Do people have thoughts on what the policy should be on upvoting posts by coworkers?
Obviously telling coworkers (or worse, employees!) to upvote your posts should be verboten, and having a EA forum policy that you can’t upvote posts by coworkers is too draconian (and also hard to enforce).
But I think there’s a lot of room in between to form a situation like “where on average posts by people who work at EA orgs will have more karma than posts of equivalent semi-objective quality.” Concretely, 2 mechanisms in which this could happen (and almost certainly does happen, at least for me):
1. For various reasons, I’m more likely to read posts by people who are coworkers. Since EAF users have a bias towards upvoting more than downvoting, by default I’d expect this to lead to a higher expected karma for coworkers.
2. I’m more likely to give people I know well a benefit of a doubt, and read their posts more charitably. This leads to higher expected karma.
3. I’m at least slightly more likely to respond to comments/posts by coworkers, since I have a stronger belief that they will reply. Since my default forum usage behavior is to upvote replies to my questions (as long as they are even remotely pertinent), this increases karma.
#2 seems like a “me problem”, and is an internal problem/bias I am optimistic about being able to correct for. #3 and especially #1 on the other hand seems like something that’s fairly hard to correct for unless we have generalized policies or norms.
(One example of a potential norm is to say that people should only upvote posts by coworkers if they think they’re likely to have read the post if they were working in a different field/org, or only upvote with a certain random probability proportional to such).
I’d prefer that people on the Forum not have to worry too much about norms of this kind. If you see a post or comment you think is good, upvote it. If you’re worried that you and others at your org have unequal exposure to coworkers’ content, make a concerted effort to read other Forum posts as well, or even share those posts within your organization.
That said, if you want to set a norm for yourself or suggest one for others, I have no problem with that — I just don’t see the Forum adopting something officially. Part of the problem is that people often have friends or housemates at other orgs, share an alma mater or cause area with a poster. etc. — there are many ways to be biased by personal connections, and I want to push us toward reading and supporting more things rather than trying to limit the extent to which people express excitement out of concern for these biases.
Do people have thoughts on what the policy should be on upvoting posts by coworkers?
Obviously telling coworkers (or worse, employees!) to upvote your posts should be verboten, and having a EA forum policy that you can’t upvote posts by coworkers is too draconian (and also hard to enforce).
But I think there’s a lot of room in between to form a situation like “where on average posts by people who work at EA orgs will have more karma than posts of equivalent semi-objective quality.” Concretely, 2 mechanisms in which this could happen (and almost certainly does happen, at least for me):
1. For various reasons, I’m more likely to read posts by people who are coworkers. Since EAF users have a bias towards upvoting more than downvoting, by default I’d expect this to lead to a higher expected karma for coworkers.
2. I’m more likely to give people I know well a benefit of a doubt, and read their posts more charitably. This leads to higher expected karma.
3. I’m at least slightly more likely to respond to comments/posts by coworkers, since I have a stronger belief that they will reply. Since my default forum usage behavior is to upvote replies to my questions (as long as they are even remotely pertinent), this increases karma.
#2 seems like a “me problem”, and is an internal problem/bias I am optimistic about being able to correct for. #3 and especially #1 on the other hand seems like something that’s fairly hard to correct for unless we have generalized policies or norms.
(One example of a potential norm is to say that people should only upvote posts by coworkers if they think they’re likely to have read the post if they were working in a different field/org, or only upvote with a certain random probability proportional to such).
I’d prefer that people on the Forum not have to worry too much about norms of this kind. If you see a post or comment you think is good, upvote it. If you’re worried that you and others at your org have unequal exposure to coworkers’ content, make a concerted effort to read other Forum posts as well, or even share those posts within your organization.
That said, if you want to set a norm for yourself or suggest one for others, I have no problem with that — I just don’t see the Forum adopting something officially. Part of the problem is that people often have friends or housemates at other orgs, share an alma mater or cause area with a poster. etc. — there are many ways to be biased by personal connections, and I want to push us toward reading and supporting more things rather than trying to limit the extent to which people express excitement out of concern for these biases.