Vote power should scale with karma
I think vote power has helped maintain a culture of expertise here on the forum. It’s hard to find quality discussion on the internet.
However, I think concerns about groupthink are valid. We could try having a section of the forum with no voting as a “control group”, for instance. Or tweak the algorithm to penalize feedback loops.
The examples I gave—downvoting based on opinion not content, downvoting based on ideology, upvoting your ingroup, upvoting because they’re you friends—are all things that can be done while staying anonymous.
Your initial complaint was mass-downvoting, which is explicitly called out in the FAQ (based on your own quote!) as something the admins are willing to de-anonymize for, no?
You think I haven’t done that?
If you had done it, I would expect your initial comment to contain something along the lines of: “I reached out privately to the admins, through standard channels, to complain about mass-downvoting. Despite the forum guidelines, they didn’t do anything. Their stated reason was X.”
Up to you. But I think voting does a tremendous amount to influence the forum’s culture. Nudging people towards voting wisely, and talking about how to vote, seems pretty high-leverage to me. Right now, my sense is we’re in a bit of a bad place, where people take karma scores too seriously given the low amount of thought that goes into them.
Voting is anonymous
I don’t believe that is true for admins:
We will try to maximally protect privacy and pseudonymity, as long as it does not seriously interfere with our ability to enforce important norms on the Forum.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yND9aGJgobm5dEXqF/guide-to-norms-on-the-forum
This forum is fairly small. It seems relatively feasible for the admins to enforce norms manually.
But in any case, I encourage you to prove me wrong. I encourage you to reach out to the admins, and then report back here when nothing useful happens, as you seem to be predicting.
Retributive downvoting appears to be a bannable offense, according to the forum guide:
I suggest you take your case up with the admins.
More generally, perhaps it would be valuable to publicize the voting guide better? E.g. every time my mouse hovers over a voting widget, a random voting guideline could pop up, so over time I would learn all of the guidelines. @Sarah Cheng
I think the risk of groupthink death spirals is real, and I suspect I’ve been on the receiving end of it. “With great power comes great responsibility.”
In any case, we should expect some heavy survivorship bias here in favor of the status-quo since EAs or potential EAs who get turned off by the karma system will either fully or largely leave the forum (e.g. me).
Do you post on the EA subreddit? Everyone’s vote power is equal there:
https://reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/
IMO, the discussion quality on the subreddit is not great. I’m unsure if that’s because it lacks scaled vote power, or simply because it has fewer serious EAs and more random redditors. I wonder what would happen if serious EAs made a dedicated effort to post on the subreddit, and bring the random redditors up to speed more etc.
Hypothesis: A big reason why organizations like Givewell exist is because developed currencies go further in developing countries—but, it’s hard for people in developed countries to know the best foreign orgs to give to. Givewell fills that gap by doing research and publicizing it.
Insofar as that hypothesis is true, we should encourage EAs in developing countries to look for giving opportunities in their personal network, if good opportunities seem to exist there.
Here’s another way of making the same argument:
GiveDirectly does blanket cash transfers for entire communities.
A hypothetical version of GiveDirectly which targets only the very neediest individuals, or only the most inspired entrepreneurs who will do the most to stimulate the local economy and reduce poverty, could be even more cost-effective. (IIRC, Givewell thinks most of the impact from their top charities comes from indirect “flow-through effects”.)
Sadly, targeting individual recipients isn’t possible at the scale GiveDirectly operates at. But, targeting individual recipients does seem feasible for an individual African donor who has a strong local network.
Note also that GiveDirectly has lost many thousands of dollars to fraud? Presumably, fraud would be less of an issue for a savvy local donor.
I think this argument is weakest in areas where local knowledge doesn’t help a lot for knowing what works.
Even though Givewell is based in the US, for a while they were ranking US educational charities. Having a strong local network in the US doesn’t necessarily help a ton for knowing which educational interventions work.
However, I still think a “randomized” giving algorithm such as “if your friends say this school really helped their kid, donate to that school” might work quite well for a lot of small donors at scale.
The pressure on non-profits to go through communications with a fine-tooth comb comes even as they face growing calls for help following swingeing cuts to the USAID budget. One person close to a major US philanthropic group said: “We can’t fill the gap even if we liquidated our endowments.”
Maybe they should go ahead and just liquidate then, before their tax-exempt status changes? (I’m offering this suggestion under a model where they actually care about the causes they say they care about, as opposed to caring about the prestige of leading a big foundation.)
I wonder if part of the issue with giving away lots of money is that to do it well, you really need to spend significant time and energy, not just money. It seems easy to procrastinate on such a task, especially since it will eventually lead to your bank account becoming smaller.
I wonder how things would go if you start from the assumption that prospective donors are suffering from “akrasia”, discuss this problem with them, and experiment with various anti-akrasia tactics such as “suggest signing a legally binding document which imposes a deadline of some sort”.
If what you’re saying is true, thinking up creative experiments around this issue could be astonishingly high-impact.
Speaking as an American—I think a silver lining on recent tariff moves is that they may foster anti-American sentiment in e.g. Europe, which then makes Europeans more instinctively resistant to America’s recklessness when it comes to AI. I think it could be really high-impact for EAs in e.g. the Netherlands to try and kickstart a conversation about how ASML may enable an American AI omnicide.
Never let a good crisis go to waste!
Probably worth red-teaming this suggestion, though. It would be bad if the MAGA crowd were to polarize in opposition, and embrace AI boosterism in order to stick it to Europe. Perhaps this effect could be mitigated if the discussion mostly happened in the Dutch language?
Someone here on the Forum wrote instructions for how to write a letter to state AGs and ask that they scrutinize the restructuring:
advocacy for detente or dialogue in any form with China may risk being branded as a Chinese sympathizer.
