Great point. I think it’s really interesting to compare the blog comments on slatestarcodex.com to the reddit comments on /r/slatestarcodex. It’s a relatively good controlled experiment because both communities are attracted by Scott’s writing, and slatestarcodex has a decent amount of overlap with EA. However, the character of the two communities is pretty different IMO. A lot of people avoid the blog comments because “it takes forever to find the good content”. And if you read the blog comments, you can tell that they are written by people with a lot of time on their hands—especially in the open threads. The discussion is a lot more leisurely and people don’t seem nearly as motivated to grab the reader’s interest. The subreddit is a lot more political, maybe because reddit’s voting system facilitates mobbing.
Digital institution design is a very high leverage problem for civilization as a whole, and should probably receive EA attention on those grounds. But maybe it’s a bad idea to use the EA forum as a skunk works?
BTW there is more discussion of the subforums thing here.
I actually believe LW2.0 is doing a pretty good job, and is likely better than reddit.
Just there is a lot of dilemmas implicitly answered in some way, e.g.
total utilitarian or average? total
decay with time or not? no decay
everything adds to one number? yes
show it or hide it? show it
scaling? logarithmic
This likely has some positive effects, and some negative ones. I will not go into speculation about what they are. Just if EAF2.0 is going this direction, I’d prefer the karma system to be sufficiently different from LW. E.g going average utilitarian and not displaying the karma would be different enough (just as an example!)
Also the academic literature on “social influence bias” (paper by Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral and Sean J. Taylor from 2014 and followups) may be worth attention
Yeah maybe they could just select whatever karma tweaks would require the minimum code changes while still being relatively sane. Or ask the LW2.0 team what their second choice karma implementation would look like and use it for the EA forum.
I really want to highlight the small point that you made in the end:
Digital institution design is a very high leverage problem for civilization as a whole, and should probably receive EA attention on those grounds.
I am personally very interested in this topic and there is a lot of depth to it. It would be awesome if this topic could gain more traction in the EA community as it seems to be one of the most important challenges for the near-to-medium term future. It may receive some conceptual attention in terms of AI alignment and more practical considerations in terms of AI development coordination but it is actually a much broader challenge than that with implications for all areas of (digital) live. If I find the time, I will try to put a comprehensive post on this together. Whoever is also interested in this topic please get in touch with me! (PM or alex{at}herwix.com)
My impression is that the subreddit comments can be longer, more detailed and higher quality than the blog comments. Maybe they are not better on average, but the outliers are far better and more numerous, and the karma sorting means the outliers are the ones that you see first.
Great point. I think it’s really interesting to compare the blog comments on slatestarcodex.com to the reddit comments on /r/slatestarcodex. It’s a relatively good controlled experiment because both communities are attracted by Scott’s writing, and slatestarcodex has a decent amount of overlap with EA. However, the character of the two communities is pretty different IMO. A lot of people avoid the blog comments because “it takes forever to find the good content”. And if you read the blog comments, you can tell that they are written by people with a lot of time on their hands—especially in the open threads. The discussion is a lot more leisurely and people don’t seem nearly as motivated to grab the reader’s interest. The subreddit is a lot more political, maybe because reddit’s voting system facilitates mobbing.
Digital institution design is a very high leverage problem for civilization as a whole, and should probably receive EA attention on those grounds. But maybe it’s a bad idea to use the EA forum as a skunk works?
BTW there is more discussion of the subforums thing here.
Good observation with the SSC natural experiment!
I actually believe LW2.0 is doing a pretty good job, and is likely better than reddit.
Just there is a lot of dilemmas implicitly answered in some way, e.g.
total utilitarian or average? total
decay with time or not? no decay
everything adds to one number? yes
show it or hide it? show it
scaling? logarithmic
This likely has some positive effects, and some negative ones. I will not go into speculation about what they are. Just if EAF2.0 is going this direction, I’d prefer the karma system to be sufficiently different from LW. E.g going average utilitarian and not displaying the karma would be different enough (just as an example!)
Also the academic literature on “social influence bias” (paper by Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral and Sean J. Taylor from 2014 and followups) may be worth attention
Yeah maybe they could just select whatever karma tweaks would require the minimum code changes while still being relatively sane. Or ask the LW2.0 team what their second choice karma implementation would look like and use it for the EA forum.
I really want to highlight the small point that you made in the end:
I am personally very interested in this topic and there is a lot of depth to it. It would be awesome if this topic could gain more traction in the EA community as it seems to be one of the most important challenges for the near-to-medium term future. It may receive some conceptual attention in terms of AI alignment and more practical considerations in terms of AI development coordination but it is actually a much broader challenge than that with implications for all areas of (digital) live. If I find the time, I will try to put a comprehensive post on this together. Whoever is also interested in this topic please get in touch with me! (PM or alex{at}herwix.com)
My impression is that the subreddit comments can be longer, more detailed and higher quality than the blog comments. Maybe they are not better on average, but the outliers are far better and more numerous, and the karma sorting means the outliers are the ones that you see first.