I’m a fan of serif fonts, so I’m a little sad about that change, and a little confused why posts and comments are in a different visual style. I’m definitely no expert on stuff like this, but I’m curious if there’s a motivation for that difference.
edit: oh, and it’s even different between section headings and post paragraphs, that seems weird to me too, but maybe it’s more common than I realized
I feel like regarding the community posts change, this post is saying something like:
people like the change because it means they’re not spending as much time on posts they don’t endorse engaging with,
we could be worried that these posts would be neglected now, but actually the amount of time people are spending on these posts has not gone down
Seems like there’s some tension between these points! Do you have a theory for what’s happening here? Are the changes leading to people engaging in different ways that are better, even though they’re not overall less? If so, how is that achieved by what seemed to me like a fairly uniform visibility reduction?
thinking about this more, I’ve started thinking:
emotions are useful for rationality
the forum should not have a norm against emotional expression
is two separate posts. I’ll probably write it as two posts, but feel free to agree/disagree on this comment to signal that you do/don’t want two posts. (One good reason to want two posts is if you only want to read one of them.)
I think it’s not primarily a question of how much to disagree – as I said, we see plenty of disagreement every day on the forum. The issue I’m trying to address is:
with whom we disagree,
how visible those disagreements are,
and particularly I’m trying to highlight that many internal disagreements will not be made public. The main epistemic benefit of disagreement is there even in private, but there’s a secondary benefit which needs the disagreement to be public, and that’s the one I’m trying to address.
To me it seems that just having the debate on <topic> is more interesting than the meta debate of <is org’s thinking on topic sloppy>.
The necessity of thinking about the second question is clearest when deciding who to fund, who to work for, who to hire, etc.
Yeah I agree that for many people, not engaging is the right choice, I don’t intend to suggest that all or even most technical debates or philosophical discussions happen here, just that keeping a sprinkling of them here helps give a more accurate impression of how these things evolve.
Hmm I find the correlation plausible but I’m not sure I’m moved to act differently by it. I wouldn’t guess it’s a strong enough effect that all young people need this conversation or all older people don’t, so I’m still going to focus on what people say to judge whether they are making this mistake or not.
Also, to the extent that we’re worried that the illusion of consensus harms our credibility, that’s going to be more of a problem with older people, I expect.
I’d like to write something about my skepticism of for-profit models of doing alignment research. I think this is a significant part of why I trust Redwood more than Anthropic or Conjecture.
(This could apply to non-alignment fields as well, but I’m less worried about the downsides of product-focused approaches to (say) animal welfare.)
That said, I would want to search for existing discussion of this before I wade into it.
Things I’ve learned about good mistake culture, no-blame post-mortems, etc. This is pretty standard stuff without a strong EA tilt so I’m not sure it merits a place on the forum, but it’s possible I overestimate how widely known it is, and I think it’s important in basically any org culture.
I was surprised to hear anyone claim this was an applause light. My prediction was that many people would hate this idea, and, well, at time of writing the rep score stands at −2. Sure doesn’t seem like I’m getting that much applause :)
I think the optimal number of most bad things is zero, and it’s only not zero when there’s a tradeoff at play. I think most people will agree in the abstract that there’s a tradeoff between stopping bad actors and sometimes punishing the innocent, but they may not concretely be willing to accept some particular costs in the kind of abusive situations we’re faced with at the moment. So, were I to write a post about this, it would be trying to encourage people to more seriously engage with flawed systems of abuse prevention, to judge how their flaws compare to the flaws in doing nothing.
I post about the idea here partly to get a sense of whether this unwillingness to compromise rings true for anyone else as a problem we might have in these discussions. So far, it hasn’t got a lot of traction, but maybe I’ll come back to it if I see more compelling examples in the wild.
The answers to these questions would have big outcomes on statistics like ‘x amount of animals live in factory farms’.
Are you sure? My guess is that it wouldn’t change much, that most factory farms are “obviously” factory farms, because there isn’t a lot of economic or moral incentive to sit on the borderline.
The Optimal Number of Innocent People’s Careers Ruined By False Allegations Is Not Zero
(haha just kidding… unless? 🥺)
This is definitely not a precondition for a successful social institution.
