I’m wondering to what extent this serves as one small data point in support of the “too much hero worship/celebrity idolization in EA” hypothesis, and (if so) to what extent we should do something about it. I feel kind of conflicted, because in a very real sense reputation can be a result of hard work over time,[1] and it seems unreasonable to say that people shouldn’t benefit from that. But it also seems antithetical to the pursuit of truth, philosophy, and doing good to weigh to the messenger so heavily over the message.
I’m mulling this over, but it is a complex and interconnected enough issue that I doubt I will create any novel ideas with some casual thought.
Perhaps just changing the upvote buttons to something more like this content creates nurtures a discussion space that lines up with the principles of EA? I’m not confident that would change much.
Although not always. Sometimes a person is just in the right place at the right time. Big issues of genetic lottery and class matter. But in a very simplistic example, my highest ranking post on the EA forum is not one of the posts that I spent hours and hours thinking about and writing, but instead is one where I simply linked to a article about EA in the popular press and basically said “hey guys, look how cool this is!”
I’m not convinced by this example; in addition to expressing the view, Toby’s message is a speech act that serves to ostracize behaviour in a way that messages from random people do not. Since his comment achieves something the others do not it makes sense for people to treat it differently. This is similar to the way people get more excited when a judge agrees with them that they were wronged than when a random person does; it is not just because of the prestige of the judge, but because of the consequences of that agreement.
I’m glad that you mentioned this. This makes sense to me, and I think it weakens the idea of this particular circumstance as an example of “celebrity idolization.”
If the EA forum had little emoji reactions for this made me change my mind or this made me update a bit, I would use them here. 😁
I agree as to the upvotes but don’t find the explanation as convincing on the agreevotes. Maybe many people’s internal business process is to only consider whether to agreevote after having decided to upvote?
Yeah, and in general there’s an extremely high correlation between upvotes and agreevotes, perhaps higher than there should be. It’s also possible that some people don’t scroll to the bottom and read all the comments.
I definitely think you should expect a strong correlation between “number of agree-votes” and “number of approval-votes”, since those are both dependent on someone choosing to engage with a comment in the first place, my guess is this explains most of the correlation.
And then yeah, I still expect a pretty substantial remaining correlation.
I wish that it was possible for agree votes to be disabled on comments that aren’t making any claim or proposal. When I write a comment saying “thank you” or “this has given me a lot to think about” and people agree vote (or disagree vote!), it feels to odd: there isn’t even anything to agree or disagree with there!
If we interpret an up-vote as “I want to see more of this kind of thing”, is it so surprising that people want to see more such supportive statements from high-status people?
I would feel more worried if we had examples of e.g. the same argument being made by different people and the higher-status person getting rewarded more. Even then—perhaps we do really want to see more of high-status people reasoning well in public.
Generally, insofar as karma is a lever for rewarding behaviour, we probably care more about the behaviour of high-status people and so we should expect to see them getting more karma when they behave well, and also losing more when they behave badly (which I think we do!). Of course, if we want karma to be something other than an expression of what people want to see more of then it’s more problematic.
Toby’s average karma-per-comment definitely seems higher than average, but it isn’t so much higher than that of other (non-famous) quality posters I spot-checked as to suggest that there are a lot of people regularly upvoting his comments due to hero worship/celebrity idolization. I can’t get the usual karma leaderboard to load to more easily point to actual numbers as opposed to impressionistic ones.
I have this concept I’ve been calling “kayfabe inversion” where attempts to create a social reality that $P$ accidentally enforces $\not P$. The EA vibe of “minimize deference, always criticize your leaders” may just be, by inscrutable social pressures, increasing deference and hero worship and so on. Spurred by my housemate’s view of DoD and it’s ecosystem of contractors (because their dad has a long career in it) that perhaps the military’s explicit deference and hierarchies actually make it easier to do meaningful criticism of or disagreement with leaders, compared to the implicit hierarchies that emerge when you say that you want to minimize deference.
Something along these lines.
Perhaps this hypothesis is made clear by a close reading of tyranny of structurelessness, idk.
In a recent post on the EA forum (Why I Spoke to TIME Magazine, and My Experience as a Female AI Researcher in Silicon Valley), I couldn’t help but notice that a comments from famous and/or well-known people got lots more upvotes than comments by less well-known people, even though the content of the comments was largely similar.
