With the first part, I’m not sure what would you imagine as the alternative—having access to evaluators google drive so you can count how much time they spent writing? The time estimate is something like an estimate how much it can take for volunteer evaluators—if all you need is in the order of 5m you are either really fast or not explaining your decisions.
I expect much more time of experts will be wasted in forum discussions you propose.
I think in a forum discussion, it’s relatively easy to see how much someone is participating in the discussion, and to get a sense of how much time they spent on stuff. I am not super confident that less time would be wasted in the forum discussions I am proposing, but I am confident that I and others would notice if lots of people’s time was wasted, which is something I am not at all confident about for your proposal and which strongly limits the downside for the forum case.
On the contrary: on slack, it is relatively easy to see the upper bound of attention spent. On the forum, you should look not on just the time spent to write comments, but also on the time and attention of people not posting. I would be quite interested how much time for example CEA+FHI+GPI employees spend reading the forum, in aggregate (I guess you can technically count this.)
*nods* I do agree that you, as the person organizing the project, will have some sense of how much time has been spent, but I think it won’t be super easy for you to communicate that knowledge, and it won’t by default help other people get better at estimating the time spent on things like this. It also requires everyone watching to trust you to accurately report those numbers, which I do think I do, but I don’t think everyone necessarily has reason to.
I do think on Slack you also have to take into account the time of all the people not posting, and while I do think that there will be more time spent just reading and not writing on the EA Forum, I generally think the time spent reading is usually worth it for people individually (and importantly people are under no commitment to read things on the EA Forum, whereas the volunteers involved here would have a commitment to their role, making it more likely that it will turn out to be net-negative for them, though I recognize that there are some caveats where sometimes there are controversial topics that cause a lot of people to pay attention to make sure that nothing explodes).
With the first part, I’m not sure what would you imagine as the alternative—having access to evaluators google drive so you can count how much time they spent writing? The time estimate is something like an estimate how much it can take for volunteer evaluators—if all you need is in the order of 5m you are either really fast or not explaining your decisions.
I expect much more time of experts will be wasted in forum discussions you propose.
I think in a forum discussion, it’s relatively easy to see how much someone is participating in the discussion, and to get a sense of how much time they spent on stuff. I am not super confident that less time would be wasted in the forum discussions I am proposing, but I am confident that I and others would notice if lots of people’s time was wasted, which is something I am not at all confident about for your proposal and which strongly limits the downside for the forum case.
On the contrary: on slack, it is relatively easy to see the upper bound of attention spent. On the forum, you should look not on just the time spent to write comments, but also on the time and attention of people not posting. I would be quite interested how much time for example CEA+FHI+GPI employees spend reading the forum, in aggregate (I guess you can technically count this.)
*nods* I do agree that you, as the person organizing the project, will have some sense of how much time has been spent, but I think it won’t be super easy for you to communicate that knowledge, and it won’t by default help other people get better at estimating the time spent on things like this. It also requires everyone watching to trust you to accurately report those numbers, which I do think I do, but I don’t think everyone necessarily has reason to.
I do think on Slack you also have to take into account the time of all the people not posting, and while I do think that there will be more time spent just reading and not writing on the EA Forum, I generally think the time spent reading is usually worth it for people individually (and importantly people are under no commitment to read things on the EA Forum, whereas the volunteers involved here would have a commitment to their role, making it more likely that it will turn out to be net-negative for them, though I recognize that there are some caveats where sometimes there are controversial topics that cause a lot of people to pay attention to make sure that nothing explodes).