A post on voting statistics on the EAF. I am (perhaps unsurprisingly by now!) interested especially in gender break-down. I would have liked to do this myself with the forum API and getting help from some AI code writer and perhaps also for using user names or descriptions to guess at gender. But I just think I do not have time. I would be super interested to see if there are indications that posts from users perceived to be female gets less votes and/or more downvoted. I guess this is less about what I want someone to write about than what work I would love for someone to do. I think potentially the data is right there in front of us.
Interesting idea. Say we DO find that—what implications would this have?
It seems to me that this data point alone wouldn’t be sufficient to derive from it any actionable consequences in the absence of the even more interesting but even harder-to-get-data on WHY this is the case.
Or maybe you think that this is knowledge that is intrinsically rather than instrumentally valuable to have?
That is a good point. If the work is quick to do for someone super skilled at this, perhaps it is almost quicker to do the work than to try to anticipate its effect? I have some hope that if the results turn out to be shockingly bad (something like women get 3 times as few votes with 90% confidence) that it might inspire this rationality-drive community to take action. Ideally it would just mean people when reading stuff and voting keeps this in the back of their head and perhaps tries to compensate for it—kind of when you force yourself to read stuff you do not agree with to overcome confirmation bias. I am not sure. Another idea is for someone to apply this bias to users on the forum and see if there are some women users that actually might be much more important voices than what current karma tallies indicate. Really not sure here. I lean towards thinking the data is instrumentally valuable. If we could have as many women as men in EA by snapping our fingers, we would be almost twice the size of what we are today! I am super open to suggestions. And I might well be naive about how quick a job this is.
A post on voting statistics on the EAF. I am (perhaps unsurprisingly by now!) interested especially in gender break-down. I would have liked to do this myself with the forum API and getting help from some AI code writer and perhaps also for using user names or descriptions to guess at gender. But I just think I do not have time. I would be super interested to see if there are indications that posts from users perceived to be female gets less votes and/or more downvoted. I guess this is less about what I want someone to write about than what work I would love for someone to do. I think potentially the data is right there in front of us.
Interesting idea. Say we DO find that—what implications would this have?
It seems to me that this data point alone wouldn’t be sufficient to derive from it any actionable consequences in the absence of the even more interesting but even harder-to-get-data on WHY this is the case.
Or maybe you think that this is knowledge that is intrinsically rather than instrumentally valuable to have?
That is a good point. If the work is quick to do for someone super skilled at this, perhaps it is almost quicker to do the work than to try to anticipate its effect? I have some hope that if the results turn out to be shockingly bad (something like women get 3 times as few votes with 90% confidence) that it might inspire this rationality-drive community to take action. Ideally it would just mean people when reading stuff and voting keeps this in the back of their head and perhaps tries to compensate for it—kind of when you force yourself to read stuff you do not agree with to overcome confirmation bias. I am not sure. Another idea is for someone to apply this bias to users on the forum and see if there are some women users that actually might be much more important voices than what current karma tallies indicate. Really not sure here. I lean towards thinking the data is instrumentally valuable. If we could have as many women as men in EA by snapping our fingers, we would be almost twice the size of what we are today! I am super open to suggestions. And I might well be naive about how quick a job this is.