Head of Online (EA Forum, effectivealtruism.org, Virtual Programs) at CEA. Non-EA interests include chess and TikTok (@benthamite). We are probably hiring: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers
Ben_West
Karma: 6,836
Karma overrates some topics; resulting issues and potential solutions
FYI I think this was experimented with.
November events inspired me to recalculate some estimates of earning to give through entrepreneurship. I haven’t gone back to entrepreneurship despite these numbers being fairly high, as one signal of how much my thinking has (not) changed.
I would guess that my willingness to pay for a year of EA labor has fallen by ~2-3x, though I haven’t thought about this much (largely because we haven’t been hiring) and it depends a lot on the role.
Mod here. Please don’t try to munchkin our rules to find a way to deanonymize someone from a ban that was intended to be anonymous. (It’s fine to give other evidence that you might have.) People may choose to reply or not to reply to things for a bunch of different reasons. We really don’t endorse pressuring people to engage on a given Forum thread. (See also: You don’t have to respond to every comment.)
Microsoft has now officially announced their investment and their stock is up ~1% but that’s within normal daily variance. Probably the deal was considered likely enough to go through that a lot of the assumed benefit from this deal was already priced in before the official announcement, but I think it’s pretty hard to look at a graph of Microsoft stock price and claim that the market is pricing in substantial benefits in the next year.[1]
PS: thanks :)
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fwiw, I’m considering this a market inefficiency and purchasing Microsoft stock as my only non-index fund holding. Feel free to check in with me next year and see how much I regret this.
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We are issuing timunderwood a warning for this comment. This is a needlessly inflammatory comparison.
Hi Bob,
1. We have been responding to your messages in intercom, I don’t know what you mean. It’s true that our moderation team is slower to respond than usual because we are overloaded right now, but I think you can probably guess why we are overloaded.
2. You are probably commenting on popular posts and we don’t show all the comments from those on the Frontpage. I think we never show more than 4 or 5. The forum is open source, so you can look through the code to see the logic we use to decide which comments to display, if you would like.
3. I don’t know who’s downvoting you. It looks like your notifications are batched, so you got notified about them all at the same time because your Vote Notifications setting is set this way.
One irony is that it’s often not that hard to change EA orgs’ minds. E.g. on the forum suggestion, which is the one that most directly applies to me: you could look at the posts people found most valuable and see if a more democratic voting system better correlates with what people marked as valuable than our current system. I think you could probably do this in a weekend, it might even be faster than writing this article, and it would be substantially more compelling.[1]
(CEA is actually doing basically this experiment soon, and I’m >2/3 chance the results will change the front page somehow, though obviously it’s hard to predict the results of experiments in advance.)
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If anyone reading this actually wants to do this experiment please DM me – I have various ideas for what might be useful and it’s probably good to coordinate so we don’t duplicate work
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We are banning trevor1 and their alternate account for one month for messaging users and accusing them of being sock puppets, even after the moderation team asked them to stop. (The moderation team has confirmed that at least some of these accusations were false.) If you believe that someone has violated Forum norms such as creating sockpuppet accounts, please contact the moderators.
Yeah, interesting. I think we have a lot of lurkers who never get any karma and I don’t want to entirely exclude them, but maybe some combo like “10 karma or your account has to be at least one week old” would be good.
Thanks! Yeah, this is something we’ve considered, usually in the context of trying to make the Forum more welcoming to newcomers, but this is another reason to prioritize that feature.
Closing comments on posts
If you are the author of a post tagged “personal blog” (which notably includes all new Bostrom-related posts) and you would like to prevent new comments on your post, please email forum@centerforeffectivealtruism.org and we can disable them.We know that some posters find the prospect of dealing with commenters so aversive that they choose not to post at all; this seems worse to us than posting with comments turned off.
How do you differentiate someone who is sincerely engaging and happens to have just created an account now from someone who just wants their viewpoint to seem more popular and isn’t interested in truth seeking?
Or are you saying we should just purge accounts that are clearly in the latter category, and accept that there will be some which are actually in the latter category but we can’t distinguish from the former?
Yeah, I think we should probably go through and remove people who are obviously brigading (eg tons of votes in one hour and no other activity), but I’m hesitant to do too much more retroactively. I think it’s possible that next time we have a discussion that has a passionate audience outside of EA we should restrict signups more, but that obviously has costs.
Possible Vote Brigading
We have received an influx of people creating accounts to cast votes and comments over the past week, and we are aware that people who feel strongly about human biodiversity sometimes vote brigade on sites where the topic is being discussed. Please be aware that voting and discussion about some topics may not be representative of the normal EA Forum user base.
What would LTPZ or its post-facto equivalent have been doing around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis? My model says ‘no prediction’; they’ll have done whatever. Afterwards somebody will make up a story about it in hindsight, but it is not the sort of thing where history says that long complicated analyses are remotely reliably good at doing it in advance.
In appendix 3 the authors cite a paper which looks at more-or-less this precise thing:
Figure 4.6: Observed Treasury and aggregate-equity movements around President Kennedy’s 22 October 1962 19:00 EDT Cuba address. For the cumulative value-weighted CRSP return, a positive value on a date up to and including that of the address indicates a negative return through the date of the address, and a negative value after the address indicates a negative return from the first trading day after the address.
It seems like government interest rates didn’t change much? But I don’t think I understand this graph.
Moderator here. The comment you quote describes the personal experience of someone who transitioned genders, but the selection you quoted doesn’t make that clear (or other nuance like that the commenter has Asperger’s and isn’t a native English speaker), which makes your quote unnecessarily inflammatory. Could you remove the quote and instead link to the comment? (Or quote the comment in its entirety.)
Also note that CEA (my employer) is hiring someone “to share stories about the impact that people in the community are having”.
I think it’s probably true that EA organizations could do better at engaging with the media, but here are a few recent headlines:
The claim isn’t that every person is better off doing direct work than donating to every organization. Just the specific claim that I generally prefer the labor of my top candidate to donations.
Even in your example though: if you are (say) an ML engineer senior enough to be donating $1M+/year, I expect that those nine junior researchers might prefer your mentorship to your money.
(I really want to emphasize Yonatan’s point of actually doing the math though. The thing I dislike is when people just assume that their current path is obviously correct, and don’t actually bother to find some junior researchers and ask them if they would prefer money versus mentorship.)