It’s also a reason I find those discussion techniques inadequate: they don’t address stopping conditions in discussions and therefore always allow anyone to quit any discussion at any time, due to bias or irrationality, with no transparency or accountability.
I think what sets the EA forum apart is the folks who choose to participate in the forum, there’s a lot of posts that go up here and I like their focus (ethics, charity, ai, meta stuff about thinking).
I doubt there’s enough interest to persuade folks to create and maintain a system of accountability for all arguments put on the forum or into their pool of literature, but there is a tendency here to quote other’s work, and that lets them do peer review and build on earlier work, so there’s some continuity of knowledge development that you don’t always find. Also, sometimes posts show academic rigor, which can have its pluses. And while relying on expert opinion on controversial topics isn’t going to lead to consensus, at least it positions an author in a larger field of perspectives enough for debates to have a well-known starting point.
My contest entry wasn’t about that sort of continuity or any system of building consensus. Fwiw, here is my contest entry. Like I said, it was about updating, but makes some other points about unweighted beliefs vs subjective probabilities, prediction, and EA guilt. Most of it went down in a short two-day stretch just before the contest entry was due, and there was a lot I wanted to improve for the next month as I waited for results to come back. I’ve still got some changes to make, then I’ll be done with it.
I think what sets the EA forum apart is the folks who choose to participate in the forum, there’s a lot of posts that go up here and I like their focus (ethics, charity, ai, meta stuff about thinking).
I doubt there’s enough interest to persuade folks to create and maintain a system of accountability for all arguments put on the forum or into their pool of literature, but there is a tendency here to quote other’s work, and that lets them do peer review and build on earlier work, so there’s some continuity of knowledge development that you don’t always find. Also, sometimes posts show academic rigor, which can have its pluses. And while relying on expert opinion on controversial topics isn’t going to lead to consensus, at least it positions an author in a larger field of perspectives enough for debates to have a well-known starting point.
My contest entry wasn’t about that sort of continuity or any system of building consensus. Fwiw, here is my contest entry. Like I said, it was about updating, but makes some other points about unweighted beliefs vs subjective probabilities, prediction, and EA guilt. Most of it went down in a short two-day stretch just before the contest entry was due, and there was a lot I wanted to improve for the next month as I waited for results to come back. I’ve still got some changes to make, then I’ll be done with it.