I think this post has some good points about overconfidence and over-deferral, but (as some others have pointed out) it seems unnecessarily inflammatory and includes jibes and rhetorical attacks I’d rather not see on the EA Forum. Examples have been pointed out by Max H here:
the language is also unnecessarily emotionally charged and inflammatory in many places. A quick sampling:
> But as I grew older and learned more, I realized it was all bullshit.
> it becomes clear that his view is a house of cards, built entirely on falsehoods and misrepresentations.
> And I spend much more time listening to Yukowsky’s followers spout nonsense than most other people.
> (phrased in a maximally Eliezer like way): … (condescending chuckle)
I also think that you should retitle the post; I do not think that the contents defend the title to a reasonable extent, and therefore the title both feels misleading and somewhat like clickbait.
The moderators have decided to move the post to Personal Blog — the connection to EA and doing good better is not that clear. I’ll also discuss with the rest of the moderation team to see if there’s anything else we should do about this post.
I have mixed feelings about this mod intervention. On the one hand, I value the way that the moderator team (including Lizka) play a positive role in making the forum a productive place, and I can see how this intervention plays a role of this sort.
On the other hand:
Minor point: I think Eliezer is often condescending and disrespectful, and I think it’s unlikely that anyone is going to successfully police his tone. I think there’s something a bit unfortunate about an asymmetry here.
More substantially: I think procedurally it’s pretty bad that the moderator team act in ways that discourages criticism of influential figures in EA (and Eliezer is definitely such a figure). I think it’s particularly bad to suggest concrete specific edits to critiques of prominent figures. I think there should probably be quite a high bar set before EA institutions (like forum moderators) discourage criticism of EA leaders (esp with a post like this that engages in quite a lot of substantive discussion, rather than mere name calling). (ETA: Likewise, with the choice to re-tag this as a personal blogpost, which substantially buries the criticism. Maybe this was the right call, maybe it wasn’t, but it certainly seems like a call to be very careful with.)
I personally agree that Eliezer’s overconfidence is dangerous, given that many people do take his views quite seriously (note this is purely a comment on his overconfidence; I think Eliezer has other qualities that are praiseworthy). I think that the way EA has helped to boost Eliezer’s voice has, in this particular respect, plausibly caused harm. Against that backdrop, I think it’s important that there be able to be robust pushback against this aspect of Eliezer.
I don’t know what the right balance is here, and maybe the mod team/Lizka have already found it. But this is far from clear to me.
(P.S. While I was typing this, I accidentally refreshed, and I was happy to discover that my text had been autosaved. It’s a nice reminder of how much I appreciate the work of the entire forum team, including the moderators, to make using the forum a pleasant experience. So I really do want to emphasise that this isn’t a criticism of the team, or Lizka in particular. It’s an attempt to raise an issue that I think is worth reflection in terms of future mod action).
Thanks for the pushback. Writing some notes, and speaking only for myself (I don’t know what the other moderators think).
I think my note[1] about Personal Blog-ing this post was unambiguously bad. In practice, the decision was made because I was trying to avoid delaying the comment, someone proposed (in the moderator slack) that this post was only loosely connected to doing good effectively and should be in Personal Blog, and I didn’t question it further.
I think we probably shouldn’t have moved the post to Personal Blog, but I’m not totally sure. I’ve flip-flopped a bit about this. (I just moved the post back, although I think this doesn’t change anything at this point.) I think the bigger error is that the distinction is so messy — I had written a doc trying to clarify things last year (it was mostly focused on whether productivity-hack-style posts should go on the Frontpage or not), and we thought a bit about it when we added the Community section, but this hasn’t been resolved. I think we probably should have prioritized clearing this up earlier, but I’m once again unsure.
Relatedly, I don’t think moving the post to “Personal Blog” substantially lowered the post’s visibility (I’m not sure it did anything except put a little “personal blog” icon on it), given that the post is also in the Community section. If it were not a Community post, then I think logged-out users wouldn’t see it on the Frontpage, but I think nothing really changes for Community posts. (Not totally confident in this; I’ll check with the rest of the Online Team.)
I agree that in an ideal world, I (or someone else from the moderation team) would have responded sooner to the replies on my comment. But I was traveling, very busy, and didn’t think the visibility of the post was actually lowered (see #3, and see the number of comments on the post), so I didn’t prioritize this issue. (I also suspect that this got ughy, although ughiness mainly pushed back my response time today, when I came back to the thread and saw newer comments.) I don’t know if I endorse the trade-offs I made, but it’s hard for me to tell.
Setting aside Personal Blog — re: the fact that this is criticism of an influential figure in EA, and moderators should avoid responding to posts like that. I think it’s very important to protect criticism, but I also think the moderators are currently over-correcting for this kind of consideration a bit (see e.g. this), and I honestly think that I want to discourage the kinds of rhetorical attacks that I saw in this post. I want to protect whistleblowing, red-teaming, disagreement, serious critical engagement with the quality of someone’s work, etc., but I don’t want to encourage the sense that if you frame your post as criticism, then it will be featured even if it is inflammatory and misleading.
(I’m still swamped and traveling, so might continue to be slow to respond.)
