Downvoted because I think “more active on the forum for a longer time” may be a good proxy for “well informed about what other forum posters think” (and even that’s doubtful), but is a bad proxy for “well informed about reality”.
Ok, this comment is ideological (but really interesting).
This comment is pushing on a lot of things, please don’t take any of this personally .
(or take it personally if you’re one of the top people listed here and fighting me!)
So below is the actual list of top karma users.
BIG CAVEATS:
I am happy to ruthlessly, mercilessly attack, the top ranked person there, on substantial issues like on their vision of the forum. Like, karma means nothing in the real world (but for onlookers, my choice is wildly not career optimal[1]).
Some people listed are sort of dumb-dumbs.
This list is missing the vast majority (95%) of the talented EAs and people just contributing in a public way, much less those who don’t post or blog.
The ranking and composition could be drastically improved
But, yes, contra you, I would say that this list of people do have better and reasonable views of reality than the average person and probably average EA.
More generally, this is positively correlated with karma.
Secondly, importantly, we don’t need EAs on the forum to have the best “view of reality”.
We need EAs to have the best views of generating impact, such as creating good meta systems, avoiding traps, driving good culture, allocating funding correctly, attracting real outside talent, and appointing EAs and others to be impactful in reality.
Another issue is that there isn’t really a good way to resolve “beef” between EAs right now.
Funders and other senior EAs, in the most prosocial, prudent way, are wary of this bad behavior and consequent effects (lock-in). So it’s really not career optimal to just randomly fight and be disagreeable.
I think I would disagree with this. At the very least, I think people on the list write pretty useful posts and comments.
Still, the ranking doesn’t really match who I think consistently makes the most valuable comments or posts, and I think it reflects volume too much. I’m probably as high as I am mainly because of a large number of comments that got 1 or 2 regular upvotes (I’ve made the 5th most comments among EA Forum users).
(I don’t think people should be penalized for making posts or comments that don’t get much or any votes; this would discourage writing on technical or niche topics, and commenting on posts that aren’t getting much attention anymore or never did. This is why I proposed dividing total karma by number of votes on your comments/posts, rather than dividing total karma by the number of your comments/posts.)
This list is missing the vast majority (95%) of the talented EAs and people just contributing in a public way, much less those who don’t post or blog.
I agree.
The ranking and composition could be drastically improved
I agree that they could probably be improved substantially. I’m not sure about “drastically”, but I think “substantially” is enough to do something about it.
I’m not quite sure I follow your reasoning. I explicitly say in the second paragraph of my comment that “right now sheer quantity is awarded more than ideal”.
You said: “Downvoted because I think “more active on the forum for a longer time” may be a good proxy for “well informed about what other forum posters think” (and even that’s doubtful), but is a bad proxy for “well informed about reality”.”
I pointed out that the second paragraph in my comment made clear that I think that quantity of comments/posts (what you call “more active on the forum for a longer time”) is a distorting factor. Thus, we seem to be in agreement on this point, which made your objection/downvote unclear to me.
Your new comment doesn’t seem to address 2, but makes an unrelated point.
This wasn’t an unrelated point, but I’ll try to make my argument more explicit.
Your original comment said:
Personally I’d rather want the difference to be bigger [than having 3 times the voting power], since I find it much more informative what the best-informed users think.
and your second paragraph implied that by “best-informed” you still mean something that’s measurable from their forum stats.
What I’m saying is this is not a good idea, regardless of whether you mean the current or an “improved” metric, since being actually best informed probably has close to nothing to do with any of those, and you’ll just end up amplifying unwanted effects.
More generally, the idea that we can objectively and consistently judge which users are most useful to all other users—or which will have a predictably higher impact if their votes are listened to—seems wrong to me. The prioritisation ideas that we apply to e.g. global health interventions may only be very weakly applicable to discourse.
Downvoted because I think “more active on the forum for a longer time” may be a good proxy for “well informed about what other forum posters think” (and even that’s doubtful), but is a bad proxy for “well informed about reality”.
