Almost all content useful to EAs is not written on the forum, and almost all authors who could write such content will not write it on the forum. So it would be a lot more valuable to reward good content whether or not it is on the forum. It is harder to evaluate all content, but one can consider nominated content. If this is outside one’s job description, then can one change the job description?
Could you say more about the other sources you are thinking of as better locations? Are they aggregators or are you just thinking about the long tail of e.g. blogs hosted by individual organizations or academic journals?
Crossposting to the Forum is one obvious way that externally hosted content could get here, though it’s inelegant.
Yeah, I think high-quality content is spread across many blogs. But not terribly hard to find—a lot of it is in blog posts that can be seen by following a hundred Twitter accounts.
I agree crossposting or linkposting is one way to gather content. I guess that’s kind-of what subreddits/hackernews/Twitter all do, but those platforms are more-designed for that purpose. Not sure what’s the best solution.
What are some examples of blog content you think is at least as good as a very good Forum post, is potentially useful to EAs, and wasn’t crossposted to the Forum?
Ideally, if I find content like that, I’d like to crosspost it for people to read here, rather than hoping that Forum readers also start reading a bunch of different blogs as a result of seeing them in Prize writeups. I think your initial comment is a good argument for more crossposting, or perhaps having a “suggest crosspost” box people can use to send me URLs of things they’d like posted here (if they want to save time on formatting and such).
I don’t think rewarding content outside the Forum is necessarily “a lot more valuable” unless doing so gets those authors to write more EA-friendly content and/or use the Forum more. To the extent that the Prize is an incentive rather than just a reward, it seems like a better incentive to offer more predictable rewards to people who submit their writing to a single website rather than rewarding people from all over the web.
To draw a comparison: If a literary journal pays people who submit great stories to the journal, is that going to incentivize more good short-fiction writing than going to authors who don’t know about the journal and giving them money for things they wrote elsewhere? I don’t think the answer is obvious, and I’d lean toward the former being more useful.
This does seem like a very good initiative, though I wonder whether grant funding might make more sense than small prizes. Jason Crawford got $75,000 from Open Phil (and also an EA Funds grant), though I don’t know how many bloggers may have applied to EA Funds/been looked at by Open Phil and then turned down.
With Prize funding, we could support roughly $22,000 in grant funds per year, which could provide solid incentives to… a dozen bloggers, maybe? Something to think on.
Are there any blogs/newsletters/etc. that you’d fund if you had the money to run a Tyler Cowen-like initiative for EA writing?
Yeah I don’t know whether/when grants or prizes are better, or exactly what the optimal initial scale is, although presumably you would want to go beyond $22k/yr once it has been demonstrated to work. One would also want to look at why previous prizes, such as Paul’s alignment prizes didn’t work out.
I guess I would be granting to individuals similar to those who “I’ve enjoyed reading” according to the post above. I also wonder if someone could get Zach Weinersmith to do something EA, given how much related stuff he’s already done previously.
I think that this is not very relevant. If you have something to write which would be valuable to the EA community, when would you expect it to be highly valuable to publish it to the forum? How valuable do you think that is?
Huh.. I think I may have been too rude, sorry if that’s the case.
To clarify, I think that the question of where the useful knowledge is, is a bit distracting from the question of whether good content should be written on the forum and also content which is directed at the EA community I’d expect to be best distributed through the forum itself.
I agree that more impact is probably done in professional settings where the topic is something related to solving one of the most important problems, if that content is strong enough, but I think that topics related to the EA community or to cause prioritization could have a lot of impact here. There is also good reasons to believe that writing cause-specific content here has impact in terms of collaborations and education. Also, I think that the forum is a great place to flesh out content which is not quite at the level of perfection needed for publications to get peer feedback.
The comment was probably strong-downvoted because it is confidently wrong in two dimensions:
1. The EA Forum only exists to promote impactful ideas. So to say that the question “where are impactful ideas?” is a distraction from the question “when should we post on the Forum?” is to have things entirely backwards. To promote good ideas, we do need to know where they are.
2. We are trying to address what a community-builder should do, not a content-creator. It is a non-sequitur to try to replace the important meta-questions of what infrastructure and incentives there should be, with the question of when an individual should post to the forum.
Ah, thanks! I think I was perceived as saying “content creators publish stuff which is highly valuable to the forum as well, and therefore we should give them a prize!”. It is definitely not what I intended, and it was a very sloppy writing from me 🤦♂️
What I do think is that the forum is a good platform and that it makes total sense to optimise on building better incentives there. Not as a matter of job descriptions, but generally when building organisations and platforms I think that it makes sense to focus some of the efforts and resources on itself even if there might be alternatives which might be better for that org/platform’s stated goals but they do not really work together well with other parts of the org/platform.
The questions were there because I specifically didn’t understand why you think that “Almost all content useful to EAs is not written on the forum, and almost all authors who could write such content will not write it on the forum”, regardless of what we think about the previous point. I’m very interested in your take on that!
Me too. Maybe a normal downvote by a very high karma member? And I also remember one instance where someone accidentally clicked on downvote without noticing.
Almost all content useful to EAs is not written on the forum, and almost all authors who could write such content will not write it on the forum. So it would be a lot more valuable to reward good content whether or not it is on the forum. It is harder to evaluate all content, but one can consider nominated content. If this is outside one’s job description, then can one change the job description?
Could you say more about the other sources you are thinking of as better locations? Are they aggregators or are you just thinking about the long tail of e.g. blogs hosted by individual organizations or academic journals?
Crossposting to the Forum is one obvious way that externally hosted content could get here, though it’s inelegant.
