I donât know to what extent that this can be addressed by the EA Forum team at all, but I have been pretty disappointed by the lack of new, interesting ideas about how to better the world. It does not seem that there is really much incentive to share such ideas on the forum, because most people will only look at articles on subject matters that they are already familiar or on meta-level conversations regarding community or norms or expectations around being in the EA world. I find myself pretty frequently logging in to the EA forum hoping to find new, interesting ideas for changing the world, but just finding a bunch of banal or naval-gazing content. I think EA, and resultantly, the world, would benefit from being a more vibrant, open-minded, and creative space, but Iâm not sure what would help us move in this direction.
It seems that users on this forum want to upvote content which is rigorous and true. So the way to gain karma is to write 10 pages defending a thesis that is obvious, as opposed to writing half a page introducing a thesis that is revolutionary.
Thatâs not necessarily a problem. I feel like the EA Forum wants to be the end of an idea pipeline, the last step where ideas get final scrutiny, and are stamped for epistemic rigor and community consensus. Yet the beginning and middle of the pipeline sort of donât seem to exist? At least not on the public internet.
Anyway, let me know if thereâs a better place to post my weird EA ideas. My general sense is that weird ideas are not super welcome here.
I would guess that weird EA ideas that were appropriately caveated would do reasonably well here, and the main negative reaction is to weird ideas that are presented overconfidently? But this is just my impression of the Forum, not a result of looking over how various posts have done.
Compare this comment with this comment. The second comment was posted about a week later. Iâm glad the second comment was posted, and Iâm glad the suggestion was packaged in a way that made it appealing to Forum users, but I do notice that the packaging seemed to matter a fair amount (ârigorâ flavoring). I donât think overconfidence was a major factor here.
I post a fair number of offbeat ideas like this, and they donât generally receive much attention, which leaves me feeling demoralized. And then I wrote the grandparent comment, where I got downvoted/âdisagreevoted for asking if thereâs a better place to post offbeat ideas, which is even more demoralizing. Like, what do you guys want from me?
I notice your framing
I would guess that weird EA ideas that were appropriately caveated would do reasonably well here
basically acknowledges that this is a hypothetical, and new ideas mostly donât get posted here. I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of why! Again, maybe this is an OK or even desirable state of affairs. But I wish we could at least acknowledge it.
Your comment on a comment on a quick take, suggesting suing OpenAI for violating their charter and including an argument for why. Voted to +4.
Aaronâs quick take, suggesting suing OpenAI for their for-profit conversion. No argument included. Voted to +173.
I donât see anything weird here. With the design of the site a quick take is likely to get much more attention than a nested comment on a quick take, and then when people start voting one up this snowballs because the site makes it more visible.
But even if youâd posted your comment as your own quick take I think it probably wouldnât have taken off: it doesnât give enough context for someone seeing it out of nowhere to figure out if they think itâs worth paying attention to, or enough of an explanation for what a suit would look like. You can gloss this as packaging/ârigor, I guess, but I think itâs serving a useful purpose.
(I think neither posting is amazing: a few minutes with an LLM asking about what the rules are for converting 501c3s into for-profits would have helped both a lot. Iâd hold that against them if they were regular posts but thatâs not a standard we do, or should, hold quick takes or comments to.)
I post a fair number of offbeat ideas like this, and they donât generally receive much attention, which leaves me feeling demoralized
In general, if you want ideas to receive attention you should expect to put in some work preparing them for other peopleâs attention: gather the information that will help others evaluate them, make an argument for why these ideas are important. If you do that work, and then post as a quick take or (better, but requires more investment) top-level post, I do think youâll get attention. This is no guarantee of a positive reaction (people may disagree that youâve sufficiently made your case) but I donât think itâs a process that selects against weird ideas.
Thereâs a reason people use âlow-effortâ as a negative term: you pay with your own effort in a bid on other peopleâs attention.
I got downvoted/âdisagreevoted for asking if thereâs a better place to post offbeat ideas
Your comment starts with claims about what people want on the forum and a thesis about how to gain karma, and only gets to asking about where to post weird ideas in the last paragraph. I interpret the downvoting and disagree voting as being primarily about the first two paragraphs.
basically acknowledges that this is a hypothetical, and new ideas mostly donât get posted here
I wasnât trying to make a claim either way on this in my comment. Instead, I was adding a caveat that I was going by my impression of the site instead of taking the time to look for specific examples that would support or counter my claim, and so people should put less weight on my claim.
Thinking now, some example ideas that were new/âweird in the sense that they were pretty different from the lines of thought Iâd seen here before but that still got attention (or at least comments /â votes):
I guess my view is that low-effort sharing of new ideas is not rewarded/âengaged with, and is undersupplied relative to whatâs 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, itâs much more out of a sense of duty than a sense of excitement.