My personal thoughts, as I was the mod who most pushed to move this to personal blog[1]. I haven’t checked this with other mods:
My main actionable general takeaway from this incident is that we should try to write longer and more detailed notes when taking any moderation action. We should treat moderation notes as low context communication, and we should try to expand more on things like “violates norms” or “is not clearly related to doing more good”. I’m very guilty of this, e.g. I think this was a core mistake here and here. In particular, we should always try to make it clear that criticism is welcome on the forum.
My less actionable and less general thoughts on this specific case:
I strongly believe that this decision was not a blunder, even if it probably was a mistake:
As many people agreed than disagreed with the moderation comment (It was 21 agreed to 18 disagreed as of 3 days ago. After the post edits and recent discussion it’s 22 to 23. People might be biased to agree, but I don’t think more than to disagree in this specific case.)
The author agreed with the decision
People who agree have no reason to comment and are less likely to see the moderation comment in the first place
In this case, there were several considerations, which made things messy. From my perspective, this post as posted was somewhat borderline on these axes, and I can see reasonable and contradicting perspectives on:
The post relevance to doing more good
The post breaking forum norms (i.e. the insults that have since been edited)
Yudkowsky relationship with EA and if that raises or lowers the bar for acceptable criticism. As an influential voice, we should allow more criticism; as a critic of large parts of EA, like AI labs and animal welfare, we should make sure criticism is kind and doesn’t discourage people from criticizing EA.
I think, in retrospect, the ideal action might have been to take mod action in the form of writing a comment asking the author to edit the post (as they did) to keep the good parts and reduce the insults (and maybe clarify the practical relevance to doing more good).
I think the main reasons why we didn’t reply earlier to comments are that:
The poster agreed with the decision, so there wasn’t much to change
Moving the post to personal blog for whatever reason didn’t remove it from the frontpage, even for logged out users (idk if this is a bug, but it just showed a little icon next to the post, which didn’t seem important to fix)
I weakly wanted to reach more of a consensus in the mod team, and hear the perspectives of all moderators
I was wrong in not seeing any relevance to EA. EY is much more relevant to EA for many more users than I would have thought, and social reality is much more important than I thought, and arguably is a core reason for the community section.[2]
I feel that the “silent majority” that reads but doesn’t write on the forum wants relatively more moderation than people who write lots of comments, so we should weakly keep that in mind when getting feedback in terms of “how much to moderate” (but the feedback in terms of “how to moderate” is very useful)
We should probably have replied earlier, even if we didn’t reach a consensus on whether it was the right call or not, potentially just to surface that we were not sure it was.
Mostly unrelated to the above, but I really liked some of the comments in this thread. I am grateful for the standards that many commenters hold themselves to when posting, and the time they invest in sharing their expertise and thoughtful perspectives even in threads that would naturally have a tendency to devolve into fights.
Apologies for writing this quickly[3], and again I want to emphasize that this is just my personal perspective, and I haven’t asked for feedback from other mods or advisors.
I might have overreacted because I have seen people loving to hate on Yudkowsky for >10 years. There used to be a subreddit dedicated to it. I haven’t found comments on either side of those discussions to be particularly true, necessary or kind. I would want this forum to have less of that, but this is my personal view and shouldn’t have influenced mod action
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. However, I don’t agree with 5, which I take to be the most important claim in this reply.
Side comment: my claim isn’t that moderators should avoid responding to posts that criticise prominent figures in EA. But my claim is that moderators should be cautious about acting in ways that discourage critique. I think this creates a sort of default presupposition that formal mod action should not be taken against critiques that include substantive discussion, as this one did.
I don’t particularly find the comparison to the “modest proposal” post fruitful, because the current post just seem like a very different categories of post. I think it’s perfectly possible to not take action on substantive criticisms of leaders while taking action on “modest proposal” style posts.
While it might be reasonable to want to discourage the sort of rhetorical attacks seen in this post if all else were equal, I don’t think all else was equal in this case. And while I agree that “criticism” of leaders shouldn’t permit all sins, the post seemed to me to have enough substantive discussion that it shouldn’t be grouped into the general category of “inflammatory and misleading”.
Writing only my personal perspective on the moderation team’s approach, I haven’t checked this with other moderators or advisors
my claim isn’t that moderators should avoid responding to posts that criticise prominent figures in EA. But my claim is that moderators should be cautious about acting in ways that discourage critique.
My view is that all moderators agree with this! There are just many reasonable places to draw this line, though, and both different users and different moderators have different preferences and perspectives on what the bar should be and what counts as “prominent figures in EA”.
In the past, we have received feedback from some users that we should have intervened in the opposite direction in other threads about prominent figures.
Also, just to say: I think these judgement calls are easy to make in the abstract, but I’m glad I don’t have to make them quickly in reality when they actually have implications.
I do think the wrong call was made here, but I also think the mod team acts in good faith and is careful and reflective in their actions. I am discussing things here because I think this is how we can collectively work towards a desirable set of moderation norms. I am not mentioning these things to criticise the mod team as individuals or indeed as a group.
Thanks for sharing your reasoning, openly acknowledging a mistake and explaining how it happened.
Note: the below is an observation of a structural problem, rather than any individual. person Moderation is not an easy job and I do believe that the Forum mods are doing their best.
Overall it sounds like the Forum team may not have enough capacity to adequately deal with issues like this (according to your description it sounds like despite traveling and being busy, you were ultimately the person responsible for this).
