The math I did was I assumed the average voter strength was 3 (educated guess). I then took the karma and vote count, and figured out the percentage. This was for the LessWrong post as of a few hours ago. It was around 70% on the EA Forum using the same method.
I did say in the post that I âDid some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio.â
Another way to come to that number: if the post was exactly 50â50 up vs downvoting, I would have zero karma. As of now, weâre at 164, so it has to be well above 50% upvote rate.
Yes. Itâs not completely precise, but I do think itâs unlikely that somebody upvoted the post if they didnât either largely update or already think that Alice and Chloe had told falsehoods and misleading claims about us.
Itâs Facebook though, for my friends, not for the EA Forum. I would try to post more precise numbers here. Iâm not going to do a whole mathematical model for Facebook though. This was posted here without my permission and I also said in the post that this was a napkin math guesstimate.
I think many people (including myself and people at Lightcone) upvoted this post for signal-boosting reasons, and because it seems important to share contradicting evidence whether you agree with it or not. I really donât think upvote to downvote ratio is a reasonable estimate of âhaving changed their mindâ in this case.
I disagree, I think itâs entirely possible to upvote things you disagree with, or to upvote the post, read it and update negatively, which is presumably not what you meant here by âpeople changed their mindsâ.
I think this is a very poor way to make this estimate for most reasonable interpretations of âpeople changed their minds
â. One charitable interpretation is that you genuinely believe post upvotes to represent people who agree or have updated positively, but this would be surprising to me.
One uncharitable interpretation is that this is a way of implying a consensus where it doesnât exist, and conflating âgood epistemicsâ with âpeople who agree with meâ. (â75% of people agree with us! Iâm so grateful that EA epistemics are trustworthyâ). Doing this may create some social pressure to conform both to the majority and to people who apparently have âgood epistemicsâ, especially given this claim came alongside the link to the EA Forum post on your FB post, and your call for action at the bottom including voting behavior. This is subtle and not necessarily what you intended, but I thought worth pointing out because the effects may exist regardless of your intentions.
On the uncharitable case: I think there are other examples in the post that seem reasonable at first glance but can be interpreted or misinterpreted as similar cases of creating some kind of social pressure to take the Nonlinear position. Some of these are are raised in Yarrowâs comment.
Others include:
âHowever, if Ben pulled a Geoffrey Hinton and was able to update based on new information despite massive psychological pressure against that, that would be an act of impressive epistemic virtue. As a community, we want to make it so that people are rewarded for doing the right but hard thing, and this is one of those times.â
âEAâs high trust culture, part of what makes it great, is crumbling, and âsharing only negative information about X person/âcharityâ posts will destroy it.
âEA since FTX has trauma. Weâre infected by a cancer of distrust, suspicion, and paranoia. Frequent witch burnings. Seeing ill-intent everywhere. Forbidden questions (in EA!) Forbidden thoughts (in EA!) Weâre attacking each other instead of attacking the worldâs problems.â
Most of the rest of the section titled âSo how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?â)
âThis doesnât mean EA is rife with abuse, it just means that EA is rife with humans. Humans with strong moral emotions and poor social skills on average. We should expect a lot of conflict. We need to find a better way to deal with this. Our community has been turning on itself with increasing ferocity, and we need to find a better way to recover from FTX. Letâs do what EA does best: optimize dispassionately, embody scout mindset, and interpret people charitably.â
On the charitable case: I think itâs fairly obvious that using post upvotes is a poor way of indicating support for the Nonlinear position, because there are a lot of reasons for upvotes (or downvotes) that are unrelated to whether voters agree or disagree with the post itself.
Skimming some comments quickly (moved to footnote for ease of reading).[1]
There are obviously problems with aggregating votes which make these hard to interpret, but even if you take a looser definition, like â75% of readers now have a better net impression of Nonlinear than after Ben Paceâs postâ, this still feels very unclear to me without cherry picking comments. Iâm not expecting NL to have attempted to modelling consensus with agreevotes, but I think itâs clear even on skimming that opinions here are mixed (this doesnât discount the possibility of multiple NL staff agree/âdisagreevoting many of these posts or comments), and ceteris paribus make it more surprising that the 75% claim was made.
âI updated significantly in the direction of âNonlinear leadership has a better case for themselves than I initially thoughtâ,
âit seems likely to me that the initial post indeed was somewhat careless with fact-checking.â,
âIâm still confused about some of the fact-checking claimsâ, âI still find Chloeâs broad perspective credible and concerning (in a âthis is difficult work environment with definite potential for toxicityâ rather than âthis is outright abusive on all reasonable definitions of the wordâ). The replies by Nonlinear leadership didnât change my initial opinion here by too muchâ
I donât have time to engage with all the evidence here, but even if I came away convinced that all of the original claims provided by Ben werenât backed up, I still feel really uneasy about Nonlinear; uneasy about your work culture, uneasy about how you communicate and argue, and alarmed at how forcefully you attack people who criticise you.
