The proposal of forum users weighted by karma can be taken over if you have a large group of new users all voting for each other. You could require a minimum number of comments, lag in karma score by a year or more, require new comments within the past few months and so on to make it harder for a takeover, but if a large enough group is invested in takeover and willing to put in the time and effort, I think they could do it. I suppose if the karma lags are long enough and engagement requirement great enough, they might lose interest and be unable to coordinate the takeover.
You could stop counting karma starting from ~now (or some specific date), but that would mean severely underweighting legitimate newcomers. EDIT: But maybe you could just do this again in the future without letting everyone know ahead of time when or what your rules will be, so newcomers can eventually have a say, but it’ll be harder to game.
You could also try to cluster users by voting patterns to identify and stop takeovers, but this would be worrying, since it could be used to target legitimate EA subgroups.
I was trying to highlight a bootstrapping problem, but by no means meant it to be the only problem.
It’s not crazy to me to create some sort of formal system to weigh the opinions of high-karma forums posters, though as you say that is only semi-democratic, and so reintroduces some of the issues Cremer et al were trying to solve in the first place.
I am open-minded about whether it would be better than openphil, assuming they get the time to invest in making decisions well after being chosen (sortition S.O.P.).
I agree that some sort of periodic rules reveal could significantly mitigate corruption issues. Maybe each generation of the chosen council could pick new rules that determine the subsequent one.
Maybe each generation of the chosen council could pick new rules that determine the subsequent one.
A simpler version of this is to have a system of membership, where existing members can nominate new members. Maybe every year some percentage of the membership gets chosen randomly and given the opportunity to nominate someone. In addition to having a process for becoming a member, there could also be processes for achieving higher levels of seniority, with more senior members granted greater input into membership decisions, and processes for nudging people who’ve lost interest in EA to let their membership lapse, and processes to kick out people found guilty of wrongdoing.
I assume there are a lot of membership-based organizations which could be studied: Rotary International, the Red Cross, national fraternities & sororities, etc.
A membership system might sound like a lot of overhead, but I think we’re already doing an ad-hoc, informal version of something like this. As NegativeNuno put it: “Influencing OP decisions requires people to move to the Bay area and become chummy friends with its grants officers.” My vague impression is that at least a few grantmakers like this system, and believe it is a good and necessary way for people to build trust. So if we step back and acknowledge that “building trust” is an objective, and it’s currently being pursued in an ad-hoc way which is probably not very robust, we can ask: “is there a better way to achieve that objective?”
The proposal of forum users weighted by karma can be taken over if you have a large group of new users all voting for each other. You could require a minimum number of comments, lag in karma score by a year or more, require new comments within the past few months and so on to make it harder for a takeover, but if a large enough group is invested in takeover and willing to put in the time and effort, I think they could do it. I suppose if the karma lags are long enough and engagement requirement great enough, they might lose interest and be unable to coordinate the takeover.
You could stop counting karma starting from ~now (or some specific date), but that would mean severely underweighting legitimate newcomers. EDIT: But maybe you could just do this again in the future without letting everyone know ahead of time when or what your rules will be, so newcomers can eventually have a say, but it’ll be harder to game.
You could also try to cluster users by voting patterns to identify and stop takeovers, but this would be worrying, since it could be used to target legitimate EA subgroups.
As I say, seems like this isn’t the actual problem, even if we did get the right group I wouldn’t trust them to be better than openphil.
I was trying to highlight a bootstrapping problem, but by no means meant it to be the only problem.
It’s not crazy to me to create some sort of formal system to weigh the opinions of high-karma forums posters, though as you say that is only semi-democratic, and so reintroduces some of the issues Cremer et al were trying to solve in the first place.
I am open-minded about whether it would be better than openphil, assuming they get the time to invest in making decisions well after being chosen (sortition S.O.P.).
I agree that some sort of periodic rules reveal could significantly mitigate corruption issues. Maybe each generation of the chosen council could pick new rules that determine the subsequent one.
A simpler version of this is to have a system of membership, where existing members can nominate new members. Maybe every year some percentage of the membership gets chosen randomly and given the opportunity to nominate someone. In addition to having a process for becoming a member, there could also be processes for achieving higher levels of seniority, with more senior members granted greater input into membership decisions, and processes for nudging people who’ve lost interest in EA to let their membership lapse, and processes to kick out people found guilty of wrongdoing.
I assume there are a lot of membership-based organizations which could be studied: Rotary International, the Red Cross, national fraternities & sororities, etc.
A membership system might sound like a lot of overhead, but I think we’re already doing an ad-hoc, informal version of something like this. As NegativeNuno put it: “Influencing OP decisions requires people to move to the Bay area and become chummy friends with its grants officers.” My vague impression is that at least a few grantmakers like this system, and believe it is a good and necessary way for people to build trust. So if we step back and acknowledge that “building trust” is an objective, and it’s currently being pursued in an ad-hoc way which is probably not very robust, we can ask: “is there a better way to achieve that objective?”