This could result in a sub-optimal situation that decisions like this are either delayed, or made quickly (with a higher chance of mistakes). I think this is bad because the Forum is actively used by hundreds of community members, and time spent critiquing mod decisions is valuable time that isn’t being spent on object-level issues.
In my opinion, it seems like it should be higher priority for the Forum team to expand the number of dedicated moderators who are “on call” to prevent situations like this in the future.
Some notes on mod capacity:
From my understanding the forum has hired some paid moderators in the past year or two, but it seems like it may not be sufficient (possibly because of a increase in forum usage over the same time period)
Moderation issues are annoying (and I agree they are too quick to go after disagreeable-but-insightful people) but adding new dedicated paid moderators seems quite expensive. Most of the time there isn’t a huge issue so their time would be wasted, and even when there was an issue you don’t get certainty of improved performance—the new people might sometimes have worse ideas than the old guard. My guess (?) is the EA forum is already an outlier on the admin-hours / user-hours ratio.
RE outlier—Do you mean an outlier in that there are more admin hours put in than other places?
I don’t think that is true, at least from my impression of a couple other places, but this is a weak impression.
I would make the case that we probably don’t want to compare the Forum to most other online communities, because unlike in other places, people are writing & sharing substantive research and trying to, in some sense, do work. Of course, there is a community / social element to it as well, but I think there is a case to see the Forum as more than just that. As a result, I think it’s okay for the mod team to be an outlier.
I’ll also say that in general, I believe CEA as an organization undervalues / underinvests in infrastructural investments for the EA movement and community (e.g. the Groups team, Events team and Community health had been chronically understaffed until early 2022. The Forum only had ~3 FTE until 2021 and only had capacity to maintain rather than build new features. I’d argue the Community Health team is still very understaffed relative to their remit.)
Clarification: I think they underinvest in staff specifically, and sometimes overinvest in specific programs (e.g. conference spend in 2022, maybe the university groups program from 2021-2022). But overall I think they just underinvest in these things across the board, despite having had the capacity to raise more funds / hire more.
If they were unable to raise more funds (which I’m very skeptical of since it appears they haven’t actively fundraised non-OP funders), then I’d have wanted them to scale down to have fewer projects, and put more resources into fewer programs.
I think having adding something like 1 FTE or 2 x 0.5 FTE moderators wouldn’t be that expensive—would add ~5% to the Forums’ overall budget (currently $2M per year per a recent comment). Onboarding and recruiting would take some time, but the process for hiring moderators (AFAIK) is less time-consuming if they are in a contract role.
It’s true that new moderators could make worse decisions, but they could also be trained by existing moderators, read up on past instances of moderation that worked / didn’t, and initially run decisions by more experienced mods to reduce the chance of decreasing quality. It seems like moderators who joined in 2022 did a pretty good job, at least Forum leadership’s standards.
Writing only my personal perspective. I haven’t checked this with other moderators or advisors.
adding something like 1 FTE or 2 x 0.5 FTE moderators wouldn’t be that expensive
I think an important cost would be the opportunity cost for what those moderators could be doing.
For me personally, the theory of change for spending more time on moderation is often not that clear. My personal theory of change is that the main value I provide via moderation is to save time/energy for Lizka and JP to focus a bit more on projects that I think are extremely valuable. (Edit: This is just my personal view! I don’t work for CEA, and I think they disagree with this!)
seems like moderators who joined in 2022 did a pretty good job
As one of these mods, I think I also made some prettyclearmistakes[1], even one year into this, that I think more experienced mods wouldn’t have made. I think the new mods went through a better selection process, though, so I’m optimistic that it will take less time for them to make better decisions.
Tangentially related to this point, I think 99% of the moderation action on this forum comes from users (via voting, commenting, and reporting posts). I think that’s how it should be, and I’m really impressed by how well users of this forum moderate discussions, compared to e.g. serious subreddits, Twitter spheres, or Hacker News.
I was also the moderator who pushed the most to move this to personal blog, as I (wrongly) didn’t see a strong connection between this post and doing good better.
Writing only my personal perspective. I haven’t checked this with other moderators or advisors.
Overall it sounds like the Forum team may not have enough capacity to adequately deal with issues like this (according to your description it sounds like despite traveling and being busy, you were ultimately the person responsible for this). [...] In my opinion, it seems like it should be higher priority for the Forum team to expand the number of dedicated moderators who are “on call” to prevent situations like this in the future.
You might be happy to hear that this already happened to a significant amount!
There are now six active moderators, plus advisors, which is ~2x as many as there were at some points. Three of the active moderators joined in August, I think ~three weeks before this post, and the content specialist role you linked to starts with “to work with me (Lizka)”, so I don’t think that she’s looking for a replacement.[1]
I’m very disappointed about the low priority the mod team assigns to being responsive to and engaging with critical feedback about their decisions from forum users. It’s very surprising to me that in this situation, with all the substantive and popular comments and votes pushing back on a potentially consequential decision and multiple people following up publicly a week later about their disappointment that the situation was left unaddressed, you are undecided on whether this situation needed addressing sooner. I find myself less interested in this forum due to this reason.
