Forum users can, should, and do downvote posts that are bad, distracting, etc. (The trolls should soon get the message and leave.) Iâm very opposed to top-down hierarchical interventions of the sort you describe. I donât particularly think that EA spaces should host âunequivocal condemnationsâ of things that (as you rightly note) have nothing to do with EA, so Iâd also encourage people to downvote those. Itâs groupthinky and cringe, and risks being massively off-putting to the kinds of independent thinkers who value epistemic integrity and have little tolerance for groupthink or witch-hunts, however meritorious the message (or wicked the witches).
âNo one else who is seriously working on problems at the highest levels of importance openly tolerates any association with race science.â
You should look into how universities work! Academic freedom means that individual professors are free to condemn whatever views they find obnoxious. Theyâre also free to invite speakers that their colleagues find obnoxious, and sometimes they do (even, e.g., at Princeton). Their colleaguesâmany of whom work on important problems! -- must then tolerate this. Note that many of the best universities follow the Chicago Principles & Kalven Report guidance on institutional neutrality, according to which the university leadership should express no official opinion on matters that arenât directly relevant to the running of the university. The university is a community of scholars, of diverse opinions, not a political party with a shared orthodoxy.
I would much prefer for the EA community to model itself on universities than on political parties.
Again, that doesnât mean that anything goes. We already have the solution to bad contributions. Itâs called âdownvotingâ.
Effective altruism is meant to be a social movement, not a university debate. And unlike in a university setting, there are zero requirements for someone to be accurate or to have relevant expertise before posting here.
It is common here for people with little expertise in a topic to do an arbitrary amount of online research and throw out their resulting opinions. This results in something like the post where someone cited âmankind quarterlyâ for their human genetics posts, without mentioning that it was a publication with a history of white supremacy, fraud and incompetence. That issue was caught, eventually, but I guarantee you the forum is riddled with similar problems that are not caught.
For a regular topic, these loose standards may be acceptable, as it makes it easier to throw out ideas and collaborate, and the air of loose discussion makes things fun. Someone may chime in with corrections, someone may not, ultimately it is not a big deal.
But when it comes to race science, the consequences of this sort of loose, non-quality controlled discussion is worse. As the OP mentioned, you drive away minorities, and make the forum an unpleasant place to be.
But it also might convince more people to be racist. At least one white supremacist has traced their radicalisation pipeline to go through lesswrong and Slatestarcodex. That was just one person out of forty, so perhaps it was a fluke, or perhaps it wasnât. Perhaps there are a few that didnât go all the way to posting on white supremacist forums, but became just a little bit more dismissive of black people on job applications. I donât know how high the cost is, but it exists.
The way I see it, the forum should either hold back any race science related post and ensure that every claim made within it is thoroughly fact checked by relevant independent experts, or it should just ban the things. I prefer the latter, so we donât waste anybodyâs time.
In fairness, expertise is not required in all university settings. Student groups invite non-experts political figures to speak, famous politicians give speeches at graduation ceremonies etc. I am generally against universities banning student groups from having racist/âoffensive speakers, although I might allow exceptions in extreme cases.
Though I am nonetheless inclined to agree that the distinction between universities, which have as a central purpose free, objective, rational debate, and EA as a movement, which has a central purpose of carrying out a particular (already mildly controversial) ethical program, and which also, frankly, is in more danger of âbe safe for witches, becomes 90% witchâ than universities are, is important and means that EA should be less internally tolerant of speech expressing bad ideas.
You seem to be imagining the choice as being between âhost bad discussionsâ or âdo something about it via centralized hierarchical controlâ. But Iâm trying to emphasize a third option: âdo something about it via decentralized mechanisms.â (Posts with negative karma are basically invisible, after all.)
The downside of centralized responses is that it creates a precedent for people to use social/âpolitical pressure to try to impose their opinions on the whole community. Decentralization protects against that. (I donât so strongly object to the mods just deciding, on their own, to ban certain topics. What especially troubles me is social/âpolitical pressure aimed towards this end.)
As I see it, the crucial question to ask is which mechanism is more reliable: top-down control in response to social/âpolitical pressure from vocal advocates, or decentralized community judgment via âsecret ballotâ karma voting. As I see it, the primary difference between the two is that the former is more âpoliticizedâ and subject to social desirability bias. (A secondary effect of politicization is to encourage factions to fight over control of this new power.) So I think the decentralized approach is much better.
