I think thereâs issues of adversarial bias with it being fully public (e.g. people writing inaccurate/âfalse-flag entries out of spite) and it could be better in future to do a version with Forum users with >100 karma.
Indeed. Anon open forms are maximally vulnerable to this: not only can detractors write stuff (for example, this poll did show up on reddits that are archly critical of EA etc.), but you can signal-boost your own renegade opinion if youâre willing to make the trivial effort to repeatedly submit it (e.g. âI think Alice sucks and people should stop paying attention to herâ, âI completely agree with the comment aboveâAlice is just really toxic to this communityâ, âAbsolutely agreed re. Alice, but I feel I canât say anything publicly because she might retaliate against meâ, etc.)
On detractors writing: Given some of the comments on the survey, I would be surprised if quite a few answers hadnât come from people who have no connection to the EA community save as critics. For example:
EA is a waste of money and time. Another example of tech minded people trying to reinvent the wheel.
This doesnât seem like someone who actually spends time on the EA Forum (or, if they do, I wish theyâd do something they found more enjoyable).
This set-up does seem like it could be exploitable in an adversarial manner⌠but my impression from reading the poll results, is that this is weak evidence against that actually being a failure modeâsince it doesnât seem to have happened.
I didnât notice any attempts to frame a particular person multiple times. The cases where there were repeated criticism of some orgs seemed to plausibly come from different accounts, since they often offered different reasons for the criticism or seemed stylistically different.
Moreover, if asked beforehand about the outcomes of something that can be read as âan open invitation to anonymous trolling that will get read by a huge amount of people in the movementâ⌠I would have expected to see things way, way worse than what I actually saw. In fact, Iâve seen many public and identifiable comments sections on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter that were much worse than this anonymous poll.
(I claim these things weakly based on having read through all the responses in the sheet. I didnât analyse them in-depth with an eye to finding traces of adversarial action, and donât expect my approach here would have caught more sophisticated attempts.)
Indeed. Anon open forms are maximally vulnerable to this: not only can detractors write stuff (for example, this poll did show up on reddits that are archly critical of EA etc.), but you can signal-boost your own renegade opinion if youâre willing to make the trivial effort to repeatedly submit it (e.g. âI think Alice sucks and people should stop paying attention to herâ, âI completely agree with the comment aboveâAlice is just really toxic to this communityâ, âAbsolutely agreed re. Alice, but I feel I canât say anything publicly because she might retaliate against meâ, etc.)
On detractors writing: Given some of the comments on the survey, I would be surprised if quite a few answers hadnât come from people who have no connection to the EA community save as critics. For example:
This doesnât seem like someone who actually spends time on the EA Forum (or, if they do, I wish theyâd do something they found more enjoyable).
This set-up does seem like it could be exploitable in an adversarial manner⌠but my impression from reading the poll results, is that this is weak evidence against that actually being a failure modeâsince it doesnât seem to have happened.
I didnât notice any attempts to frame a particular person multiple times. The cases where there were repeated criticism of some orgs seemed to plausibly come from different accounts, since they often offered different reasons for the criticism or seemed stylistically different.
Moreover, if asked beforehand about the outcomes of something that can be read as âan open invitation to anonymous trolling that will get read by a huge amount of people in the movementâ⌠I would have expected to see things way, way worse than what I actually saw. In fact, Iâve seen many public and identifiable comments sections on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter that were much worse than this anonymous poll.
(I claim these things weakly based on having read through all the responses in the sheet. I didnât analyse them in-depth with an eye to finding traces of adversarial action, and donât expect my approach here would have caught more sophisticated attempts.)