I strongly disagree with the claim that the connection to EA and doing good is unclear. The EA community’s beliefs about AI have been, and continue to be, strongly influenced by Eliezer. It’s very pertinent if Eliezer is systematically wrong and overconfident about being wrong because, insofar as there’s some level of defferal to Elizer on AI questions within the EA community which I think there clearly is, it implies that most EAs should reduce their credence in Elizer’s AI views.
I agree that much of the language is inflammatory, and this is blameworthy. I disagree that the connection to EA and doing good better is unclear, conditional upon the writer being substantively correct. And historically, the personal blogpost/frontpage distinction has not been contingent on correctness. (But I understand you’re operating under pretty difficult tradeoffs, need to move fast, etc, so wording might not be exact).
Just want to say, I also agree that much of the original language was inflammatory. I think I have fixed it to make it less inflammatory, but do let me know if there are other parts that you think are inflammatory.
In your shoes, I’d remove “egregiously” from the title, but I’m not great at titles and also occupy a different epistemic status than you (eg I think FDT is better than CDT or EDT).
Can you clarify the basis on which a post about an influential figure in the EA community that according to you makes some good points about overconfidence and over-deferral is not clearly connected to EA and doing good better? I genuinely cannot make sense of this decision or its stated justification.
Your comment only goes into specifics about the tone and rhetoric in parts of the post. Are these factors relevant to which section a post belongs to? If so, can you clarify how?
Thanks for this comment — I left a longer comment here. In brief, I hadn’t thought very hard about the decision to move the post to Personal Blog, and was in fact mostly focused on the rhetorical/inflammatory aspects of the post, and only briefly considered the strength of its relevance to EA.
I’ve moved the post back to Frontpage (although I don’t think this changes much) — see this comment. We don’t generally move posts to Frontpage if the authors mark them as Personal Blog themselves. Do you want us to move this post back?
I don’t feel particularly good that the various concerns about this mod decision were not, as far as I can tell, addressed by mods. I accept that this decision has support from some people, but a number of people have also expressed concern. My own concern got 69 upvotes and 24 agree votes. Nathan, Linch, and Sphor all raise concerns too. I think a high bar should be set for mod action against critiques of EA leaders, but I also think that mods would ideally be willing to engage in discussion about this sort of action (even if only to provide reassurance that they generally support appropriate critique but that they feel this instance wasn’t appropriate for X, Y and Z reasons).
ETA: Lizka has now written a thoughtful and reflective response here (and also explained why it took a while for any such response to be written).
I really appreciate this mod comment. I was seriously wracking my brain, trying to think of how to put into words exactly what was wrong with this post, and nothing I pulled out was anywhere near as concise or precise as this comment. This was done extremely well, something that I’m able to recognize after the fact but nowhere near able to do myself.
I still wish it had come sooner. It’s also worth noting that this post made a really serious effort to optimize for maximizing damage to the reputation to at least one of the major Schelling points in the Rationality community (the Lesswrong Sequences), which many people in EA also use for upskilling in preparation for high-EV projects. It’s not clear how many people read the arguments at the beginning and assumed they were true, rather than that the author had insulated themself from accountability. Rather than hosting bad-faith attacks on other communities for more than 20 hours and following up with heavy-handed actions, like moving to personal blog, that couldn’t have been done sooner than ~20 hours, it would make more sense to take lighter actions sooner, such as just posting a superior-quality disclaimer warning very early on in the process (and, again, this comment nailed the situation in a really effective way). This will maximize the number of people who can make informed decisions about the content itself, rather than just go wherever it was designed to take them.
I’m not sure how that something like this would be, as I’m not a moderator and I don’t know what the base rates are for moderator capability, as well as other factors that I’m not aware of; I know that this situation was ultimately handled well but possibly could have been done better.
Yudkowsky made a long reply, but it also contained this point:
As the entire post violates basic rules of epistemic conduct by opening with a series of not-yet-supported personal attacks, I will not be responding to the rest in detail. I’m sad about how anything containing such an egregious violation of basic epistemic conduct got this upvoted, and wonder about sockpuppet accounts or alternatively a downfall of EA.
Although forum cybersecurity is very important since we don’t know what kinds of people will be the adversaries in the future, I don’t think this is as much of an indictment or a dissappointment as Yudkowsky thinks. As a thought experiment, if EA were to grow by a factor of two each year, then that would mean, at any given time, a disproportionately large proportion of people in EA would have only had their first exposure to EA ideas less than 6 months ago. However, it would still mean that it is even more important to acknowledge that, at any given time, many newer users aren’t yet ready to handle complex bad-faith arguments and mind games that inevitably end up getting cooked up by an intelligent disgruntled person here or there; this would happen even if EA is doing everything right, and continuously getting better every day, by expanding and bringing in many new people, which is already hard enough as is in the current ambiently-hostile environment.
I’d disagree with the notion that “this post made a really serious effort to optimize for maximizing damage to the reputation to at least one of the major Schelling points in the Rationality community.” The thing I was optimizing for was getting people to be more skeptical about Eliezer’s views, not ruining his career or reputation. In fact, as I said in the article, I think he often has interesting, clever, and unique insights and has made the world a better place.
See also my reply to Eliezer. In short, if you’re writing a post arguing for why we should trust someone less, I don’t know why you can’t start out with the broad claim and then give the reasons. Eliezer doesn’t defend that practice—he just asserts that it’s basic rationality.