One important difference between the Forum and most other fora is the strong voteâa minority faction can use their strong votes to keep things in circulation unless the majority acts the same way. The Forum is also small enough for brigading to be a major concern.
I think encouraging people who take the view to just strong downvote race science material off the Forum poses its own set of epistemic problems for the Forum. And encouraging them to âmerelyâ downvote may not be effective if the other side is employing the strongvotes.
Maybe this proposed solution would be more viable if there were special voting rules for current topics at mod discretionâe.g., 500 karma required to vote, no strongvotes allowed? Iâm not sure, though. If all the race science folks vote and everyone else mostly stays away, the result is a false sense of community views.
Still, I support a banârace science is off topic, there are other places people can go if they want to talk about it, and these discussions cause significant harmful effects. If discussions of why the New England Patriots and New York Yankees were a scourge on humanity were causing these problems for the Forum, Iâd support a ban even though I believe those teams are. :)
Karma is not a straightforward signal of the value of contributions
âWe already have the solution to bad contributions. Itâs called âdownvotingâ.â
This statement and the idea of karma as the decentralized solution to the problems OP describes feels overconfident to me. To reference this comment, I also would push back on karma not being subject to social desirability bias (ex: someone sees a post already has relatively high karma, so theyâre more inclined to upvote it knowing that others on the Forum or in the EA community have, even if they, letâs say, havenât read the whole post).
I would argue that karma isnât a straightforward or infallible signal of âbadâ or âgoodâ contributions. As those working on the Forum have discussed in the past, karma can overrate certain topics. It can signal interest from a large fraction of the community, or âlowest-common-denominatorâ posts, rather than the value or quality of a contribution. As a current Forum staff member put it, âthe karma system is designed to show people posts which the Forum community judges as valuable for Forum readers.â
I would note, though, that karma also does not straightforwardly represent the opinions of the Forum community as a whole regarding whatâs valuable. The recent data from the 2023 EA Forum user survey shows that a raw estimate of 46.5% of those surveyed and a weighted estimate of 70.9% of those surveyed upvoted or downvoted a post or comment. Of 13.7k distinct users in a year, 4.4k of those are distinct commenters, and only 171 are distinct post authors. Engagement across users is âquite unequal,â and a small number of users create an outsized amount of comments, posts, and karma. Weighted upvotes and downvotes also mean that certain users can have more influence on karma than others.
I appreciate the karma system and its values (of which there are several!), and maybe your argument is that more people should vote and contribute to the karma system. I just wanted to point out how karma seems to currently function and the ways it might not directly correlate with value, which brings me to my next pointâŠ
Karma seems unlikely to address the concerns the OP describes
Without making a claim for or against the OPâs proposed solutions, Iâm unsurprised by their proposal for a centralized approach. One argument against relying on a mechanism like karma, particularly for discussions of race on the Forum, is that it hasnât been a solution for upholding the values or conditions I think the OP is referencing and advocating for (like not losing the potential involvement of people who are alienated by race science, engaging in broader intellectual diversity, and balancing the implications of truth-seeking with other values).
To give an example: I heard from six separate people involved in the EA community that they felt alienated by the discussions around Manifest on the Forum and chose to not engage or participate (and for a few people, that this was close to a last straw for them wanting to remain involved in EA at all). The costs and personal toll for them to engage felt too high, so they didnât add their votes or voices to the discussion. Iâve heard of this dynamic happening for different race-related discussions on the Forum in the past few years, and I suspect it leads to some perspectives being more represented on the Forum than others (even if they might be more balanced in the EA community or movement as a whole). In these situations, the high karma of some topically related comments or posts in fact seemed to further some of the problems OP describes.
I respect and agree with wanting to maintain a community that values epistemic integrity. Maybe you think that costs incurred by race science discussions on the Forum are not costly enough for the Forum to ban discussion of the topic, which is an argument to be made. I would be curious for what other ideas or proposals you would have for addressing some of the dynamics OP describes, or thoughts on the tradeoffs between allowing/âencouraging discussions of race science in EA-funded spaces and the effects that can have on the community or the movement.
