I don’t have much interest in engaging much further in this discussion, since I think most things are covered by other people, and I’ve already spent far more time than I think is warranted on this issue.
I mostly wanted to quickly reply to this section of your comment, given that it directly addresses me:
“I find it hard to fathom how Oliver can say what he said, as all three comments and the upvotes happened before Oliver’s comment. This is a clear case of confirmation bias – twisting the evidence to make it agree with one’s pre-formed conclusion: see link To me Oliver right now is fundamentally discredited as either someone with integrity or as someone who has a good grasp of the mood and dynamics of EAs overall, despite being a central figure in the EA movement and a CEA staff member.”
I’ve responded to Carl Shulman’s comment below regarding my thoughts on the hyperbole used in the linked comment, which I do think muddled the message, and for which I do apologize.
I do also think that your strict dismissal here of my observation is worrying, and I think misses the point that I was trying to make with my comment. I do agree with Gregory’s top comment on this post, in that I think your engagement with Effective Altruism has had a large negative impact on the community, and I do also think that you worsened the experience of being a member of the EA community for at least 70% of its members, and more likely something like 80%. If you disagree, I am happy to send Facebook messages to a random sample of 10-20 people who were recently active on the EA Facebook group, and ask them whether they felt that the work of InIn had a negative impact on their experience as an EA, and bet with you on the outcome.
I think your judgement of me as someone “fundamentally discredited”, “without integrity” or as someone out of touch with the EA community would be misguided, and that the way you wrote it, feels like a fairly unjustified social attack to me.
I am happy to have a discussion about the content of my comment, i.e. the fraction of the community that was negatively influenced by InIn’s actions, though I think most of the evidence has already been brought up by others, or myself, on this, and the implication follows fairly naturally from you having made sure that every potential EA communication channel has featured one or multiple pieces written by InIn at some point, which I generally think worsen people’s experience of the intellectual discourse in the community.
I see the less hyperbolic claim (worsening rather than significant worsening of experience as an EA, 70% rather than almost) and still doubt it.
Online fora where InIn can post are only a subset of experience as an EA, it’s still a small minority of content on those forums, readers who find InIn content unwelcome can and do scroll past it, and some like it or parts thereof. I expect a large portion of people don’t know or care either way about InIn’s effect on their EA experience.
I would still be interested to see the results of such a mini-poll on attitudes toward InIn content from a random sample of some kind (posters/commenters vs group members is a significant distinction for that).
I’ll be happy to take that bet. So if I understand correctly, we’d choose a random 10 people on the EA FB group—ones who are not FB friends with you or I to avoid potential personal factors getting into play—and then ask them if their experience of the EA community has been “significantly worsened” by InIn. If 8 or more say yes, you win. I suggest 1K to a charity of the choice of the winning party? We can let a third party send messages to prevent any framing effects.
Since the majority of the FB group is inactive, I propose that we limit ourselves to the 50 or 100 most recently active members on the FB group, which will give a more representative sample of people who are actually engaging with the community (and since I don’t want to get into debates of what precisely an EA is).
Given that I am friends with a large chunk of the core EA community, I don’t think it’s sensible to exclude my circle of friends, or your circle of friends for that matter.
Splitting this into two questions seems like a better idea. Here is a concrete proposal:
Do you identify as a member of the EA community? [Yes] [No]
Do you feel like the engagement of Gleb Tsipursky or Intentional Insights with the EA community has had a net negative impact on your experience as a member of the EA community? [Yes] [No]
I am happy to take a bet that chosen from the top 50 most recent posters on the FB group (at this current point in time), 7 out of 10 people who said yes to the first question, will say yes to the second. Or, since I would prefer a larger sample size, 14 out of 20 people.
(Since I think this is obviously a system of high noise, I only assign about 60% probability to winning this bet.)
I sadly don’t have $1000 left right now, but would be happy about a $50 bet.
The bet was resolved with 6 yes votes, and 4 no votes, which means a victory for Carl Shulman. I will be sending Carl $10, as per our initial agreement.
I should note that this provided the maximum possible evidence for Oliver’s hypothesis given that outcome, and that as a result I update in his direction (although less so because of the small sample).
(I haven’t run this by Carl yet, but this is my current plan for how to interpret the incoming data)
Since our response rates where somewhat lower than expected (mostly because we chose an account that was friends with only one person from our sample, and so messages probably ended up in people’s secondary Inbox), we decided to only send messages until we get 10 responses to (1), since we don’t want to spam a ton of people with a somewhat shady looking question (I think two people expressed concern about conducting a poll like this).
Since our stopping criteria is 10 people, we will also stop if we get more than 7 yes responses, or more than 3 no responses, before we reach 10 people.