From my perspective, this is between ânot responsive to the complaintâ and âevidence for the spirit of the complaintâ. It seems an overreach to call âThey told me not to spend time with my boyfriend...â a âsad, unbelievable lieâ âdiscrediting [Chloe] as a reliable source of truthâ when it is not something anyone has cited Chloe as saying. It seems incorrect to describe âadvised not to spend time with âlow value peopleââ as in âdirect contradictionâ with any of this, which instead seems to affirm that traveling with Nonlinear was conditioned on âhigh potentialâ or being among the âhighest quality peopleâ. Finally, having initially considered inviting Chloeâs boyfriend to travel with them would still be entirely consistent with later deciding not to; encouraging a visit in May would still be consistent with an overall expectation that Chloe not spend too much time with her boyfriend in general for reasons related to his perceived âqualityâ.
Whatever people think about this particular reply by Nonlinear, I hope itâs clear to most EAs that Ben Pace could have done a much better job fact-checking his allegations against Nonlinear, and in getting their side of the story.
âFor the most part, an initial reading of this post and the linked documents did have the intended effect on me of making me view many of the original claims as likely false or significantly exaggerated. But my own take is that the post would have been stronger had these changes been made prior to publishing. Curious to hear if others agree or disagree.â
âOverall, I think Nonlinear looks pretty good here. I definitely think they made some mistakes, especially adding members to their work+travel arrangements, but on the whole, I think they acted pretty reasonably and were unjustly vilified.â
I think the preliminary takeaway is that non-linear are largely innocent, but really bad at appearing that way. They derailed their own exoneration via a series of bizarre editorials, which do nothing but distract, borne out of (seemingly) righteous indignation
I disagree, I think itâs entirely possible to upvote things you disagree with, or to upvote the post, read it and update negatively, which is presumably not what you meant here by âpeople changed their mindsâ.
Or âagreed with Nonlinear before this post and still agrees nowâ. Katâs math assumes that literally everyone agreed with Benâs post until now.
The math I did was I assumed the average voter strength was 3 (educated guess). I then took the karma and vote count, and figured out the percentage. This was for the LessWrong post as of a few hours ago. It was around 70% on the EA Forum using the same method.
I did say in the post that I âDid some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio.â
Another way to come to that number: if the post was exactly 50â50 up vs downvoting, I would have zero karma. As of now, weâre at 164, so it has to be well above 50% upvote rate.
If Iâm understanding this right, you assume that if someone upvoted the post, itâs because they changed their mind?
Yes. Itâs not completely precise, but I do think itâs unlikely that somebody upvoted the post if they didnât either largely update or already think that Alice and Chloe had told falsehoods and misleading claims about us.
Itâs Facebook though, for my friends, not for the EA Forum. I would try to post more precise numbers here. Iâm not going to do a whole mathematical model for Facebook though. This was posted here without my permission and I also said in the post that this was a napkin math guesstimate.
I think many people (including myself and people at Lightcone) upvoted this post for signal-boosting reasons, and because it seems important to share contradicting evidence whether you agree with it or not. I really donât think upvote to downvote ratio is a reasonable estimate of âhaving changed their mindâ in this case.
I disagree, I think itâs entirely possible to upvote things you disagree with, or to upvote the post, read it and update negatively, which is presumably not what you meant here by âpeople changed their mindsâ.
I think this is a very poor way to make this estimate for most reasonable interpretations of âpeople changed their minds
One uncharitable interpretation is that this is a way of implying a consensus where it doesnât exist, and conflating âgood epistemicsâ with âpeople who agree with meâ. (â75% of people agree with us! Iâm so grateful that EA epistemics are trustworthyâ). Doing this may create some social pressure to conform both to the majority and to people who apparently have âgood epistemicsâ, especially given this claim came alongside the link to the EA Forum post on your FB post, and your call for action at the bottom including voting behavior. This is subtle and not necessarily what you intended, but I thought worth pointing out because the effects may exist regardless of your intentions.
On the uncharitable case:
I think there are other examples in the post that seem reasonable at first glance but can be interpreted or misinterpreted as similar cases of creating some kind of social pressure to take the Nonlinear position. Some of these are are raised in Yarrowâs comment.
Others include:
âHowever, if Ben pulled a Geoffrey Hinton and was able to update based on new information despite massive psychological pressure against that, that would be an act of impressive epistemic virtue. As a community, we want to make it so that people are rewarded for doing the right but hard thing, and this is one of those times.â
âEAâs high trust culture, part of what makes it great, is crumbling, and âsharing only negative information about X person/âcharityâ posts will destroy it.
âEA since FTX has trauma. Weâre infected by a cancer of distrust, suspicion, and paranoia. Frequent witch burnings. Seeing ill-intent everywhere. Forbidden questions (in EA!) Forbidden thoughts (in EA!)