If, say, a philosophy professor wants to express opinions on infanticide, that is covered under academic freedom. If they want to encourage students to drink bleach, saying it is good for their health, that is not covered.
We can and should have a strong standard of academic freedom for relevant, on-topic contributions. But race science is off topic and irrelevant to EA. Itâs closer to spam. Should the forum have no spam filter and rely on community members to downvote posts as the method of spam control?
You elsewhere link to this post as a âclear example of a post that would be banned under the rulesâ. That post includes the following argument:
People act like genetic engineering would be some sort of horrifying mad science project to create freakish mutant supermen who can shoot acid out of their eyes. But I would be pretty happy if it could just make everyone do as well as Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazim I know are mostly well-off, well-educated, and live decent lives. If genetic engineering could give those advantages to everyone, it would easily qualify as the most important piece of social progress in history, even before we started giving people the ability to shoot acid out of their eyes.
The post concludes, âEAâs existing taboos are preventing it from answering questions like these, and as new taboos are accepted, the effectiveness of the movement will continue to wain.â
You may well judge this to be wrong, as a substantive matter. But I donât understand how anyone could seriously claim that this is âoff topic and irrelevant to EA.â (The effectiveness of the movement is obviously a matter of relevant concern for EA.) Peopleâs tendency to dishonestly smuggle substantive judgments under putatively procedural grounds is precisely why Iâm so suspicious of such calls for censorship.
As an Ashkenazi Jew myself, saying âweâd like to make everyone like Ashkenazi Jewsâ feels just like a mirror image of Nazism that very clearly should not appear on the forum
Iâm not making any claims either way about that. Iâm just pointing out (contra Matthew) that it is clearly not âirrelevant spamâ. Your objections are substantive, not procedural. Folks who want to censor views they find offensive should be honest about what theyâre doing, not pretend that theyâre just filtering out viagra ads.
I think it is irrelevant, and in every context where Iâve seen it presented as âon topicâ in EA, the connection between it and any positive impact was simplistic to the point of being imaginary, while at the same time promoting dangerous viewsâjust like in the post you quoted.
Topical relevance is independent of the position one takes on a topic, so the rule youâre suggesting also implies that condemnations of race science are spam and should be deleted. (I think Iâd be fine with a consistently applied rule of that form. But itâs clearly not the OPâs position.)
Forum users can, should, and do downvote posts that are bad, distracting, etc. (The trolls should soon get the message and leave.) Iâm very opposed to top-down hierarchical interventions of the sort you describe. I donât particularly think that EA spaces should host âunequivocal condemnationsâ of things that (as you rightly note) have nothing to do with EA, so Iâd also encourage people to downvote those. Itâs groupthinky and cringe, and risks being massively off-putting to the kinds of independent thinkers who value epistemic integrity and have little tolerance for groupthink or witch-hunts, however meritorious the message (or wicked the witches).
You should look into how universities work! Academic freedom means that individual professors are free to condemn whatever views they find obnoxious. Theyâre also free to invite speakers that their colleagues find obnoxious, and sometimes they do (even, e.g., at Princeton). Their colleaguesâmany of whom work on important problems! -- must then tolerate this. Note that many of the best universities follow the Chicago Principles & Kalven Report guidance on institutional neutrality, according to which the university leadership should express no official opinion on matters that arenât directly relevant to the running of the university. The university is a community of scholars, of diverse opinions, not a political party with a shared orthodoxy.
I would much prefer for the EA community to model itself on universities than on political parties.
Again, that doesnât mean that anything goes. We already have the solution to bad contributions. Itâs called âdownvotingâ.
Effective altruism is meant to be a social movement, not a university debate. And unlike in a university setting, there are zero requirements for someone to be accurate or to have relevant expertise before posting here.
It is common here for people with little expertise in a topic to do an arbitrary amount of online research and throw out their resulting opinions. This results in something like the post where someone cited âmankind quarterlyâ for their human genetics posts, without mentioning that it was a publication with a history of white supremacy, fraud and incompetence. That issue was caught, eventually, but I guarantee you the forum is riddled with similar problems that are not caught.