I see the âLetâs think about slowing down AIâ post as support for my position. We shouldnât 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 thereâs a chance that EA takes far longer to consider a pivot.
I think high-effort contributions for new ideas arenât 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 (â10 pages defending a thesis that is obviousâ). So we see a lot of that stuff on the Forum. People copy whatâs upvoted, and the Forum ends up rather bland.
The â10 pages defending a thesis that is obviousâ-type posts tend to be ones where the author tries to anticipate and respond to every possible criticism or deficiency. An author canât 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. Itâd 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 Iâm not aware of it. But there does seem to be a suspicious lack of new ideas on the Forumâespecially 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 thereâs 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 ânew ideaâ posts on the Forum, and Iâm largely not seeing those posts.
It does seem like EA as a movement has matured (or maybe, less charitably, ossified) in what to focus on and how to approach it. In some ways thatâs good, but I also see how having a less nebulous/âfreewheeling debate makes it easier for people to see where the focus is, and to decide itâs not interesting.
Perhaps this is similar to how Obama had very high approval ratings in his earliest days, when he was a blank canvas everyone projected their hopes and dreams onto. Then as he inevitably started making policies and choosing what to focus on, his approval rating slipped as initial supporters realized he wasnât going to pursue free college, single-payer healthcare, etc.
I appreciate your feedback, and I agree that thereâs room for improvement. I think ultimately the ideas need to come from the community rather than the Forum Team, and hopefully by putting more attention and intention around community building we can improve the rate of collective intellectual progress made on the Forum.
That said, I donât necessarily think that new ideas is the right goal (though it depends on what one categorizes as ânewâ). For example, writing good summarizes of existing work (or doing things like meta-analyses) creates useful foundations for future work. Research like this may not be considered a ânew ideaâ but builds on existing ideas and adds important data and nuance. Finding specific ways to practically implement ideas that have previously been floated is important and valuable progress.
Thereâs also the possibility that a enough low-hanging fruit ideas in this space have been brought up already and so itâs just by default harder for someone to come up with a new idea than it was in the past.
most people will only look at articles on subject matters that they are already familiar or on meta-level conversations
I agree that this is a thing to some extent, but Iâm guessing I view this as less of a problem than you do (both that I think itâs not happening to an extreme extent [like I would guess that there are not that many people who have background knowledge on cluster headaches but this post got a fair amount of karma and comments], and that I think some of this is fine/âgood since people probably should spend relatively more time on posts which match their subject matter knowledge).
I do feel like the issues we are addressing might not be always changing frequently as we have not solved many things yet, but what could be new is the solution to solve them
I donât know to what extent that this can be addressed by the EA Forum team at all, but I have been pretty disappointed by the lack of new, interesting ideas about how to better the world. It does not seem that there is really much incentive to share such ideas on the forum, because most people will only look at articles on subject matters that they are already familiar or on meta-level conversations regarding community or norms or expectations around being in the EA world. I find myself pretty frequently logging in to the EA forum hoping to find new, interesting ideas for changing the world, but just finding a bunch of banal or naval-gazing content. I think EA, and resultantly, the world, would benefit from being a more vibrant, open-minded, and creative space, but Iâm not sure what would help us move in this direction.
It seems that users on this forum want to upvote content which is rigorous and true. So the way to gain karma is to write 10 pages defending a thesis that is obvious, as opposed to writing half a page introducing a thesis that is revolutionary.
Thatâs not necessarily a problem. I feel like the EA Forum wants to be the end of an idea pipeline, the last step where ideas get final scrutiny, and are stamped for epistemic rigor and community consensus. Yet the beginning and middle of the pipeline sort of donât seem to exist? At least not on the public internet.
Anyway, let me know if thereâs a better place to post my weird EA ideas. My general sense is that weird ideas are not super welcome here.
I would guess that weird EA ideas that were appropriately caveated would do reasonably well here, and the main negative reaction is to weird ideas that are presented overconfidently? But this is just my impression of the Forum, not a result of looking over how various posts have done.
Compare this comment with this comment. The second comment was posted about a week later. Iâm glad the second comment was posted, and Iâm glad the suggestion was packaged in a way that made it appealing to Forum users, but I do notice that the packaging seemed to matter a fair amount (ârigorâ flavoring). I donât think overconfidence was a major factor here.
I post a fair number of offbeat ideas like this, and they donât generally receive much attention, which leaves me feeling demoralized. And then I wrote the grandparent comment, where I got downvoted/âdisagreevoted for asking if thereâs a better place to post offbeat ideas, which is even more demoralizing. Like, what do you guys want from me?
I notice your framing
basically acknowledges that this is a hypothetical, and new ideas mostly donât get posted here. I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of why! Again, maybe this is an OK or even desirable state of affairs. But I wish we could at least acknowledge it.