I am unwilling to take “active members of the EA group” as representative of the EA community, since your actual claim was that I made the experience of the EA community significantly worse, and that includes all members, not simply activists. On average, only 1% of any internet community contribute, but the rest are still community members. Instead, I am fine taking the bet than Benito describes—who is clearly far from friendly to InIn.
I am even fine with going with your lower estimate of 14 out of 20.
I am fine including friends.
I am fine with the two questions, although I would insist the second question be “significantly worse” not simply “negative impact,” since that is the claim we are testing, and the same for “significant preference for Gleb or InIn to not have engaged.” Words matter.
I am fine with having a pledge of $1K to be contributed as either of us has the money to do so in the future. I presume you will eventually have $1K.
Actually, I’d suggest just taking a random sample from the FB group. My guess is that your positive connections should be taken into account in this bet Gleb—if you’ve personally had a significant positive impact on many people’s lives in the movement (and helped them be better effective altruists) then that’s something this is trying to measure.
Also, 10 seems like a small sample, 20 seems better.
Regarding positive connections, the claim made by Oliver is what we’re trying to measure—that I made “significantly worse” the experience of being a member of the EA community for “something like 80%” of the people there. I had not made any claims about my positive connections.
After some private conversation with Carl Shulman, who thinks that I am miscalibrated on this, and whose reasoning I trust quite a bit, I have updated away from me winning a bet with the words “significantly worse” and also think it’s probably unlikely I would win a bet with 8⁄10, instead of 7⁄10.
I have however taken on a bet with Carl with the exact wording I supplied below, i.e. with the words “net negative” and 7⁄10. Though given Carl’s track record of winning bets, I feel a feeling of doom about the outcome of that bet, and on some level expect to lose that bet as well.
At this point, my epistemic status on this is definitely more confused, and I assign significant probability to me overestimating the degree to which people will report that have InIn or Gleb had a negative impact on their experience (though I am even more confused whether I am just updating about people’s reports, or the actual effects on the EA community, both of which seem like plausible candidates to me).
FYI my initial reaction was that people in the community would feel very averse to being so boldly critical, and want to be charitable to InIn (as they’ve been doing for years).
I don’t have much interest in engaging much further in this discussion, since I think most things are covered by other people, and I’ve already spent far more time than I think is warranted on this issue.
I mostly wanted to quickly reply to this section of your comment, given that it directly addresses me:
“I find it hard to fathom how Oliver can say what he said, as all three comments and the upvotes happened before Oliver’s comment. This is a clear case of confirmation bias – twisting the evidence to make it agree with one’s pre-formed conclusion: see link To me Oliver right now is fundamentally discredited as either someone with integrity or as someone who has a good grasp of the mood and dynamics of EAs overall, despite being a central figure in the EA movement and a CEA staff member.”
I’ve responded to Carl Shulman’s comment below regarding my thoughts on the hyperbole used in the linked comment, which I do think muddled the message, and for which I do apologize.
I do also think that your strict dismissal here of my observation is worrying, and I think misses the point that I was trying to make with my comment. I do agree with Gregory’s top comment on this post, in that I think your engagement with Effective Altruism has had a large negative impact on the community, and I do also think that you worsened the experience of being a member of the EA community for at least 70% of its members, and more likely something like 80%. If you disagree, I am happy to send Facebook messages to a random sample of 10-20 people who were recently active on the EA Facebook group, and ask them whether they felt that the work of InIn had a negative impact on their experience as an EA, and bet with you on the outcome.
I think your judgement of me as someone “fundamentally discredited”, “without integrity” or as someone out of touch with the EA community would be misguided, and that the way you wrote it, feels like a fairly unjustified social attack to me.
I am happy to have a discussion about the content of my comment, i.e. the fraction of the community that was negatively influenced by InIn’s actions, though I think most of the evidence has already been brought up by others, or myself, on this, and the implication follows fairly naturally from you having made sure that every potential EA communication channel has featured one or multiple pieces written by InIn at some point, which I generally think worsen people’s experience of the intellectual discourse in the community.
I see the less hyperbolic claim (worsening rather than significant worsening of experience as an EA, 70% rather than almost) and still doubt it.
Online fora where InIn can post are only a subset of experience as an EA, it’s still a small minority of content on those forums, readers who find InIn content unwelcome can and do scroll past it, and some like it or parts thereof. I expect a large portion of people don’t know or care either way about InIn’s effect on their EA experience.
I would still be interested to see the results of such a mini-poll on attitudes toward InIn content from a random sample of some kind (posters/commenters vs group members is a significant distinction for that).
I’ll be happy to take that bet. So if I understand correctly, we’d choose a random 10 people on the EA FB group—ones who are not FB friends with you or I to avoid potential personal factors getting into play—and then ask them if their experience of the EA community has been “significantly worsened” by InIn. If 8 or more say yes, you win. I suggest 1K to a charity of the choice of the winning party? We can let a third party send messages to prevent any framing effects.