Yeah it seems pretty obvious to me that there are far worse things you could’ve said if you wanted to optimize for reputational damage, assuming above 75th percentile creativity and/or ruthlessness.
I think this post has some good points about overconfidence and over-deferral, but (as some others have pointed out) it seems unnecessarily inflammatory and includes jibes and rhetorical attacks I’d rather not see on the EA Forum. Examples have been pointed out by Max H here:
I also think that you should retitle the post; I do not think that the contents defend the title to a reasonable extent, and therefore the title both feels misleading and somewhat like clickbait.
The moderators have decided to move the post to Personal Blog — the connection to EA and doing good better is not that clear. I’ll also discuss with the rest of the moderation team to see if there’s anything else we should do about this post.
I have mixed feelings about this mod intervention. On the one hand, I value the way that the moderator team (including Lizka) play a positive role in making the forum a productive place, and I can see how this intervention plays a role of this sort.
On the other hand:
Minor point: I think Eliezer is often condescending and disrespectful, and I think it’s unlikely that anyone is going to successfully police his tone. I think there’s something a bit unfortunate about an asymmetry here.
More substantially: I think procedurally it’s pretty bad that the moderator team act in ways that discourages criticism of influential figures in EA (and Eliezer is definitely such a figure). I think it’s particularly bad to suggest concrete specific edits to critiques of prominent figures. I think there should probably be quite a high bar set before EA institutions (like forum moderators) discourage criticism of EA leaders (esp with a post like this that engages in quite a lot of substantive discussion, rather than mere name calling). (ETA: Likewise, with the choice to re-tag this as a personal blogpost, which substantially buries the criticism. Maybe this was the right call, maybe it wasn’t, but it certainly seems like a call to be very careful with.)
I personally agree that Eliezer’s overconfidence is dangerous, given that many people do take his views quite seriously (note this is purely a comment on his overconfidence; I think Eliezer has other qualities that are praiseworthy). I think that the way EA has helped to boost Eliezer’s voice has, in this particular respect, plausibly caused harm. Against that backdrop, I think it’s important that there be able to be robust pushback against this aspect of Eliezer.
I don’t know what the right balance is here, and maybe the mod team/Lizka have already found it. But this is far from clear to me.
(P.S. While I was typing this, I accidentally refreshed, and I was happy to discover that my text had been autosaved. It’s a nice reminder of how much I appreciate the work of the entire forum team, including the moderators, to make using the forum a pleasant experience. So I really do want to emphasise that this isn’t a criticism of the team, or Lizka in particular. It’s an attempt to raise an issue that I think is worth reflection in terms of future mod action).
Thanks for the pushback. Writing some notes, and speaking only for myself (I don’t know what the other moderators think).
I think my note[1] about Personal Blog-ing this post was unambiguously bad. In practice, the decision was made because I was trying to avoid delaying the comment, someone proposed (in the moderator slack) that this post was only loosely connected to doing good effectively and should be in Personal Blog, and I didn’t question it further.
I think we probably shouldn’t have moved the post to Personal Blog, but I’m not totally sure. I’ve flip-flopped a bit about this. (I just moved the post back, although I think this doesn’t change anything at this point.) I think the bigger error is that the distinction is so messy — I had written a doc trying to clarify things last year (it was mostly focused on whether productivity-hack-style posts should go on the Frontpage or not), and we thought a bit about it when we added the Community section, but this hasn’t been resolved. I think we probably should have prioritized clearing this up earlier, but I’m once again unsure.
Relatedly, I don’t think moving the post to “Personal Blog” substantially lowered the post’s visibility (I’m not sure it did anything except put a little “personal blog” icon on it), given that the post is also in the Community section. If it were not a Community post, then I think logged-out users wouldn’t see it on the Frontpage, but I think nothing really changes for Community posts. (Not totally confident in this; I’ll check with the rest of the Online Team.)
I agree that in an ideal world, I (or someone else from the moderation team) would have responded sooner to the replies on my comment. But I was traveling, very busy, and didn’t think the visibility of the post was actually lowered (see #3, and see the number of comments on the post), so I didn’t prioritize this issue. (I also suspect that this got ughy, although ughiness mainly pushed back my response time today, when I came back to the thread and saw newer comments.) I don’t know if I endorse the trade-offs I made, but it’s hard for me to tell.
Setting aside Personal Blog — re: the fact that this is criticism of an influential figure in EA, and moderators should avoid responding to posts like that. I think it’s very important to protect criticism, but I also think the moderators are currently over-correcting for this kind of consideration a bit (see e.g. this), and I honestly think that I want to discourage the kinds of rhetorical attacks that I saw in this post. I want to protect whistleblowing, red-teaming, disagreement, serious critical engagement with the quality of someone’s work, etc., but I don’t want to encourage the sense that if you frame your post as criticism, then it will be featured even if it is inflammatory and misleading.
(I’m still swamped and traveling, so might continue to be slow to respond.)
“The moderators have decided to move the post to Personal Blog — the connection to EA and doing good better is not that clear”
My personal thoughts, as I was the mod who most pushed to move this to personal blog[1]. I haven’t checked this with other mods:
My main actionable general takeaway from this incident is that we should try to write longer and more detailed notes when taking any moderation action. We should treat moderation notes as low context communication, and we should try to expand more on things like “violates norms” or “is not clearly related to doing more good”. I’m very guilty of this, e.g. I think this was a core mistake here and here. In particular, we should always try to make it clear that criticism is welcome on the forum.