Yeah, I think high-quality content is spread across many blogs. But not terribly hard to find—a lot of it is in blog posts that can be seen by following a hundred Twitter accounts.
I agree crossposting or linkposting is one way to gather content. I guess that’s kind-of what subreddits/hackernews/Twitter all do, but those platforms are more-designed for that purpose. Not sure what’s the best solution.
What are some examples of blog content you think is at least as good as a very good Forum post, is potentially useful to EAs, and wasn’t crossposted to the Forum?
Ideally, if I find content like that, I’d like to crosspost it for people to read here, rather than hoping that Forum readers also start reading a bunch of different blogs as a result of seeing them in Prize writeups. I think your initial comment is a good argument for more crossposting, or perhaps having a “suggest crosspost” box people can use to send me URLs of things they’d like posted here (if they want to save time on formatting and such).
I don’t think rewarding content outside the Forum is necessarily “a lot more valuable” unless doing so gets those authors to write more EA-friendly content and/or use the Forum more. To the extent that the Prize is an incentive rather than just a reward, it seems like a better incentive to offer more predictable rewards to people who submit their writing to a single website rather than rewarding people from all over the web.
To draw a comparison: If a literary journal pays people who submit great stories to the journal, is that going to incentivize more good short-fiction writing than going to authors who don’t know about the journal and giving them money for things they wrote elsewhere? I don’t think the answer is obvious, and I’d lean toward the former being more useful.
In the last month or so, here are a bunch of things I’ve enjoyed reading that weren’t on the forum:
Blogs:
http://www.paulgraham.com/orth.html
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/07/why-banning-all-party-members-is-stupid.html
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-world-that-twitter-made.html
https://stefanfschubert.com/blog/2020/7/24/the-focus-of-collective-attention-and-the-long-run-future
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N6vZEnCn6A95Xn39p/are-we-in-an-ai-overhang
News (opinion):
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-29/china-s-xi-jinping-could-make-same-mistakes-as-kaiser-wilhelm-ii?fbclid=IwAR3xWbe7IcvfVul4tqv6a1psRU8gLAjnyamL0wysI8fpBqIT3OPvoKRPO7A
Other:
https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
http://www.usrsb.in/three-gorges-dam-2020.html
https://theprecipice.com/quotations
Here is the kind of initiative that would seem more useful to me than an EA forum prize (if you switched in EA for liberalism): https://mobile.twitter.com/tylercowen/status/1296152595728412675
This does seem like a very good initiative, though I wonder whether grant funding might make more sense than small prizes. Jason Crawford got $75,000 from Open Phil (and also an EA Funds grant), though I don’t know how many bloggers may have applied to EA Funds/been looked at by Open Phil and then turned down.
With Prize funding, we could support roughly $22,000 in grant funds per year, which could provide solid incentives to… a dozen bloggers, maybe? Something to think on.
Are there any blogs/newsletters/etc. that you’d fund if you had the money to run a Tyler Cowen-like initiative for EA writing?
Yeah I don’t know whether/when grants or prizes are better, or exactly what the optimal initial scale is, although presumably you would want to go beyond $22k/yr once it has been demonstrated to work. One would also want to look at why previous prizes, such as Paul’s alignment prizes didn’t work out.
I guess I would be granting to individuals similar to those who “I’ve enjoyed reading” according to the post above. I also wonder if someone could get Zach Weinersmith to do something EA, given how much related stuff he’s already done previously.
I think that this is not very relevant. If you have something to write which would be valuable to the EA community, when would you expect it to be highly valuable to publish it to the forum? How valuable do you think that is?
I am fairly confused by the strong (!) downvote on this comment.
Huh.. I think I may have been too rude, sorry if that’s the case.
To clarify, I think that the question of where the useful knowledge is, is a bit distracting from the question of whether good content should be written on the forum and also content which is directed at the EA community I’d expect to be best distributed through the forum itself.
I agree that more impact is probably done in professional settings where the topic is something related to solving one of the most important problems, if that content is strong enough, but I think that topics related to the EA community or to cause prioritization could have a lot of impact here. There is also good reasons to believe that writing cause-specific content here has impact in terms of collaborations and education. Also, I think that the forum is a great place to flesh out content which is not quite at the level of perfection needed for publications to get peer feedback.
The comment was probably strong-downvoted because it is confidently wrong in two dimensions:
1. The EA Forum only exists to promote impactful ideas. So to say that the question “where are impactful ideas?” is a distraction from the question “when should we post on the Forum?” is to have things entirely backwards. To promote good ideas, we do need to know where they are.
2. We are trying to address what a community-builder should do, not a content-creator. It is a non-sequitur to try to replace the important meta-questions of what infrastructure and incentives there should be, with the question of when an individual should post to the forum.
Ah, thanks! I think I was perceived as saying “content creators publish stuff which is highly valuable to the forum as well, and therefore we should give them a prize!”.
It is definitely not what I intended, and it was a very sloppy writing from me 🤦♂️
What I do think is that the forum is a good platform and that it makes total sense to optimise on building better incentives there. Not as a matter of job descriptions, but generally when building organisations and platforms I think that it makes sense to focus some of the efforts and resources on itself even if there might be alternatives which might be better for that org/platform’s stated goals but they do not really work together well with other parts of the org/platform.
The questions were there because I specifically didn’t understand why you think that “Almost all content useful to EAs is not written on the forum, and almost all authors who could write such content will not write it on the forum”, regardless of what we think about the previous point. I’m very interested in your take on that!
Me too. Maybe a normal downvote by a very high karma member? And I also remember one instance where someone accidentally clicked on downvote without noticing.
No user on the Forum has a “normal” vote worth more than 2 karma.
(The full karma system is written out in this post.)