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.
That’s 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 don’t seem to exist? At least not on the public internet.
Anyway, let me know if there’s 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. I’m glad the second comment was posted, and I’m 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 (“rigor” flavoring). I don’t think overconfidence was a major factor here.
I post a fair number of offbeat ideas like this, and they don’t generally receive much attention, which leaves me feeling demoralized. And then I wrote the grandparent comment, where I got downvoted/disagreevoted for asking if there’s 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 don’t 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.
Aaron’s quick take, suggesting suing OpenAI for their for-profit conversion. No argument included. Voted to +173.
I don’t 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 you’d posted your comment as your own quick take I think it probably wouldn’t have taken off: it doesn’t give enough context for someone seeing it out of nowhere to figure out if they think it’s worth paying attention to, or enough of an explanation for what a suit would look like. You can gloss this as packaging/rigor, I guess, but I think it’s 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. I’d hold that against them if they were regular posts but that’s 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 don’t 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 people’s 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 you’ll get attention. This is no guarantee of a positive reaction (people may disagree that you’ve sufficiently made your case) but I don’t think it’s a process that selects against weird ideas.
There’s a reason people use “low-effort” as a negative term: you pay with your own effort in a bid on other people’s attention.
I got downvoted/disagreevoted for asking if there’s 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 don’t get posted here
I wasn’t 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/weird in the sense that they were pretty different from the lines of thought I’d seen here before but that still got attention (or at least comments / votes):
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.
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.
That’s 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 don’t seem to exist? At least not on the public internet.
Anyway, let me know if there’s 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. I’m glad the second comment was posted, and I’m 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 (“rigor” flavoring). I don’t think overconfidence was a major factor here.
I post a fair number of offbeat ideas like this, and they don’t generally receive much attention, which leaves me feeling demoralized. And then I wrote the grandparent comment, where I got downvoted/disagreevoted for asking if there’s 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 don’t 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.
Aaron’s quick take, suggesting suing OpenAI for their for-profit conversion. No argument included. Voted to +173.
I don’t 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 you’d posted your comment as your own quick take I think it probably wouldn’t have taken off: it doesn’t give enough context for someone seeing it out of nowhere to figure out if they think it’s worth paying attention to, or enough of an explanation for what a suit would look like. You can gloss this as packaging/rigor, I guess, but I think it’s 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. I’d hold that against them if they were regular posts but that’s 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 people’s 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 you’ll get attention. This is no guarantee of a positive reaction (people may disagree that you’ve sufficiently made your case) but I don’t think it’s a process that selects against weird ideas.
There’s a reason people use “low-effort” as a negative term: you pay with your own effort in a bid on other people’s 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 wasn’t 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/weird in the sense that they were pretty different from the lines of thought I’d seen here before but that still got attention (or at least comments / votes):
Top level post: Let’s 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/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.