Weâre attacking each other instead of attacking the worldâs problems.â
Most of the rest of the section titled âSo how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?â)
âThis doesnât mean EA is rife with abuse, it just means that EA is rife with humans. Humans with strong moral emotions and poor social skills on average. We should expect a lot of conflict. We need to find a better way to deal with this. Our community has been turning on itself with increasing ferocity, and we need to find a better way to recover from FTX. Letâs do what EA does best: optimize dispassionately, embody scout mindset, and interpret people charitably.â
On the charitable case:
I think itâs fairly obvious that using post upvotes is a poor way of indicating support for the Nonlinear position, because there are a lot of reasons for upvotes (or downvotes) that are unrelated to whether voters agree or disagree with the post itself.
Skimming some comments quickly (moved to footnote for ease of reading).[1]
There are obviously problems with aggregating votes which make these hard to interpret, but even if you take a looser definition, like â75% of readers now have a better net impression of Nonlinear than after Ben Paceâs postâ, this still feels very unclear to me without cherry picking comments. Iâm not expecting NL to have attempted to modelling consensus with agreevotes, but I think itâs clear even on skimming that opinions here are mixed (this doesnât discount the possibility of multiple NL staff agree/âdisagreevoting many of these posts or comments), and ceteris paribus make it more surprising that the 75% claim was made.
Yarrowâs comment
âEven if most of what Kat says is factually true, this post still gives me really bad vibes and makes me think poorly of Nonlinear.â
has 68 agreevotes and 24 disagreevotes.
Lukasâ comment:
âI updated significantly in the direction of âNonlinear leadership has a better case for themselves than I initially thoughtâ,
âit seems likely to me that the initial post indeed was somewhat careless with fact-checking.â,
âIâm still confused about some of the fact-checking claimsâ, âI still find Chloeâs broad perspective credible and concerning (in a âthis is difficult work environment with definite potential for toxicityâ rather than âthis is outright abusive on all reasonable definitions of the wordâ). The replies by Nonlinear leadership didnât change my initial opinion here by too muchâ
has 34 agree-votes and 4 disagreevotes.
Ollieâs comment:
I donât have time to engage with all the evidence here, but even if I came away convinced that all of the original claims provided by Ben werenât backed up, I still feel really uneasy about Nonlinear; uneasy about your work culture, uneasy about how you communicate and argue, and alarmed at how forcefully you attack people who criticise you.
has 78 agreevotes and 31 disagreevotes
Muireallâs comment/âspot check:
From my perspective, this is between ânot responsive to the complaintâ and âevidence for the spirit of the complaintâ. It seems an overreach to call âThey told me not to spend time with my boyfriend...â a âsad, unbelievable lieâ âdiscrediting [Chloe] as a reliable source of truthâ when it is not something anyone has cited Chloe as saying. It seems incorrect to describe âadvised not to spend time with âlow value peopleââ as in âdirect contradictionâ with any of this, which instead seems to affirm that traveling with Nonlinear was conditioned on âhigh potentialâ or being among the âhighest quality peopleâ. Finally, having initially considered inviting Chloeâs boyfriend to travel with them would still be entirely consistent with later deciding not to; encouraging a visit in May would still be consistent with an overall expectation that Chloe not spend too much time with her boyfriend in general for reasons related to his perceived âqualityâ.
has 20 agreevotes and 3 disagreevotes
Geoffreyâs comment:
Whatever people think about this particular reply by Nonlinear, I hope itâs clear to most EAs that Ben Pace could have done a much better job fact-checking his allegations against Nonlinear, and in getting their side of the story.
has 53 agreevotes and 11 disagreevotes
Vipulnaikâs comment:
âFor the most part, an initial reading of this post and the linked documents did have the intended effect on me of making me view many of the original claims as likely false or significantly exaggerated. But my own take is that the post would have been stronger had these changes been made prior to publishing. Curious to hear if others agree or disagree.â
has 24 agreevotes and 2 disagreevotes
Peterâs comment:
âPersonally, I have updated back to being relatively unconcerned about bad behaviour at Nonlinearâ
has 9 agreevotes and 15 disagreevotes
Kerryâs comment:
âto the main charges raised by Ben, this seems about as close to exonerating as one can reasonably expect to get in such casesâ
has 30 agreevotes and 26 disagreevotes
Marcusâ comment:
âOverall, I think Nonlinear looks pretty good here. I definitely think they made some mistakes, especially adding members to their work+travel arrangements, but on the whole, I think they acted pretty reasonably and were unjustly vilified.â
has 14 agreevotes and 13 disagreevotes
Johnâs comment:
I think the preliminary takeaway is that non-linear are largely innocent, but really bad at appearing that way. They derailed their own exoneration via a series of bizarre editorials, which do nothing but distract, borne out of (seemingly) righteous indignation
has 12 agreevotes and 13 disagreevotes
Or âagreed with Nonlinear before this post and still agrees nowâ. Katâs math assumes that literally everyone agreed with Benâs post until now.
âThis was posted here without my permissionâ
It was a public post an hour ago.