Division Manager: Forum and Events at CEA. Non-EA interests include chess, TikTok, and applying science to things it isn’t usually applied to.
TikTok: @benthamite
Ben_West
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Does the Forum Prize lead people to write more posts?
Thanks for posting this! I ended up liking it, although it took me a while to figure out what the poem was trying to say. In case others have the same confusion, here’s the Kipling society’s summary:
From its place out over the shoals, the Bell Buoy’s voice is lifted to issue warning and protect human life while the church bell safe in its tower, knows nothing of these dangers and stands aloof. Its voice is one controlled by the authority of the church and limited by the church’s interests. In contrast the bell buoy glories in its independence and in the vital work it performs.
I found this motivational. Thanks for posting!
Thanks for posting this! I had read some of their other stuff, but hadn’t come across this story
Thanks! “EA organizations are bad” is a reasonable answer.
(In contrast, “for-profit organizations are bad” doesn’t seem like reasonable answer for why for-profit entrepreneurship exists, as adverse selection isn’t something better organizations can reasonably get around. It seems important to distinguish these, because it tells us how much effort EA organizations should put into supporting entrepreneur-type positions.)
Thanks for writing this up. At the risk of asking obvious question, I’m interested in why you think entrepreneurship is valuable in EA.
One explanation for why entrepreneurship has high financial returns is information asymmetry/adverse selection: it’s hard to tell if someone is a good CEO apart from “does their business do well”, so they are forced to have their compensation tied closely to business outcomes (instead of something like “does their manager think they are doing a good job”), which have high variance; as a result of this variance and people being risk-averse, expected returns need to be high in order to compensate these entrepreneurs.
It’s not obvious to me that this information asymmetry exists in EA. E.g. I expect “Buck thinks X is a good group leader” correlates better with “X is a good group leader” than “Buck thinks X will be a successful startup” correlates with “X is a successful startup”.
It seems like there might be a “market failure” in EA where people can reasonably be known to be doing good work, but are not compensated appropriately for their work, unless they do some weird bespoke thing.
Sure, those other things are also ways in which I would say that Bob is underqualified, not overqualified.
I see. My model is something like: working uses up some mental resource, and that resource being diminished presents as “it’s hard for you to work more hours without some sort of lifestyle change.” If you can work more hours without a lifestyle change, that seems to me like evidence your mental resources aren’t diminished, and therefore I would predict you to be more productive if you worked more hours.
As you say, the most productive form of work might not be programming, but instead talking to random users etc.
Thanks for writing this up – I’m really interested in answers to this and have signed up for notifications to comments on this post because I want to see what others say.
I find it hard to talk about “working harder” in the abstract, but if I think of interventions that would make the average EA work more hours I think of things like: surrounding themselves by people who work hard, customizing light sources to keep their energy going throughout the day, removing distractions from their environment, exercising and regulating sleep well, etc. I would guess that these interventions would make the average EA more productive, not less.
(nb: there are also “hard work” interventions that seem more dubious to me, e.g. “feel bad about yourself for not having worked enough” or “abuse stimulants”.)
One specific point: I’m not sure I agree regarding the benefits of “fresh perspective”. It can sometimes happen that I come back from vacation and realize a clever solution that I missed, but usually me having lost context on a project makes my performance worse, not better.
Thanks! I added these to the comment (because of how big query works, I can’t easily add them to the dashboard).
I’ve received a couple of kind suggestions of people I should have included as “EA adjacent influencers”. Please reply to this comment (or DM me) if you see more.
SBF_FTX − 1 IPW Follower
LinchZhang − 1 IPW Follower
sapinker − 24 IPW Followers
tylercowen − 28 IPW Followers
mattyglesias − 24 IPW Followers
dominic2306 − 0 IPW Followers
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Who do intellectual prizewinners follow on Twitter?
Thanks SEADS for your help with this research, and for taking the time to share it publicly!
Thanks! This is helpful to know.
A digest for notifications is an interesting idea. And I agree the current UI gives more information on desktop, which is probably unavoidable given that there’s just more real estate, but I do think we want our mobile experience to be good. (About half of our users are on mobile devices.)
Thanks! I appreciate the feedback
Thanks! Your comment is helpful information that we should make tag subscriptions more findable, even if we don’t change the underlying functionality.
But to the extent these come at the cost of rational discussion, this is a cost we should be happy to pay.
What do you think the effect size is of adding pictures? My guess is that it’s pretty small.
For example, the “beauty premium” in employment compensation is usually considered to be small (<10%),[1] and I would expect that to be much larger than the effect of profile pictures on a forum, because a) how your coworkers look is much more salient than how some commenter with a tiny picture looks, and b) beauty is more plausibly correlated with productivity in certain jobs (e.g. sales) than it is with forum post quality.
This is going based off of memory from the last time I looked into this, but it seems to be confirmed by this article, which is the most recent review article a quick search could find. ↩︎
[PR FAQ] Improving tag notifications
Thanks Nathan! I look forward to hearing your feedback on them
Thanks Larks! I somewhat regularly encounter people who are hesitant to post on the forum, and can’t recall a time when telling them about the existence of the prize made them seem more likely to post. I can, however, think of people who have told me that they were more willing to post after having received the prize or other recognition for their work.
My guess is that something like imposter syndrome is more of a barrier to people posting than money is.