For a regular topic, these loose standards may be acceptable, as it makes it easier to throw out ideas and collaborate, and the air of loose discussion makes things fun. Someone may chime in with corrections, someone may not, ultimately it is not a big deal.
But when it comes to race science, the consequences of this sort of loose, non-quality controlled discussion is worse. As the OP mentioned, you drive away minorities, and make the forum an unpleasant place to be.
But it also might convince more people to be racist. At least one white supremacist has traced their radicalisation pipeline to go through lesswrong and Slatestarcodex. That was just one person out of forty, so perhaps it was a fluke, or perhaps it wasnât. Perhaps there are a few that didnât go all the way to posting on white supremacist forums, but became just a little bit more dismissive of black people on job applications. I donât know how high the cost is, but it exists.
The way I see it, the forum should either hold back any race science related post and ensure that every claim made within it is thoroughly fact checked by relevant independent experts, or it should just ban the things. I prefer the latter, so we donât waste anybodyâs time.
In fairness, expertise is not required in all university settings. Student groups invite non-experts political figures to speak, famous politicians give speeches at graduation ceremonies etc. I am generally against universities banning student groups from having racist/âoffensive speakers, although I might allow exceptions in extreme cases.
Though I am nonetheless inclined to agree that the distinction between universities, which have as a central purpose free, objective, rational debate, and EA as a movement, which has a central purpose of carrying out a particular (already mildly controversial) ethical program, and which also, frankly, is in more danger of âbe safe for witches, becomes 90% witchâ than universities are, is important and means that EA should be less internally tolerant of speech expressing bad ideas.
You seem to be imagining the choice as being between âhost bad discussionsâ or âdo something about it via centralized hierarchical controlâ. But Iâm trying to emphasize a third option: âdo something about it via decentralized mechanisms.â (Posts with negative karma are basically invisible, after all.)
The downside of centralized responses is that it creates a precedent for people to use social/âpolitical pressure to try to impose their opinions on the whole community. Decentralization protects against that. (I donât so strongly object to the mods just deciding, on their own, to ban certain topics. What especially troubles me is social/âpolitical pressure aimed towards this end.)
As I see it, the crucial question to ask is which mechanism is more reliable: top-down control in response to social/âpolitical pressure from vocal advocates, or decentralized community judgment via âsecret ballotâ karma voting. As I see it, the primary difference between the two is that the former is more âpoliticizedâ and subject to social desirability bias. (A secondary effect of politicization is to encourage factions to fight over control of this new power.) So I think the decentralized approach is much better.
One important difference between the Forum and most other fora is the strong voteâa minority faction can use their strong votes to keep things in circulation unless the majority acts the same way. The Forum is also small enough for brigading to be a major concern.
I think encouraging people who take the view to just strong downvote race science material off the Forum poses its own set of epistemic problems for the Forum. And encouraging them to âmerelyâ downvote may not be effective if the other side is employing the strongvotes.
Maybe this proposed solution would be more viable if there were special voting rules for current topics at mod discretionâe.g., 500 karma required to vote, no strongvotes allowed? Iâm not sure, though. If all the race science folks vote and everyone else mostly stays away, the result is a false sense of community views.
Still, I support a banârace science is off topic, there are other places people can go if they want to talk about it, and these discussions cause significant harmful effects. If discussions of why the New England Patriots and New York Yankees were a scourge on humanity were causing these problems for the Forum, Iâd support a ban even though I believe those teams are. :)
Karma is not a straightforward signal of the value of contributions
This statement and the idea of karma as the decentralized solution to the problems OP describes feels overconfident to me. To reference this comment, I also would push back on karma not being subject to social desirability bias (ex: someone sees a post already has relatively high karma, so theyâre more inclined to upvote it knowing that others on the Forum or in the EA community have, even if they, letâs say, havenât read the whole post).
I would argue that karma isnât a straightforward or infallible signal of âbadâ or âgoodâ contributions. As those working on the Forum have discussed in the past, karma can overrate certain topics. It can signal interest from a large fraction of the community, or âlowest-common-denominatorâ posts, rather than the value or quality of a contribution. As a current Forum staff member put it, âthe karma system is designed to show people posts which the Forum community judges as valuable for Forum readers.â
I would note, though, that karma also does not straightforwardly represent the opinions of the Forum community as a whole regarding whatâs valuable. The recent data from the 2023 EA Forum user survey shows that a raw estimate of 46.5% of those surveyed and a weighted estimate of 70.9% of those surveyed upvoted or downvoted a post or comment. Of 13.7k distinct users in a year, 4.4k of those are distinct commenters, and only 171 are distinct post authors. Engagement across users is âquite unequal,â and a small number of users create an outsized amount of comments, posts, and karma. Weighted upvotes and downvotes also mean that certain users can have more influence on karma than others.
