I think the general question about voting norms w.r.t. conflicts of interest—and the more specific questions that are relevant here—are important and very hard, and I don’t think I currently have good/well-thought-through answers.
My current, tentative perspective/intuition/feelings on this is something like:
The point of this forum is to do good effectively. If the karma of a post on a sensitive topic is determined mostly by, say, the number of Israelis vs. number of Palestinians that are involved in the EA community (and have access to electricity + internet), that seems like a problem.
Voting on a post helps to organize the Frontpage — it’s a signal of what you think would be useful for others to read in order to do more good — and provides feedback to the poster.
But then the guide lists things that users should not do, followed by the sentence “Other than that, you can vote using your preferred criteria.” That list of things that users should not do does not seem to cover things like [casting votes that promote international legitimacy for the actions of my government in a deadly conflict that I have extreme emotions about].
Take for example this post titled “I’m a Former Israeli Officer. AMA”. It seems to me reasonable to describe what the author did in that AMA as an attempt to promote ‘pro-Israel propaganda’. So far the author never wrote anything on this forum (from that account) outside that AMA. That post currently has 64 karma points. Should Israelis feel welcome to strong-upvote such posts?
Finally, another relevant consideration: If we ask people to (not) vote in a particular way, but then we do not enforce that request, we can end up in a situation where only some users—ones that are more scrupulous than others—adhere to the request.
I think the general question about voting norms w.r.t. conflicts of interest—and the more specific questions that are relevant here—are important and very hard, and I don’t think I currently have good/well-thought-through answers.
My current, tentative perspective/intuition/feelings on this is something like:
In the Guide to norms on the Forum (that is linked to from the about page) there is a section called Voting norm. It says:
But then the guide lists things that users should not do, followed by the sentence “Other than that, you can vote using your preferred criteria.” That list of things that users should not do does not seem to cover things like [casting votes that promote international legitimacy for the actions of my government in a deadly conflict that I have extreme emotions about].
Take for example this post titled “I’m a Former Israeli Officer. AMA”. It seems to me reasonable to describe what the author did in that AMA as an attempt to promote ‘pro-Israel propaganda’. So far the author never wrote anything on this forum (from that account) outside that AMA. That post currently has 64 karma points. Should Israelis feel welcome to strong-upvote such posts?
Finally, another relevant consideration: If we ask people to (not) vote in a particular way, but then we do not enforce that request, we can end up in a situation where only some users—ones that are more scrupulous than others—adhere to the request.