downvoted me for it:
The examples I gave—downvoting based on opinion not content, downvoting based on ideology, upvoting your ingroup, upvoting because they’re you friends—are all things that can be done while staying anonymous.
Your initial complaint was mass-downvoting, which is explicitly called out in the FAQ (based on your own quote!) as something the admins are willing to de-anonymize for, no?
You think I haven’t done that?
If you had done it, I would expect your initial comment to contain something along the lines of: “I reached out privately to the admins, through standard channels, to complain about mass-downvoting. Despite the forum guidelines, they didn’t do anything. Their stated reason was X.”
Not necessarily because you want to, but just because that’s how the system is set up.
I used a personal example, but the complaint was about people being incentivized to downvote (past and future) stuff by the outgroup while upvoting the ingroup, whether or not it’s “mass” voting:
it incentivizes detractors to go back and downvote your other stuff as well. [...]
So if you want the forum to remain dominated by your ingroup, better upvote your ingroup’s posts/comments
which I then expanded on with examples like:
If someone is spreading opinions you disagree with, then the karma system makes strong-downvoting them an excellent way to hinder their ability to do so. If your friend makes mediocre posts but he also upvotes all your mediocre posts, then upvoting them is a great way to ensure your posts get more exposure.
Not only that, it incentivizes detractors to go back and downvote your other stuff as well. When I was coming out against HBD, older things I had written also got downvoted (and I lost voting power).
This doesn’t make sense on other forums but here it’s perfectly reasonable since with karma you’re not just deciding “how good is this post/comment?” but also “who gets voting power?”. So if you want the forum to remain dominated by your ingroup, better upvote your ingroup’s posts/comments while downvoting everything by the outgroup. Not necessarily because you want to, but just because that’s how the system is set up.
The only reason why I don’t go full disagree is because I could see a system akin to “liquid democracy” where you can give proxies or where once in a while we vote on which people will have more voting power for the next term.
In any case, we should expect some heavy survivorship bias here in favor of the status-quo since EAs or potential EAs who get turned off by the karma system will either fully or largely leave the forum (e.g. me).
Retributive downvoting appears to be a bannable offense, according to the forum guide:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yND9aGJgobm5dEXqF/guide-to-norms-on-the-forum#Voting_norms
I suggest you take your case up with the admins.
More generally, perhaps it would be valuable to publicize the voting guide better? E.g. every time my mouse hovers over a voting widget, a random voting guideline could pop up, so over time I would learn all of the guidelines. @Sarah Cheng
I think the risk of groupthink death spirals is real, and I suspect I’ve been on the receiving end of it. “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Do you post on the EA subreddit? Everyone’s vote power is equal there:
https://reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/
IMO, the discussion quality on the subreddit is not great. I’m unsure if that’s because it lacks scaled vote power, or simply because it has fewer serious EAs and more random redditors. I wonder what would happen if serious EAs made a dedicated effort to post on the subreddit, and bring the random redditors up to speed more etc.
I appreciate the suggestion! :) I’ve added it to our backlog. My current guess is that, given the limited resources we have to spend, this probably won’t meet our bar for being cost-effective enough to implement.
Up to you. But I think voting does a tremendous amount to influence the forum’s culture. Nudging people towards voting wisely, and talking about how to vote, seems pretty high-leverage to me. Right now, my sense is we’re in a bit of a bad place, where people take karma scores too seriously given the low amount of thought that goes into them.
Yes, I do post there. It’s...fine. I don’t exactly love it, but it at least doesn’t give me an active feeling of disgust every time I use it (which the forum does).
This is unenforceable. In fact that whole section is unenforceable:
I agree that if everyone followed these norms there wouldn’t be a problem, however they aren’t, and there isn’t a way to make them. Worse, the incentives work against a lot of these norms:
If someone is spreading opinions you disagree with, then the karma system makes strong-downvoting them an excellent way to hinder their ability to do so.
If your friend makes mediocre posts but he also upvotes all your mediocre posts, then upvoting them is a great way to ensure your posts get more exposure.
If an HBDer sees me sharing studies that undermine HBD, then a great way to lessen my ability to do so is downvote other posts and comments I’ve written (and downvote the posts and comments I write in the future too). Worst case scenario, my reach decreases. Best case scenario, I start to self-censor or leave the forum (aka what happened).
Voting is anonymous, so unless you “mass” vote it will remain undetected. It’s good that they have written down these norms, but it’ll barely do anything even if it was better known. The karma system simply works against it. It’s not enough to say “pretty-please don’t act on the bad incentives we’ve created”, you have to actually give people good incentives.
I don’t believe that is true for admins:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yND9aGJgobm5dEXqF/guide-to-norms-on-the-forum
This forum is fairly small. It seems relatively feasible for the admins to enforce norms manually.
But in any case, I encourage you to prove me wrong. I encourage you to reach out to the admins, and then report back here when nothing useful happens, as you seem to be predicting.
They literally say so:
That’s why I said:
The examples I gave—downvoting based on opinion not content, downvoting based on ideology, upvoting your ingroup, upvoting because they’re you friends—are all things that can be done while staying anonymous.
You think I haven’t done that? I even send a comment to Ben West publicly and people downvoted me for it:
Your initial complaint was mass-downvoting, which is explicitly called out in the FAQ (based on your own quote!) as something the admins are willing to de-anonymize for, no?
If you had done it, I would expect your initial comment to contain something along the lines of: “I reached out privately to the admins, through standard channels, to complain about mass-downvoting. Despite the forum guidelines, they didn’t do anything. Their stated reason was X.”
My complaint was the incentive structure:
I used a personal example, but the complaint was about people being incentivized to downvote (past and future) stuff by the outgroup while upvoting the ingroup, whether or not it’s “mass” voting:
which I then expanded on with examples like:
I had done it, see: my screenshotted comment.