While I disagree with Michael and don’t think we should discourage EA orgs from posting fundraising documents,* I’m disappointed that his comment has so far received 100% downvotes. This seems to be part of a disturbing larger phenomenon whereby criticism of prominent EA orgs or people tends to attract significantly more downvotes that other posts or comments of comparable quality, especially posts or comments that praise such orgs or people.
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(*) I work for CEA, so there’s a potential conflict of interest that may bias my thinking about this issue.
I downvoted because I found the tone negative and hyperbolic. It won’t kill the forum. I think a good norm the community is to always steelman before criticising. This would make us more welcoming and constructive.
Also there’s now 14 comments debating this issue and 0 comments debating how much funding CEA should get, which is a vastly more important issue. So this comment derailed the thread.
If the CEA is seriously seeking feedback from unaligned EA community members on how much funding the CEA should receive, I have all kinds of thoughts on this I’ll write up as a top-level post when I get the chance.
I agree that, other things equal, we want to encourage critics to be constructive. All things considered, however, I’m not sure we should hold criticism to a higher standard, as we seem to be doing. This would result in higher quality criticism, but also in less total criticism.
In addition, the standard to which criticism is held is often influenced by irrelevant considerations, like the status of the person or organization being criticized. So in practice I would expect such a norm to stifle certain types of criticism more than others, over and above reducing criticism in general.
I think we should hold criticism to a higher standard, because criticism has more costs. Negative things are much more memorable than positive things. People often remember criticism, perhaps just on a gut level, even if it’s shown to be wrong later in the thread.
Yep, it’s helpful to emphasize that upvotes and downvotes should be allocated according to whether (as indicated when you hover over the button), you “found this useful”, or “didn’t find this useful”, not based on agreement!
I know this is the stated meaning, and I usually think it’s correct to act on. In some cases when usage deviates from this, though, I’m not actually sure that people are making a mistake.
I think that happens most often on short statements of opinion. In such cases, there’s not much ambiguity about how useful the comment was (opinions are always somewhat useful but don’t contain amazing new insights). It’s more useful to get a cheap instant poll of how widespread that opinion is in the community.
Notes:
I’m not confident in this, but to the extent that it seems wrong it would be if we thought posting short opinions was generally unhelpful. (I’d find that claim more plausible of LW, but still dubious there.) Otherwise to convey the information about distribution of opinions lots of people need to post.
Separate buttons as Benito suggests below might well be preferable. In particular they’d avoid ambiguity of things like the case in hand, which will be mostly read as an expression of opinion but also gives some considerations for.
This “instant poll” effect is to my mind the strongest reason for having voting scores on posts be public anyway. Maybe if there were separate buttons only the “agree/disagree” one would get displayed, and the “useful/not-useful” would be used to determine display-order for posts.
I was going to down-vote Ryan’s comment to express that I disagree ;) But then I noticed that it was unusually helpful that he’d raised the point explicitly as it made it easier to have this conversation, and didn’t know what to do.
The primary role of the vote buttons is to create the incentive gradient that determines which comments (and commenters) we get to have. This is perhaps the most powerful tool we have for incentivising some types of commentary. So I think we should practically always vote according to what comments we want to exist. On the margin, I think everyone (including you, based on your last bullet!) should vote more on usefulness.
I definitely use the down vote button a lot to expressive negative affect, which is strongly influenced by ‘disagree’. Having separate buttons could be pretty awesome.
You could give a little (3x3? 5x5?) voting grid: usefulness is one dimension, agreement is another. Users have the option of hiding one of the dimensions, and maybe this is the default.
While I disagree with Michael and don’t think we should discourage EA orgs from posting fundraising documents,* I’m disappointed that his comment has so far received 100% downvotes. This seems to be part of a disturbing larger phenomenon whereby criticism of prominent EA orgs or people tends to attract significantly more downvotes that other posts or comments of comparable quality, especially posts or comments that praise such orgs or people.
__
(*) I work for CEA, so there’s a potential conflict of interest that may bias my thinking about this issue.
I downvoted because I found the tone negative and hyperbolic. It won’t kill the forum. I think a good norm the community is to always steelman before criticising. This would make us more welcoming and constructive.
Also there’s now 14 comments debating this issue and 0 comments debating how much funding CEA should get, which is a vastly more important issue. So this comment derailed the thread.
If the CEA is seriously seeking feedback from unaligned EA community members on how much funding the CEA should receive, I have all kinds of thoughts on this I’ll write up as a top-level post when I get the chance.
I agree that, other things equal, we want to encourage critics to be constructive. All things considered, however, I’m not sure we should hold criticism to a higher standard, as we seem to be doing. This would result in higher quality criticism, but also in less total criticism.
In addition, the standard to which criticism is held is often influenced by irrelevant considerations, like the status of the person or organization being criticized. So in practice I would expect such a norm to stifle certain types of criticism more than others, over and above reducing criticism in general.
I think we should hold criticism to a higher standard, because criticism has more costs. Negative things are much more memorable than positive things. People often remember criticism, perhaps just on a gut level, even if it’s shown to be wrong later in the thread.
Yep, it’s helpful to emphasize that upvotes and downvotes should be allocated according to whether (as indicated when you hover over the button), you “found this useful”, or “didn’t find this useful”, not based on agreement!
I know this is the stated meaning, and I usually think it’s correct to act on. In some cases when usage deviates from this, though, I’m not actually sure that people are making a mistake.
I think that happens most often on short statements of opinion. In such cases, there’s not much ambiguity about how useful the comment was (opinions are always somewhat useful but don’t contain amazing new insights). It’s more useful to get a cheap instant poll of how widespread that opinion is in the community.
Notes:
I’m not confident in this, but to the extent that it seems wrong it would be if we thought posting short opinions was generally unhelpful. (I’d find that claim more plausible of LW, but still dubious there.) Otherwise to convey the information about distribution of opinions lots of people need to post.
Separate buttons as Benito suggests below might well be preferable. In particular they’d avoid ambiguity of things like the case in hand, which will be mostly read as an expression of opinion but also gives some considerations for.
This “instant poll” effect is to my mind the strongest reason for having voting scores on posts be public anyway. Maybe if there were separate buttons only the “agree/disagree” one would get displayed, and the “useful/not-useful” would be used to determine display-order for posts.
I was going to down-vote Ryan’s comment to express that I disagree ;) But then I noticed that it was unusually helpful that he’d raised the point explicitly as it made it easier to have this conversation, and didn’t know what to do.
The primary role of the vote buttons is to create the incentive gradient that determines which comments (and commenters) we get to have. This is perhaps the most powerful tool we have for incentivising some types of commentary. So I think we should practically always vote according to what comments we want to exist. On the margin, I think everyone (including you, based on your last bullet!) should vote more on usefulness.
Yes—perhaps the text (particularly of the downvote button) should be changed to something that clarifies that.
I definitely use the down vote button a lot to expressive negative affect, which is strongly influenced by ‘disagree’. Having separate buttons could be pretty awesome.
It would also be terrible UI to have two ‘up’ and two ‘down’ buttons with different meanings.
The nearest thing that would be feasible would be to have, as does LessWrong, a polling feature.
You could give a little (3x3? 5x5?) voting grid: usefulness is one dimension, agreement is another. Users have the option of hiding one of the dimensions, and maybe this is the default.