Since the majority of the FB group is inactive, I propose that we limit ourselves to the 50 or 100 most recently active members on the FB group, which will give a more representative sample of people who are actually engaging with the community (and since I don’t want to get into debates of what precisely an EA is).
Given that I am friends with a large chunk of the core EA community, I don’t think it’s sensible to exclude my circle of friends, or your circle of friends for that matter.
Splitting this into two questions seems like a better idea. Here is a concrete proposal:
Do you identify as a member of the EA community? [Yes] [No]
Do you feel like the engagement of Gleb Tsipursky or Intentional Insights with the EA community has had a net negative impact on your experience as a member of the EA community? [Yes] [No]
I am happy to take a bet that chosen from the top 50 most recent posters on the FB group (at this current point in time), 7 out of 10 people who said yes to the first question, will say yes to the second. Or, since I would prefer a larger sample size, 14 out of 20 people.
(Since I think this is obviously a system of high noise, I only assign about 60% probability to winning this bet.)
I sadly don’t have $1000 left right now, but would be happy about a $50 bet.
[Posting to note I have agreed to bet against Oliver on his proposed terms above.]
Why do people keep betting against Carl Shulman???
No shame if you lose, so much glory if you win
I wasn’t super-confident, and so far it looks neck-and-neck (albeit on a smaller and noisier dataset than we had hoped for, 10 instead of 20).
Any outcome yet?
And the results are in!
The bet was resolved with 6 yes votes, and 4 no votes, which means a victory for Carl Shulman. I will be sending Carl $10, as per our initial agreement.
I should note that this provided the maximum possible evidence for Oliver’s hypothesis given that outcome, and that as a result I update in his direction (although less so because of the small sample).
We had 8⁄10 responses, and just sent out messages to another batch to get the last two responses. Should be resolved soon.
What will you do about people who don’t reply to your messages?
(I haven’t run this by Carl yet, but this is my current plan for how to interpret the incoming data)
Since our response rates where somewhat lower than expected (mostly because we chose an account that was friends with only one person from our sample, and so messages probably ended up in people’s secondary Inbox), we decided to only send messages until we get 10 responses to (1), since we don’t want to spam a ton of people with a somewhat shady looking question (I think two people expressed concern about conducting a poll like this).
Since our stopping criteria is 10 people, we will also stop if we get more than 7 yes responses, or more than 3 no responses, before we reach 10 people.
I agree to this.
I’m interpreting this as “go until you get 20 ‘yes’ responses to (1) and then compare their responses to (2)”.
I am unwilling to take “active members of the EA group” as representative of the EA community, since your actual claim was that I made the experience of the EA community significantly worse, and that includes all members, not simply activists. On average, only 1% of any internet community contribute, but the rest are still community members. Instead, I am fine taking the bet than Benito describes—who is clearly far from friendly to InIn.
I am even fine with going with your lower estimate of 14 out of 20.
I am fine including friends.
I am fine with the two questions, although I would insist the second question be “significantly worse” not simply “negative impact,” since that is the claim we are testing, and the same for “significant preference for Gleb or InIn to not have engaged.” Words matter.
I am fine with having a pledge of $1K to be contributed as either of us has the money to do so in the future. I presume you will eventually have $1K.
I read “active” to mean actually involved in things, whether socially, online, finding, or campaigning.
The word “activist” has a stronger connotation in spite of the same root.
Fair enough
Actually, I’d suggest just taking a random sample from the FB group. My guess is that your positive connections should be taken into account in this bet Gleb—if you’ve personally had a significant positive impact on many people’s lives in the movement (and helped them be better effective altruists) then that’s something this is trying to measure.
Also, 10 seems like a small sample, 20 seems better.
I’m fine taking a random sample of 20 people.
Regarding positive connections, the claim made by Oliver is what we’re trying to measure—that I made “significantly worse” the experience of being a member of the EA community for “something like 80%” of the people there. I had not made any claims about my positive connections.
After some private conversation with Carl Shulman, who thinks that I am miscalibrated on this, and whose reasoning I trust quite a bit, I have updated away from me winning a bet with the words “significantly worse” and also think it’s probably unlikely I would win a bet with 8⁄10, instead of 7⁄10.
I have however taken on a bet with Carl with the exact wording I supplied below, i.e. with the words “net negative” and 7⁄10. Though given Carl’s track record of winning bets, I feel a feeling of doom about the outcome of that bet, and on some level expect to lose that bet as well.
At this point, my epistemic status on this is definitely more confused, and I assign significant probability to me overestimating the degree to which people will report that have InIn or Gleb had a negative impact on their experience (though I am even more confused whether I am just updating about people’s reports, or the actual effects on the EA community, both of which seem like plausible candidates to me).
FYI my initial reaction was that people in the community would feel very averse to being so boldly critical, and want to be charitable to InIn (as they’ve been doing for years).