My less actionable and less general thoughts on this specific case:
I strongly believe that this decision was not a blunder, even if it probably was a mistake:
As many people agreed than disagreed with the moderation comment (It was 21 agreed to 18 disagreed as of 3 days ago. After the post edits and recent discussion it’s 22 to 23. People might be biased to agree, but I don’t think more than to disagree in this specific case.)
The author agreed with the decision
People who agree have no reason to comment and are less likely to see the moderation comment in the first place
In this case, there were several considerations, which made things messy. From my perspective, this post as posted was somewhat borderline on these axes, and I can see reasonable and contradicting perspectives on:
The post relevance to doing more good
The post breaking forum norms (i.e. the insults that have since been edited)
Yudkowsky relationship with EA and if that raises or lowers the bar for acceptable criticism. As an influential voice, we should allow more criticism; as a critic of large parts of EA, like AI labs and animal welfare, we should make sure criticism is kind and doesn’t discourage people from criticizing EA.
I think, in retrospect, the ideal action might have been to take mod action in the form of writing a comment asking the author to edit the post (as they did) to keep the good parts and reduce the insults (and maybe clarify the practical relevance to doing more good).
I think the main reasons why we didn’t reply earlier to comments are that:
The poster agreed with the decision, so there wasn’t much to change
Moving the post to personal blog for whatever reason didn’t remove it from the frontpage, even for logged out users (idk if this is a bug, but it just showed a little icon next to the post, which didn’t seem important to fix)
It’s obvious to moderators that criticizing anyone is ok (while following norms) so we didn’t feel the need to spell it out
I weakly wanted to reach more of a consensus in the mod team, and hear the perspectives of all moderators
I was wrong in not seeing any relevance to EA. EY is much more relevant to EA for many more users than I would have thought, and social reality is much more important than I thought, and arguably is a core reason for the community section.[2]
I feel that the “silent majority” that reads but doesn’t write on the forum wants relatively more moderation than people who write lots of comments, so we should weakly keep that in mind when getting feedback in terms of “how much to moderate” (but the feedback in terms of “how to moderate” is very useful)
We should probably have replied earlier, even if we didn’t reach a consensus on whether it was the right call or not, potentially just to surface that we were not sure it was.
Mostly unrelated to the above, but I really liked some of the comments in this thread. I am grateful for the standards that many commenters hold themselves to when posting, and the time they invest in sharing their expertise and thoughtful perspectives even in threads that would naturally have a tendency to devolve into fights.
Apologies for writing this quickly[3], and again I want to emphasize that this is just my personal perspective, and I haven’t asked for feedback from other mods or advisors.
As I (wrongly) didn’t see a strong connection between this post and doing good better
I might have overreacted because I have seen people loving to hate on Yudkowsky for >10 years. There used to be a subreddit dedicated to it. I haven’t found comments on either side of those discussions to be particularly true, necessary or kind. I would want this forum to have less of that, but this is my personal view and shouldn’t have influenced mod action
I’m writing this from EAGxBerlin
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. However, I don’t agree with 5, which I take to be the most important claim in this reply.
Side comment: my claim isn’t that moderators should avoid responding to posts that criticise prominent figures in EA. But my claim is that moderators should be cautious about acting in ways that discourage critique. I think this creates a sort of default presupposition that formal mod action should not be taken against critiques that include substantive discussion, as this one did.
I don’t particularly find the comparison to the “modest proposal” post fruitful, because the current post just seem like a very different categories of post. I think it’s perfectly possible to not take action on substantive criticisms of leaders while taking action on “modest proposal” style posts.
While it might be reasonable to want to discourage the sort of rhetorical attacks seen in this post if all else were equal, I don’t think all else was equal in this case. And while I agree that “criticism” of leaders shouldn’t permit all sins, the post seemed to me to have enough substantive discussion that it shouldn’t be grouped into the general category of “inflammatory and misleading”.
Writing only my personal perspective on the moderation team’s approach, I haven’t checked this with other moderators or advisors
My view is that all moderators agree with this! There are just many reasonable places to draw this line, though, and both different users and different moderators have different preferences and perspectives on what the bar should be and what counts as “prominent figures in EA”.
In the past, we have received feedback from some users that we should have intervened in the opposite direction in other threads about prominent figures.
Also, just to say: I think these judgement calls are easy to make in the abstract, but I’m glad I don’t have to make them quickly in reality when they actually have implications.
I do think the wrong call was made here, but I also think the mod team acts in good faith and is careful and reflective in their actions. I am discussing things here because I think this is how we can collectively work towards a desirable set of moderation norms. I am not mentioning these things to criticise the mod team as individuals or indeed as a group.
Thanks for sharing your reasoning, openly acknowledging a mistake and explaining how it happened.
Note: the below is an observation of a structural problem, rather than any individual. person Moderation is not an easy job and I do believe that the Forum mods are doing their best.
Overall it sounds like the Forum team may not have enough capacity to adequately deal with issues like this (according to your description it sounds like despite traveling and being busy, you were ultimately the person responsible for this).
