I guess my view is that low-effort sharing of new ideas is not rewarded/engaged with, and is undersupplied relative to what’s optimal. When I have a new idea that seems like it could have a big impact, and I quickly post it on the EA Forum, it’s much more out of a sense of duty than a sense of excitement.
I see the “Let’s think about slowing down AI” post as support for my position. We shouldn’t have required a 45-minute read by a senior community member before slowing down AI was taken seriously as a possibility. In a world where Katja is too busy to make that effort-post, I think there’s a chance that EA takes far longer to consider a pivot.
I think high-effort contributions for new ideas aren’t necessarily optimal. I put a fair amount of effort into this post, which looks like a big waste of time in retrospect. In this case, Linch explicitly told me I put too much effort in, and his short comment to that effect got more upvotes than my effort-comment.
The upvote-snowballing mechanism means a small difference in the rate of vote-gaining creates a large difference in attention. It seems like the top 10% of vote-gainers tend to be high-effort, non-controversial stuff, which ideally has some sort of prestige affiliation (“10 pages defending a thesis that is obvious”). So we see a lot of that stuff on the Forum. People copy what’s upvoted, and the Forum ends up rather bland.
The “10 pages defending a thesis that is obvious”-type posts tend to be ones where the author tries to anticipate and respond to every possible criticism or deficiency. An author can’t necessarily predict in advance which axes readers will want more effort on. If you try to predict and address them all, I suspect that contributes to bland writing. It’d be better to address those issues through dialogue than monologue.
Maybe there is a good place for low-effort sharing of new EA ideas elsewhere, and I’m not aware of it. But there does seem to be a suspicious lack of new ideas on the Forum—especially given how fast the world is changing, which should naturally produce new ideas for how to do good. I think lack of new ideas on the Forum is evidence that there’s no good place for low-effort sharing of new EA ideas elsewhere. If EA was good at low-effort sharing of new ideas elsewhere, I would expect some of those ideas to trickle into high-effort “new idea” posts on the Forum, and I’m largely not seeing those posts.
I guess my view is that low-effort sharing of new ideas is not rewarded/engaged with, and is undersupplied relative to what’s optimal. When I have a new idea that seems like it could have a big impact, and I quickly post it on the EA Forum, it’s much more out of a sense of duty than a sense of excitement.
I see the “Let’s think about slowing down AI” post as support for my position. We shouldn’t have required a 45-minute read by a senior community member before slowing down AI was taken seriously as a possibility. In a world where Katja is too busy to make that effort-post, I think there’s a chance that EA takes far longer to consider a pivot.
I think high-effort contributions for new ideas aren’t necessarily optimal. I put a fair amount of effort into this post, which looks like a big waste of time in retrospect. In this case, Linch explicitly told me I put too much effort in, and his short comment to that effect got more upvotes than my effort-comment.
The upvote-snowballing mechanism means a small difference in the rate of vote-gaining creates a large difference in attention. It seems like the top 10% of vote-gainers tend to be high-effort, non-controversial stuff, which ideally has some sort of prestige affiliation (“10 pages defending a thesis that is obvious”). So we see a lot of that stuff on the Forum. People copy what’s upvoted, and the Forum ends up rather bland.
The “10 pages defending a thesis that is obvious”-type posts tend to be ones where the author tries to anticipate and respond to every possible criticism or deficiency. An author can’t necessarily predict in advance which axes readers will want more effort on. If you try to predict and address them all, I suspect that contributes to bland writing. It’d be better to address those issues through dialogue than monologue.
Maybe there is a good place for low-effort sharing of new EA ideas elsewhere, and I’m not aware of it. But there does seem to be a suspicious lack of new ideas on the Forum—especially given how fast the world is changing, which should naturally produce new ideas for how to do good. I think lack of new ideas on the Forum is evidence that there’s no good place for low-effort sharing of new EA ideas elsewhere. If EA was good at low-effort sharing of new ideas elsewhere, I would expect some of those ideas to trickle into high-effort “new idea” posts on the Forum, and I’m largely not seeing those posts.