I do remember this post having around 20 net upvotes about a day ago.
But some changes over time can also just be noise (if some people have strong-votes). Also, timezone correlations could also be an explanation (it would not surprise me if the US is more free-speech than Europe). Or there could be changes in the way the article gets found by different people. Or people change their vote after they changed their mind over the article.
Or the article gets posted in a discord channel, without any intentions or instructions of brigading.
Of course its still possible that the vote changes have some sketchy origin, and I am not against the forum moderators investigating these patterns.
This post is on a controversial topic, so lots of votes in both directions are to be expected.
Noise is certainly a viable alternative explanation, which is why I limited myself to “raises some concerns about possible brigading.”[1]
I don’t think a mod investigation would be a good use of time here. The mods have pointed out a past influx of new accounts triggered by this topic being hot, along with possible non-representative voting patterns on this topic before. In contrast to events at the time of the Bostrom affair, it would be much harder to rule in / rule out irregular voting with confidence where the activity volume is much smaller.
However, since people do cite to Forum upvotes/downvotes as evidence of broader EA sentiment (whether justified or not), I think it’s fair to point vote distortion out as a possibility.
I note that there is a range of opinions about what count as brigading. There are, for instance, places on Reddit where voting in the original subreddit if you learn about crossposted content from a different subreddit is counted as brigading. That is not my own view (although I understand why Reddit communities have operationalized it that way for administrability reasons). However, I do think it is possible for brigading to occur without specific intent or instruction. In particular, people whose involvement with the Forum is limited to threads on their pet issue and who are otherwise uninvolved with EA should not be voting in my opinion.
I do remember this post having around 20 net upvotes about a day ago.
But some changes over time can also just be noise (if some people have strong-votes). Also, timezone correlations could also be an explanation (it would not surprise me if the US is more free-speech than Europe). Or there could be changes in the way the article gets found by different people. Or people change their vote after they changed their mind over the article. Or the article gets posted in a discord channel, without any intentions or instructions of brigading. Of course its still possible that the vote changes have some sketchy origin, and I am not against the forum moderators investigating these patterns.
This post is on a controversial topic, so lots of votes in both directions are to be expected.
Noise is certainly a viable alternative explanation, which is why I limited myself to “raises some concerns about possible brigading.”[1]
I don’t think a mod investigation would be a good use of time here. The mods have pointed out a past influx of new accounts triggered by this topic being hot, along with possible non-representative voting patterns on this topic before. In contrast to events at the time of the Bostrom affair, it would be much harder to rule in / rule out irregular voting with confidence where the activity volume is much smaller.
However, since people do cite to Forum upvotes/downvotes as evidence of broader EA sentiment (whether justified or not), I think it’s fair to point vote distortion out as a possibility.
I note that there is a range of opinions about what count as brigading. There are, for instance, places on Reddit where voting in the original subreddit if you learn about crossposted content from a different subreddit is counted as brigading. That is not my own view (although I understand why Reddit communities have operationalized it that way for administrability reasons). However, I do think it is possible for brigading to occur without specific intent or instruction. In particular, people whose involvement with the Forum is limited to threads on their pet issue and who are otherwise uninvolved with EA should not be voting in my opinion.