Ok, this comment is ideological (but really interesting).
This comment is pushing on a lot of things, please don’t take any of this personally .
(or take it personally if you’re one of the top people listed here and fighting me!)
So below is the actual list of top karma users.
BIG CAVEATS:
I am happy to ruthlessly, mercilessly attack, the top ranked person there, on substantial issues like on their vision of the forum. Like, karma means nothing in the real world (but for onlookers, my choice is wildly not career optimal[1]).
Some people listed are sort of dumb-dumbs.
This list is missing the vast majority (95%) of the talented EAs and people just contributing in a public way, much less those who don’t post or blog.
The ranking and composition could be drastically improved
But, yes, contra you, I would say that this list of people do have better and reasonable views of reality than the average person and probably average EA.
More generally, this is positively correlated with karma.
Secondly, importantly, we don’t need EAs on the forum to have the best “view of reality”.
We need EAs to have the best views of generating impact, such as creating good meta systems, avoiding traps, driving good culture, allocating funding correctly, attracting real outside talent, and appointing EAs and others to be impactful in reality.
Another issue is that there isn’t really a good way to resolve “beef” between EAs right now.
Funders and other senior EAs, in the most prosocial, prudent way, are wary of this bad behavior and consequent effects (lock-in). So it’s really not career optimal to just randomly fight and be disagreeable.
I think I would disagree with this. At the very least, I think people on the list write pretty useful posts and comments.
Still, the ranking doesn’t really match who I think consistently makes the most valuable comments or posts, and I think it reflects volume too much. I’m probably as high as I am mainly because of a large number of comments that got 1 or 2 regular upvotes (I’ve made the 5th most comments among EA Forum users).
(I don’t think people should be penalized for making posts or comments that don’t get much or any votes; this would discourage writing on technical or niche topics, and commenting on posts that aren’t getting much attention anymore or never did. This is why I proposed dividing total karma by number of votes on your comments/posts, rather than dividing total karma by the number of your comments/posts.)
I agree.
I agree that they could probably be improved substantially. I’m not sure about “drastically”, but I think “substantially” is enough to do something about it.
Thank you for the corrections, which I agree with. It is generous of you to graciously indulge my comment.
Ok, debate aside as it’s 2am here, where does one get these data?
It’s on Issa Rice’s site: https://eaforum.issarice.com/userlist?sort=karma
I’m not quite sure I follow your reasoning. I explicitly say in the second paragraph of my comment that “right now sheer quantity is awarded more than ideal”.
I think it’s probable that the answer to “whose voice should count the most” is either:
No one’s—all voices should be equal, or
Something not close to any internally-available metric.
The dialectic was as follows:
You said: “Downvoted because I think “more active on the forum for a longer time” may be a good proxy for “well informed about what other forum posters think” (and even that’s doubtful), but is a bad proxy for “well informed about reality”.”
I pointed out that the second paragraph in my comment made clear that I think that quantity of comments/posts (what you call “more active on the forum for a longer time”) is a distorting factor. Thus, we seem to be in agreement on this point, which made your objection/downvote unclear to me.
Your new comment doesn’t seem to address 2, but makes an unrelated point.
This wasn’t an unrelated point, but I’ll try to make my argument more explicit.
Your original comment said:
and your second paragraph implied that by “best-informed” you still mean something that’s measurable from their forum stats.
What I’m saying is this is not a good idea, regardless of whether you mean the current or an “improved” metric, since being actually best informed probably has close to nothing to do with any of those, and you’ll just end up amplifying unwanted effects.
More generally, the idea that we can objectively and consistently judge which users are most useful to all other users—or which will have a predictably higher impact if their votes are listened to—seems wrong to me. The prioritisation ideas that we apply to e.g. global health interventions may only be very weakly applicable to discourse.
OK, thanks for explaining your reasoning.
On the object level issue, maybe we’ll have to agree to disagree. Fwiw I don’t think the karma system has to be perfect to be useful.