(Edit the below was written before Max edited the second paragraph into his comment)
Seems good! I actually think considerations around legibility are quite important and where I expect a good amount of intellectual progress to be made by talking to each other, so I would like to see your perspective written up and engage with it.
I also want to make sure that it’s clear that I do think CFAR should be more legible and transparent (as I said in the writeup above). I have some concerns with organizations trying to be overly legible, but I think we both agree that at the current margin it would be better for CFAR to optimize more for legibility.
(I’ve sadly had every single comment of mine on this thread strong-downvoted by at least one person, and often multiple people. My sense is that CFAR is a pretty polarizing topic, which I think makes it particularly important to have this conversation, but seems to also cause some unfortunate voting patterns that feel somewhat stressful to deal with.)
I’m sorry to see the strong downvotes, especially when you’ve put in more effort on explaining your thinking and genuinely engaging with critiques than perhaps than all other EA Fund granters put together. I want you to know that I found your explanations very helpful and thought provoking, and really like how you’ve engaged with criticisms both in this thread and the last one.
(I’m wondering whether this phenomenon could also be due to people using downvotes for different purposes. For example, I use votes roughly to convey my answer to the question “Would I want to see more posts like this on the Forum?”, and so I frequently upvote comments I disagree with. By contrast, someone might use votes to convey “Do I think the claims made in this comment are true?”.)
Data point: I often feel a pull towards up-voting comments that I feel have stimulated or advanced my thinking or exemplify a valuable norm of transparency and clarity, but then I hold back because I think I might disagree with the claims made or I think I simply don’t know enough to judge those claims. This is based on a sense that I should avoid contributing to information cascade-type situations (even if, in these cases, any contribution would only be very slight).
This has happened multiple times in this particular thread; there’ve been comments of Oliver’s that I’ve very much appreciated the transparency of, but with which I felt like I still might slightly disagree overall, so I avoided voting either way.
(I’m not saying this is the ideal policy, just that it’s the one I’ve taken so far.)
(Edit the below was written before Max edited the second paragraph into his comment)
Seems good! I actually think considerations around legibility are quite important and where I expect a good amount of intellectual progress to be made by talking to each other, so I would like to see your perspective written up and engage with it.
I also want to make sure that it’s clear that I do think CFAR should be more legible and transparent (as I said in the writeup above). I have some concerns with organizations trying to be overly legible, but I think we both agree that at the current margin it would be better for CFAR to optimize more for legibility.
(I’ve sadly had every single comment of mine on this thread strong-downvoted by at least one person, and often multiple people. My sense is that CFAR is a pretty polarizing topic, which I think makes it particularly important to have this conversation, but seems to also cause some unfortunate voting patterns that feel somewhat stressful to deal with.)
I’m sorry to see the strong downvotes, especially when you’ve put in more effort on explaining your thinking and genuinely engaging with critiques than perhaps than all other EA Fund granters put together. I want you to know that I found your explanations very helpful and thought provoking, and really like how you’ve engaged with criticisms both in this thread and the last one.
Seconded.
(I’m wondering whether this phenomenon could also be due to people using downvotes for different purposes. For example, I use votes roughly to convey my answer to the question “Would I want to see more posts like this on the Forum?”, and so I frequently upvote comments I disagree with. By contrast, someone might use votes to convey “Do I think the claims made in this comment are true?”.)
Data point: I often feel a pull towards up-voting comments that I feel have stimulated or advanced my thinking or exemplify a valuable norm of transparency and clarity, but then I hold back because I think I might disagree with the claims made or I think I simply don’t know enough to judge those claims. This is based on a sense that I should avoid contributing to information cascade-type situations (even if, in these cases, any contribution would only be very slight).
This has happened multiple times in this particular thread; there’ve been comments of Oliver’s that I’ve very much appreciated the transparency of, but with which I felt like I still might slightly disagree overall, so I avoided voting either way.
(I’m not saying this is the ideal policy, just that it’s the one I’ve taken so far.)
Thank you! :)