Maybe we should—after this question of investigation or not has been discussed in more detail—organize community-wide vote on whether there should be an investigation or not?
Knowing what people think is useful, especially if it’s a non-anonymous poll aimed at sparking conversations, questions, etc. (One thing that might help here is to include a field for people to leave a brief explanation of their vote, if the polling software allows for it.)
Anonymous polls are a bit trickier, since random people on the Internet can easily brigade such a poll. And I wouldn’t want to assume that something’s a good idea just because most EAs agree with it; I’d rather focus on the arguments for and against.
“Just focus on the arguments” isn’t a decision-making algorithm, but I think informal processes like “just talk about it and individually do what makes sense” perform better than rigid algorithms in cases like this.
If we want something more formal, I tend to prefer approaches like “delegate the question to someone trustworthy who can spend a bunch of time carefully weighing the arguments” or “subsidize a prediction market to resolve the question” over “just run an opinion poll and do whatever the majority of people-who-see-the-poll vote for, without checking how informed or wise the respondents are”.
The question of a community-wide vote, on any level, about whether there should be such an investigation might at this point be moot. I have personally offered to begin conducting significant parts of such an investigation myself. Since I made that initial comment, I’ve now read several more providing arguments against the need or desirability for such an investigation. Having found them unconvincing, I now intend privately contact at least several private individuals—both in and around the EA movement, as well as some outside of or who no longer participate in the EA community—to pursue that end. Something like a community-wide vote, or some proxy like even dozens of effective altruists trying to talk me out of that, would be unlikely to convice me to not do so.
I disagree, and in this case I don’t think the forum team should have a say in the matter. Each user has their own interpretation of the upvote/downvote button and that’s ok. Personally I don’t use it as “I disagree” but rather as “this comment shouldn’t have been written”, but there’s certainly a correlation. For instance, I both disagree-voted and downvoted your comment (since I dislike the attempt to police this).
Random idea:
Maybe we should—after this question of investigation or not has been discussed in more detail—organize community-wide vote on whether there should be an investigation or not?
It’s easy to vote for something you don’t have to pay for. If we do anything like this, an additional fundraiser to pay for it might be appropriate.
Knowing what people think is useful, especially if it’s a non-anonymous poll aimed at sparking conversations, questions, etc. (One thing that might help here is to include a field for people to leave a brief explanation of their vote, if the polling software allows for it.)
Anonymous polls are a bit trickier, since random people on the Internet can easily brigade such a poll. And I wouldn’t want to assume that something’s a good idea just because most EAs agree with it; I’d rather focus on the arguments for and against.
“Just focus on the arguments” isn’t a decision-making algorithm, but I think informal processes like “just talk about it and individually do what makes sense” perform better than rigid algorithms in cases like this.
If we want something more formal, I tend to prefer approaches like “delegate the question to someone trustworthy who can spend a bunch of time carefully weighing the arguments” or “subsidize a prediction market to resolve the question” over “just run an opinion poll and do whatever the majority of people-who-see-the-poll vote for, without checking how informed or wise the respondents are”.
The question of a community-wide vote, on any level, about whether there should be such an investigation might at this point be moot. I have personally offered to begin conducting significant parts of such an investigation myself. Since I made that initial comment, I’ve now read several more providing arguments against the need or desirability for such an investigation. Having found them unconvincing, I now intend privately contact at least several private individuals—both in and around the EA movement, as well as some outside of or who no longer participate in the EA community—to pursue that end. Something like a community-wide vote, or some proxy like even dozens of effective altruists trying to talk me out of that, would be unlikely to convice me to not do so.
People, the downvote button is not a disagree button. That’s not really what it should be used for.
Thanks
Maybe quite some people don’t like random ideas being shared on the Forum?
I disagree, and in this case I don’t think the forum team should have a say in the matter. Each user has their own interpretation of the upvote/downvote button and that’s ok. Personally I don’t use it as “I disagree” but rather as “this comment shouldn’t have been written”, but there’s certainly a correlation. For instance, I both disagree-voted and downvoted your comment (since I dislike the attempt to police this).