I appreciate the karma system and its values (of which there are several!), and maybe your argument is that more people should vote and contribute to the karma system. I just wanted to point out how karma seems to currently function and the ways it might not directly correlate with value, which brings me to my next pointâŠ
Karma seems unlikely to address the concerns the OP describes
Without making a claim for or against the OPâs proposed solutions, Iâm unsurprised by their proposal for a centralized approach. One argument against relying on a mechanism like karma, particularly for discussions of race on the Forum, is that it hasnât been a solution for upholding the values or conditions I think the OP is referencing and advocating for (like not losing the potential involvement of people who are alienated by race science, engaging in broader intellectual diversity, and balancing the implications of truth-seeking with other values).
To give an example: I heard from six separate people involved in the EA community that they felt alienated by the discussions around Manifest on the Forum and chose to not engage or participate (and for a few people, that this was close to a last straw for them wanting to remain involved in EA at all). The costs and personal toll for them to engage felt too high, so they didnât add their votes or voices to the discussion. Iâve heard of this dynamic happening for different race-related discussions on the Forum in the past few years, and I suspect it leads to some perspectives being more represented on the Forum than others (even if they might be more balanced in the EA community or movement as a whole). In these situations, the high karma of some topically related comments or posts in fact seemed to further some of the problems OP describes.
I respect and agree with wanting to maintain a community that values epistemic integrity. Maybe you think that costs incurred by race science discussions on the Forum are not costly enough for the Forum to ban discussion of the topic, which is an argument to be made. I would be curious for what other ideas or proposals you would have for addressing some of the dynamics OP describes, or thoughts on the tradeoffs between allowing/âencouraging discussions of race science in EA-funded spaces and the effects that can have on the community or the movement.
Academic freedom is not and has never been meant to protect professors on topics that have no relevance to their discipline: âTeachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.â
If, say, a philosophy professor wants to express opinions on infanticide, that is covered under academic freedom. If they want to encourage students to drink bleach, saying it is good for their health, that is not covered.
We can and should have a strong standard of academic freedom for relevant, on-topic contributions. But race science is off topic and irrelevant to EA. Itâs closer to spam. Should the forum have no spam filter and rely on community members to downvote posts as the method of spam control?
You elsewhere link to this post as a âclear example of a post that would be banned under the rulesâ. That post includes the following argument:
The post concludes, âEAâs existing taboos are preventing it from answering questions like these, and as new taboos are accepted, the effectiveness of the movement will continue to wain.â
You may well judge this to be wrong, as a substantive matter. But I donât understand how anyone could seriously claim that this is âoff topic and irrelevant to EA.â (The effectiveness of the movement is obviously a matter of relevant concern for EA.) Peopleâs tendency to dishonestly smuggle substantive judgments under putatively procedural grounds is precisely why Iâm so suspicious of such calls for censorship.
As an Ashkenazi Jew myself, saying âweâd like to make everyone like Ashkenazi Jewsâ feels just like a mirror image of Nazism that very clearly should not appear on the forum
Iâm not making any claims either way about that. Iâm just pointing out (contra Matthew) that it is clearly not âirrelevant spamâ. Your objections are substantive, not procedural. Folks who want to censor views they find offensive should be honest about what theyâre doing, not pretend that theyâre just filtering out viagra ads.
I think it is irrelevant, and in every context where Iâve seen it presented as âon topicâ in EA, the connection between it and any positive impact was simplistic to the point of being imaginary, while at the same time promoting dangerous viewsâjust like in the post you quoted.
Topical relevance is independent of the position one takes on a topic, so the rule youâre suggesting also implies that condemnations of race science are spam and should be deleted. (I think Iâd be fine with a consistently applied rule of that form. But itâs clearly not the OPâs position.)