Looking at the two comments, I see:
Your comment on a comment on a quick take, suggesting suing OpenAI for violating their charter and including an argument for why. Voted to +4.
Aaronâs quick take, suggesting suing OpenAI for their for-profit conversion. No argument included. Voted to +173.
I donât see anything weird here. With the design of the site a quick take is likely to get much more attention than a nested comment on a quick take, and then when people start voting one up this snowballs because the site makes it more visible.
But even if youâd posted your comment as your own quick take I think it probably wouldnât have taken off: it doesnât give enough context for someone seeing it out of nowhere to figure out if they think itâs worth paying attention to, or enough of an explanation for what a suit would look like. You can gloss this as packaging/ârigor, I guess, but I think itâs serving a useful purpose.
(I think neither posting is amazing: a few minutes with an LLM asking about what the rules are for converting 501c3s into for-profits would have helped both a lot. Iâd hold that against them if they were regular posts but thatâs not a standard we do, or should, hold quick takes or comments to.)
In general, if you want ideas to receive attention you should expect to put in some work preparing them for other peopleâs attention: gather the information that will help others evaluate them, make an argument for why these ideas are important. If you do that work, and then post as a quick take or (better, but requires more investment) top-level post, I do think youâll get attention. This is no guarantee of a positive reaction (people may disagree that youâve sufficiently made your case) but I donât think itâs a process that selects against weird ideas.
Thereâs a reason people use âlow-effortâ as a negative term: you pay with your own effort in a bid on other peopleâs attention.
Your comment starts with claims about what people want on the forum and a thesis about how to gain karma, and only gets to asking about where to post weird ideas in the last paragraph. I interpret the downvoting and disagree voting as being primarily about the first two paragraphs.
I wasnât trying to make a claim either way on this in my comment. Instead, I was adding a caveat that I was going by my impression of the site instead of taking the time to look for specific examples that would support or counter my claim, and so people should put less weight on my claim.
Thinking now, some example ideas that were new/âweird in the sense that they were pretty different from the lines of thought Iâd seen here before but that still got attention (or at least comments /â votes):
Top level post: Letâs think about slowing down AI
Quick take: EA Awards
Comment: efforts to block anti-ozone bill being harmful
I guess my view is that low-effort sharing of new ideas is not rewarded/âengaged with, and is undersupplied relative to whatâs 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, itâs much more out of a sense of duty than a sense of excitement.
I see the âLetâs think about slowing down AIâ post as support for my position. We shouldnât 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 thereâs a chance that EA takes far longer to consider a pivot.
I think high-effort contributions for new ideas arenât 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 (â10 pages defending a thesis that is obviousâ). So we see a lot of that stuff on the Forum. People copy whatâs upvoted, and the Forum ends up rather bland.
The â10 pages defending a thesis that is obviousâ-type posts tend to be ones where the author tries to anticipate and respond to every possible criticism or deficiency. An author canât 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. Itâd 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 Iâm not aware of it. But there does seem to be a suspicious lack of new ideas on the Forumâespecially 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 thereâs 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 ânew ideaâ posts on the Forum, and Iâm largely not seeing those posts.
It does seem like EA as a movement has matured (or maybe, less charitably, ossified) in what to focus on and how to approach it. In some ways thatâs good, but I also see how having a less nebulous/âfreewheeling debate makes it easier for people to see where the focus is, and to decide itâs not interesting.
Perhaps this is similar to how Obama had very high approval ratings in his earliest days, when he was a blank canvas everyone projected their hopes and dreams onto. Then as he inevitably started making policies and choosing what to focus on, his approval rating slipped as initial supporters realized he wasnât going to pursue free college, single-payer healthcare, etc.
I appreciate your feedback, and I agree that thereâs room for improvement. I think ultimately the ideas need to come from the community rather than the Forum Team, and hopefully by putting more attention and intention around community building we can improve the rate of collective intellectual progress made on the Forum.
That said, I donât necessarily think that new ideas is the right goal (though it depends on what one categorizes as ânewâ). For example, writing good summarizes of existing work (or doing things like meta-analyses) creates useful foundations for future work. Research like this may not be considered a ânew ideaâ but builds on existing ideas and adds important data and nuance. Finding specific ways to practically implement ideas that have previously been floated is important and valuable progress.
Thereâs also the possibility that a enough low-hanging fruit ideas in this space have been brought up already and so itâs just by default harder for someone to come up with a new idea than it was in the past.
I agree that this is a thing to some extent, but Iâm guessing I view this as less of a problem than you do (both that I think itâs not happening to an extreme extent [like I would guess that there are not that many people who have background knowledge on cluster headaches but this post got a fair amount of karma and comments], and that I think some of this is fine/âgood since people probably should spend relatively more time on posts which match their subject matter knowledge).
I do feel like the issues we are addressing might not be always changing frequently as we have not solved many things yet, but what could be new is the solution to solve them