I’m wondering to what extent this serves as one small data point in support of the “too much hero worship/celebrity idolization in EA” hypothesis, and (if so) to what extent we should do something about it. I feel kind of conflicted, because in a very real sense reputation can be a result of hard work over time,[1] and it seems unreasonable to say that people shouldn’t benefit from that. But it also seems antithetical to the pursuit of truth, philosophy, and doing good to weigh to the messenger so heavily over the message.
I’m mulling this over, but it is a complex and interconnected enough issue that I doubt I will create any novel ideas with some casual thought.
Perhaps just changing the upvote buttons to something more like this content creates nurtures a discussion space that lines up with the principles of EA? I’m not confident that would change much.
Although not always. Sometimes a person is just in the right place at the right time. Big issues of genetic lottery and class matter. But in a very simplistic example, my highest ranking post on the EA forum is not one of the posts that I spent hours and hours thinking about and writing, but instead is one where I simply linked to a article about EA in the popular press and basically said “hey guys, look how cool this is!”
I’m not convinced by this example; in addition to expressing the view, Toby’s message is a speech act that serves to ostracize behaviour in a way that messages from random people do not. Since his comment achieves something the others do not it makes sense for people to treat it differently. This is similar to the way people get more excited when a judge agrees with them that they were wronged than when a random person does; it is not just because of the prestige of the judge, but because of the consequences of that agreement.
I’m glad that you mentioned this. This makes sense to me, and I think it weakens the idea of this particular circumstance as an example of “celebrity idolization.”
If the EA forum had little emoji reactions for this made me change my mind or this made me update a bit, I would use them here. 😁
I agree as to the upvotes but don’t find the explanation as convincing on the agreevotes. Maybe many people’s internal business process is to only consider whether to agreevote after having decided to upvote?
Yeah, and in general there’s an extremely high correlation between upvotes and agreevotes, perhaps higher than there should be. It’s also possible that some people don’t scroll to the bottom and read all the comments.
I definitely think you should expect a strong correlation between “number of agree-votes” and “number of approval-votes”, since those are both dependent on someone choosing to engage with a comment in the first place, my guess is this explains most of the correlation.
And then yeah, I still expect a pretty substantial remaining correlation.
I wish that it was possible for agree votes to be disabled on comments that aren’t making any claim or proposal. When I write a comment saying “thank you” or “this has given me a lot to think about” and people agree vote (or disagree vote!), it feels to odd: there isn’t even anything to agree or disagree with there!
In those cases I would interpret agree votes as “I’m also thankful” or “this has also given me a lot to think about”
If we interpret an up-vote as “I want to see more of this kind of thing”, is it so surprising that people want to see more such supportive statements from high-status people?
I would feel more worried if we had examples of e.g. the same argument being made by different people and the higher-status person getting rewarded more. Even then—perhaps we do really want to see more of high-status people reasoning well in public.
Generally, insofar as karma is a lever for rewarding behaviour, we probably care more about the behaviour of high-status people and so we should expect to see them getting more karma when they behave well, and also losing more when they behave badly (which I think we do!). Of course, if we want karma to be something other than an expression of what people want to see more of then it’s more problematic.
Toby’s average karma-per-comment definitely seems higher than average, but it isn’t so much higher than that of other (non-famous) quality posters I spot-checked as to suggest that there are a lot of people regularly upvoting his comments due to hero worship/celebrity idolization. I can’t get the usual karma leaderboard to load to more easily point to actual numbers as opposed to impressionistic ones.
I have this concept I’ve been calling “kayfabe inversion” where attempts to create a social reality that $P$ accidentally enforces $\not P$. The EA vibe of “minimize deference, always criticize your leaders” may just be, by inscrutable social pressures, increasing deference and hero worship and so on. Spurred by my housemate’s view of DoD and it’s ecosystem of contractors (because their dad has a long career in it) that perhaps the military’s explicit deference and hierarchies actually make it easier to do meaningful criticism of or disagreement with leaders, compared to the implicit hierarchies that emerge when you say that you want to minimize deference.
Something along these lines.
Perhaps this hypothesis is made clear by a close reading of tyranny of structurelessness, idk.
Could I bother you to rephrase “$P$ accidentally enforces $\not P$”? I don’t know what you mean by using these symbols.
Oh sorry I just meant a general form for “any arbitrary quality a community may wish to cultivate”