This could result in a sub-optimal situation that decisions like this are either delayed, or made quickly (with a higher chance of mistakes). I think this is bad because the Forum is actively used by hundreds of community members, and time spent critiquing mod decisions is valuable time that isn’t being spent on object-level issues.
In my opinion, it seems like it should be higher priority for the Forum team to expand the number of dedicated moderators who are “on call” to prevent situations like this in the future.
Some notes on mod capacity:
From my understanding the forum has hired some paid moderators in the past year or two, but it seems like it may not be sufficient (possibly because of a increase in forum usage over the same time period)
I am also aware that the Forum is trying to hire another Content Specialist, although it is unclear whether they are replacing Lizka or adding more capacity.
Moderation issues are annoying (and I agree they are too quick to go after disagreeable-but-insightful people) but adding new dedicated paid moderators seems quite expensive. Most of the time there isn’t a huge issue so their time would be wasted, and even when there was an issue you don’t get certainty of improved performance—the new people might sometimes have worse ideas than the old guard. My guess (?) is the EA forum is already an outlier on the admin-hours / user-hours ratio.
RE outlier—Do you mean an outlier in that there are more admin hours put in than other places?
I don’t think that is true, at least from my impression of a couple other places, but this is a weak impression.
I would make the case that we probably don’t want to compare the Forum to most other online communities, because unlike in other places, people are writing & sharing substantive research and trying to, in some sense, do work. Of course, there is a community / social element to it as well, but I think there is a case to see the Forum as more than just that. As a result, I think it’s okay for the mod team to be an outlier.
I’ll also say that in general, I believe CEA as an organization undervalues / underinvests in infrastructural investments for the EA movement and community (e.g. the Groups team, Events team and Community health had been chronically understaffed until early 2022. The Forum only had ~3 FTE until 2021 and only had capacity to maintain rather than build new features. I’d argue the Community Health team is still very understaffed relative to their remit.)
What do you think CEA over-invests in? If you take away Online, Groups, Events and CH as all undervalued there’s not much of CEA left.
Clarification: I think they underinvest in staff specifically, and sometimes overinvest in specific programs (e.g. conference spend in 2022, maybe the university groups program from 2021-2022). But overall I think they just underinvest in these things across the board, despite having had the capacity to raise more funds / hire more.
If they were unable to raise more funds (which I’m very skeptical of since it appears they haven’t actively fundraised non-OP funders), then I’d have wanted them to scale down to have fewer projects, and put more resources into fewer programs.
I think having adding something like 1 FTE or 2 x 0.5 FTE moderators wouldn’t be that expensive—would add ~5% to the Forums’ overall budget (currently $2M per year per a recent comment). Onboarding and recruiting would take some time, but the process for hiring moderators (AFAIK) is less time-consuming if they are in a contract role.
It’s true that new moderators could make worse decisions, but they could also be trained by existing moderators, read up on past instances of moderation that worked / didn’t, and initially run decisions by more experienced mods to reduce the chance of decreasing quality. It seems like moderators who joined in 2022 did a pretty good job, at least Forum leadership’s standards.
Writing only my personal perspective. I haven’t checked this with other moderators or advisors.
I think an important cost would be the opportunity cost for what those moderators could be doing.
For me personally, the theory of change for spending more time on moderation is often not that clear. My personal theory of change is that the main value I provide via moderation is to save time/energy for Lizka and JP to focus a bit more on projects that I think are extremely valuable. (Edit: This is just my personal view! I don’t work for CEA, and I think they disagree with this!)
As one of these mods, I think I also made some pretty clear mistakes[1], even one year into this, that I think more experienced mods wouldn’t have made. I think the new mods went through a better selection process, though, so I’m optimistic that it will take less time for them to make better decisions.
Tangentially related to this point, I think 99% of the moderation action on this forum comes from users (via voting, commenting, and reporting posts). I think that’s how it should be, and I’m really impressed by how well users of this forum moderate discussions, compared to e.g. serious subreddits, Twitter spheres, or Hacker News.
I was also the moderator who pushed the most to move this to personal blog, as I (wrongly) didn’t see a strong connection between this post and doing good better.
Writing only my personal perspective. I haven’t checked this with other moderators or advisors.
You might be happy to hear that this already happened to a significant amount!
There are now six active moderators, plus advisors, which is ~2x as many as there were at some points. Three of the active moderators joined in August, I think ~three weeks before this post, and the content specialist role you linked to starts with “to work with me (Lizka)”, so I don’t think that she’s looking for a replacement.[1]
I have no insider info, just going by public posts.
Thanks for the honesty Lizka. I appreciate it.
I’m very disappointed about the low priority the mod team assigns to being responsive to and engaging with critical feedback about their decisions from forum users. It’s very surprising to me that in this situation, with all the substantive and popular comments and votes pushing back on a potentially consequential decision and multiple people following up publicly a week later about their disappointment that the situation was left unaddressed, you are undecided on whether this situation needed addressing sooner. I find myself less interested in this forum due to this reason.
Hi sphor,
I’m sorry about this, especially that this worsened your experience on the forum, I quickly wrote some reasons why it took us so long here
I strongly disagree with the claim that the connection to EA and doing good is unclear. The EA community’s beliefs about AI have been, and continue to be, strongly influenced by Eliezer. It’s very pertinent if Eliezer is systematically wrong and overconfident about being wrong because, insofar as there’s some level of defferal to Elizer on AI questions within the EA community which I think there clearly is, it implies that most EAs should reduce their credence in Elizer’s AI views.
