I think that if a lot of people tried to do this, few would fully succeed, and most would mostly fail, but that we’d all learn a lot in the process and get better at bias-free belief reporting over time.
Right. I’m modeling some subset of the failures as negative expected value, and it’s not obvious to me that the positive impact of the successes would outweigh the impact of these failures.
The EA community has become unusually good at some forms of communication (e.g. our online discussions are more civil and helpful than those almost anywhere else)
Totally agree. I don’t understand why our communication norms are so good (compared to benchmarks).
Because I don’t have a believable causal model of how this came to be, I have a Hayekian stance towards it – I’m reluctant to go twiddling with things that seem to be working well via processes I don’t understand.
I’m reluctant to go twiddling with things that seem to be working well via processes I don’t understand.
To me, one of the things that has “worked well” historically has been “people in EA writing about why they’ve made decisions in great detail”. These posts tend to be heavily upvoted and have often been influential in setting the tone of discussion around a particular topic. I don’t think people should be forced or pressured to write more of them, but I also don’t see why more of them would turn the sign from positive to negative.
… but I also don’t see why more of them would turn the sign from positive to negative.
There’s probably strong selection effects here.
People write up things / spotlight things that are straightforward to justify and/or make them look good.
People avoid things / downplay things that are opaque and/or unflattering.
(speculative) Perhaps more posts like this would increase the selection pressure, leading to a more distorted map of what’s going on / more distance between the map and the territory.
Right. I’m modeling some subset of the failures as negative expected value, and it’s not obvious to me that the positive impact of the successes would outweigh the impact of these failures.
Totally agree. I don’t understand why our communication norms are so good (compared to benchmarks).
Because I don’t have a believable causal model of how this came to be, I have a Hayekian stance towards it – I’m reluctant to go twiddling with things that seem to be working well via processes I don’t understand.
To me, one of the things that has “worked well” historically has been “people in EA writing about why they’ve made decisions in great detail”. These posts tend to be heavily upvoted and have often been influential in setting the tone of discussion around a particular topic. I don’t think people should be forced or pressured to write more of them, but I also don’t see why more of them would turn the sign from positive to negative.
Ben Hoffman’s latest feels tangentially relevant to our disagreement here.
There’s probably strong selection effects here.
People write up things / spotlight things that are straightforward to justify and/or make them look good.
People avoid things / downplay things that are opaque and/or unflattering.
(speculative) Perhaps more posts like this would increase the selection pressure, leading to a more distorted map of what’s going on / more distance between the map and the territory.