I want to differentiate two kinds of success for a social institution:
“reproductive” success, by analogy with evolution: how well the institution establishes and maintains itself as dominant,
success at stated goals: for peer review, success at finding the truth, producing high quality research, etc.
Your argument seems to be (at least in part) that because peer review has achieved success 1, that is strong evidence that it’s better than its alternatives at success 2. My argument (in part) is that this is only true if the two kinds of success have some mechanism tying them together. Some example mechanisms could be:
the institution achieved reproductive success by means of being pushed really hard by people motivated by the desire to build and maintain a really high quality system,
the institution is easy to replace with better systems, and better systems are easy to try, so the fact that it hasn’t been replaced must mean better systems are hard to find.
I don’t think either of these things are true of peer review. (The second is true of AWS, for example.) So what’s the mechanism that established peer review as the consensus system that relates to it being a high quality system?
(I’m not saying I have alternatives, just that “consensus means a thing is good” is only sometimes a good argument.)
Maybe I’m just missing something, but I don’t get why EAs have enough standing in philosophy to dispute the experts, but not in sociology. I’m not sure I could reliably predict which other fields you think conventional wisdom is or isn’t adequate in.
I upvoted this post and am strongly in favour of more institutional expertise in the community.
However, to take the example of peer review specifically, my sense is that:
academics themselves have criticized the peer review system a great deal for various reasons, including predatory journals, incentive problems, publication bias, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, etc
people outside academia, e.g. practitioners in industry, are often pretty sharply skeptical of the usefulness of academic work, or unaware of it entirely,
the peer review system didn’t obviously arise from a really intentional and thoughtful design effort (though maybe this is just my historical ignorance?), and there are institutional-inertia reasons why it would be hard to replace with something better even once we had a good proposal,
at the time the peer review system was developed, an enormous amount of our modern tools for communication and information search, processing, dissemination etc. didn’t exist, so it really arose in an environment quite different from the one it’s now in.
It feels to me both like the consensus view isn’t as strongly in favour of peer review as you suggest, and that there are some structural reasons to think that the dominance of peer review in academic contexts isn’t so strong an indicator of its fitness.
I recognise my above criticisms have holes in them, but they seemed worth airing anyway, to at least gesture at why people might end up where they are on this topic.
(Also, obviously I’ve done nothing to demonstrate that forum posts aren’t worse on every axis. I just think that if we’re really in the situation of “we should use this moderately terrible system instead of this extremely terrible system”, we need to acknowledge that if we’re going to get people who can see the terribleness on board.)
If there were other rules employed that you think helped, feel encouraged to write them up too!
Commenters are fine to object, but to the extent they rely on the question of whether the science is actually discredited or not, I think they should link to an existing discussion of it rather than duplicating it here. The duplication just damages all of:
the discussion of the issue here, to the extent it misses things that previous discussions have covered,
the discussions that we’d otherwise have linked to, to the extent that people spend effort improving this one rather than that one,
any other discussion here, which becomes more difficult to navigate for being mixed in with it.
I’m not trying to prevent discussion, I’m just trying to move and consolidate it.
(But in practice it hasn’t been as dominating here as I’d feared, so I’m not going to bang too hard on this drum.)
something about the role of emotions in rationality and why the implicit / perceived Forum norm against emotions is unhelpful, or at least not precisely aimed
(there’s a lot of nuance here, I’ll put it in dw)
edit: I feel like the “notice your confusion” meme is arguably an example of emotional responses providing rational value.
Longview Philanthropy advises large donors, though I don’t know whether they’ve tried targeting private foundations in the broad, systematic way you suggest.
Effective Giving superficially appears to be doing a similar thing, though I know less about the specifics.
(I’m confused because there used to be two Effective Givings, until one of them renamed to Longview, but it sounds like they both do work like this.)
While I agree it would have been significantly better to send this to the org ahead of time, I think on the margin I really wish we had more random spot-checks and discussions of org decisions, and still prefer seeing a post that puts an accidentally heavy burden on the org than not seeing one at all.