Thanks for commenting — I agree with your main point, and wrote more here.
I agree that much of the language is inflammatory, and this is blameworthy. I disagree that the connection to EA and doing good better is unclear, conditional upon the writer being substantively correct. And historically, the personal blogpost/frontpage distinction has not been contingent on correctness. (But I understand you’re operating under pretty difficult tradeoffs, need to move fast, etc, so wording might not be exact).
Just want to say, I also agree that much of the original language was inflammatory. I think I have fixed it to make it less inflammatory, but do let me know if there are other parts that you think are inflammatory.
In your shoes, I’d remove “egregiously” from the title, but I’m not great at titles and also occupy a different epistemic status than you (eg I think FDT is better than CDT or EDT).
Thanks for this comment — I left a longer reply here.
Can you clarify the basis on which a post about an influential figure in the EA community that according to you makes some good points about overconfidence and over-deferral is not clearly connected to EA and doing good better? I genuinely cannot make sense of this decision or its stated justification.
Your comment only goes into specifics about the tone and rhetoric in parts of the post. Are these factors relevant to which section a post belongs to? If so, can you clarify how?
Thanks for this comment — I left a longer comment here. In brief, I hadn’t thought very hard about the decision to move the post to Personal Blog, and was in fact mostly focused on the rhetorical/inflammatory aspects of the post, and only briefly considered the strength of its relevance to EA.
Yes, sorry I should have had it start in personal blog. I have now removed the incendiary phrasing that you highlight.
Thanks for editing your post.
I’ve moved the post back to Frontpage (although I don’t think this changes much) — see this comment. We don’t generally move posts to Frontpage if the authors mark them as Personal Blog themselves. Do you want us to move this post back?
I don’t feel particularly good that the various concerns about this mod decision were not, as far as I can tell, addressed by mods. I accept that this decision has support from some people, but a number of people have also expressed concern. My own concern got 69 upvotes and 24 agree votes. Nathan, Linch, and Sphor all raise concerns too. I think a high bar should be set for mod action against critiques of EA leaders, but I also think that mods would ideally be willing to engage in discussion about this sort of action (even if only to provide reassurance that they generally support appropriate critique but that they feel this instance wasn’t appropriate for X, Y and Z reasons).
ETA: Lizka has now written a thoughtful and reflective response here (and also explained why it took a while for any such response to be written).
I really appreciate this mod comment. I was seriously wracking my brain, trying to think of how to put into words exactly what was wrong with this post, and nothing I pulled out was anywhere near as concise or precise as this comment. This was done extremely well, something that I’m able to recognize after the fact but nowhere near able to do myself.
I still wish it had come sooner. It’s also worth noting that this post made a really serious effort to optimize for maximizing damage to the reputation to at least one of the major Schelling points in the Rationality community (the Lesswrong Sequences), which many people in EA also use for upskilling in preparation for high-EV projects. It’s not clear how many people read the arguments at the beginning and assumed they were true, rather than that the author had insulated themself from accountability. Rather than hosting bad-faith attacks on other communities for more than 20 hours and following up with heavy-handed actions, like moving to personal blog, that couldn’t have been done sooner than ~20 hours, it would make more sense to take lighter actions sooner, such as just posting a superior-quality disclaimer warning very early on in the process (and, again, this comment nailed the situation in a really effective way). This will maximize the number of people who can make informed decisions about the content itself, rather than just go wherever it was designed to take them.
I’m not sure how that something like this would be, as I’m not a moderator and I don’t know what the base rates are for moderator capability, as well as other factors that I’m not aware of; I know that this situation was ultimately handled well but possibly could have been done better.
Yudkowsky made a long reply, but it also contained this point:
Although forum cybersecurity is very important since we don’t know what kinds of people will be the adversaries in the future, I don’t think this is as much of an indictment or a dissappointment as Yudkowsky thinks. As a thought experiment, if EA were to grow by a factor of two each year, then that would mean, at any given time, a disproportionately large proportion of people in EA would have only had their first exposure to EA ideas less than 6 months ago. However, it would still mean that it is even more important to acknowledge that, at any given time, many newer users aren’t yet ready to handle complex bad-faith arguments and mind games that inevitably end up getting cooked up by an intelligent disgruntled person here or there; this would happen even if EA is doing everything right, and continuously getting better every day, by expanding and bringing in many new people, which is already hard enough as is in the current ambiently-hostile environment.
I’d disagree with the notion that “this post made a really serious effort to optimize for maximizing damage to the reputation to at least one of the major Schelling points in the Rationality community.” The thing I was optimizing for was getting people to be more skeptical about Eliezer’s views, not ruining his career or reputation. In fact, as I said in the article, I think he often has interesting, clever, and unique insights and has made the world a better place.
See also my reply to Eliezer. In short, if you’re writing a post arguing for why we should trust someone less, I don’t know why you can’t start out with the broad claim and then give the reasons. Eliezer doesn’t defend that practice—he just asserts that it’s basic rationality.
Yeah it seems pretty obvious to me that there are far worse things you could’ve said if you wanted to optimize for reputational damage, assuming above 75th percentile creativity and/or ruthlessness.