I’m skeptical.
Trump praises President Xi, says he looks forward to ‘getting along with China’
Trump invited Xi to his inauguration. He did not invite Ursula von der Leyen.
Trump wants U.S., China and Russia to cut military spending in half
I think we’re in a surprisingly good position to negotiate an AI treaty.
this section appears to be currently in charge of the US government
What section do you put Marco Rubio in?
These people cannot be reasoned out of their positions
Not sure hostile tweets are compelling evidence here. Social media participation seems very self-selected. Generally I think hostile tweets represent tails of a bell curve. (Also, most of the replies I’m reading don’t seem overly hostile.)
Search for “Life Effects” in Scott’s survey results. Many readers say they donate more to charity as a result of his blog. His reasonable approach appears to work.
Even if we grant that some people are unpersuadable—If your goal is for Republican poll numbers to go down as a result of the USAID situation, the best advocacy strategy isn’t obvious. For all we know, fire-and-brimstone rhetoric will polarize more people against foreign aid.
Vegans have taken a super-aggressive approach to advocacy for years. My sense is that it works on about 5% of the population, and turns off the remaining 95%.
Progressive activists only make up 8% of the population in the US (they’re just very vocal): https://hiddentribes.us/
“You’re anti-human because you bought yourself a birthday cake instead of donating to malaria nets!” Even EAs don’t use this kind of language with each other. If it doesn’t work for us, why would we expect it to work on the general population?
Edit 1/29: Funding is back, baby!
A recent article in The Economist (archive) claims PEPFAR funding hasn’t actually been restored. It seems like the “restore funding to PEPFAR” lever is sorta no longer attached to anything :-(
I don’t think avoiding criticising political figures because they’re sensitive, powerful and have some public support is a way forward either.
This sounds right to me too. In general your points seem fair. Although I will note that skepticism towards foreign aid (as practiced by e.g. Givewell charity evaluators) seems rather compatible with EA in principle.
BTW, for a few reasons, I think it’s better, by default, to criticize actions rather than individuals. (For example, I suspect that makes it easier psychologically for the individuals who committed those actions to change their behavior.) So I feel good about posts like this one criticizing PEPFAR cuts.
Most of this seems unrelated to my observation that evidence of weariness toward harshly criticizing people merely for their political beliefs does not provide much evidence of weariness for criticizing extremely powerful political people for their actions.
I think that’s a valuable distinction, and important puzzle piece here. However, OP doesn’t just talk about actions: “That these kind of attitudes can be found and not swiftly and roundly condemned by moderators...” (emphasis mine)
I’m thinking aloud in these comments, trying to put my finger on what bothered me (and, I suspect, would bother other people—especially conservatives) about the OP, and where to draw the line.
Yes, I know what due process is. In a strict sense, it applies only to governmental actions. In a looser sense, it applies to actions by private organizations that are considering taking adverse action against people associated with it—e.g., a private university which is considering disciplining a student, a homeowner’s association which is considering fining a unitowner. I am not aware of its extension to citizens (or groups of citizens) who wish to criticize a senior government official, or to a social movement that wishes to express its disapproval of a prominent person and distance themselves from said person.
The title of OP is: The EA movement needs to be able to disown rogue “supporters”, starting with Musk. So we’re considering collective adverse action against a person who’s been associated with us.
The key question appears to be the nature of EA. You seem to agree with me in the sense that if we were a “private association”, due process would be appropriate. And I agree with you that if we were just a random group of citizens, due process would feel less necessary.
The problem is that we’re something in between. You could call us a “community”—a term that’s also used to describe a university or a homeowner’s assocation, which you acknowledge as venues where due process is appropriate.
You could also call us a “movement”, but EA is not a political movement. It’s a movement based on using reason and evidence to do the most good. In my view, hasty “disowning [of] rogue supporters” without due process would undermine core tenets related to reason and evidence.
The private interest of Elon Musk in not being criticized by EAs is exceedingly modest.
Note that we’re not just talking about Musk here. OP wants us to clearly ‘pick a side’. So the private interest of Musk supporters within EA sound implicated. Are they going to be fired? Deprived of funding? Forced to stay quiet? What would be sufficient to satisfy OP?
I think the expected value of additional safeguards is low—he has made numerous troubling, divorced-from-reality, or erratic public statements and I am unaware of any dispute about whether the statements are his.
“Erroneous deprivation” seems far more likely to apply if you’re incorrect about the nature of the statements, not the fact that Musk said them? This attitude is part of what I’m trying to push back against—the implicit assumption that you don’t need to worry about your own errors in judging the veracity of someone’s statements. This is part of the mistake Musk is allegedly making, so let’s not make it ourselves.
BTW, there seems to be a bit of a motte-and-bailey thing going on here, because you were previously emphasizing a focus on denouncing actions over denouncing beliefs, but now you’re talking about “public statements”. Denouncing someone for public statements feels more like denouncing them for their beliefs than denouncing them for their actions.
Finally, with the volume of problematic statements, and new ones coming out on a near-daily basis, the burden of adjudicating them all would be considerable for a relatively small social movement.
In my comment, I suggested you just focus on one or two particularly bad and particularly clear Musk actions. Again, you’re a lawyer—if someone has committed numerous crimes, it should be easy to convict them for just one of them. Imagine a prosecutor who said: “It’s too burdensome to prosecute Joe because he’s committed so many darn crimes. So due process shouldn’t apply. Just toss him in prison.” Can you see how I would find that reasoning suspicious?
Relatedly, one of the reasons we can hold the government to the dictates of due process is that we concurrently give it the powers needed to carry out its functions while providing more protections. EA cannot subpoena Musk to judge him, or force him to sit for depositions on pain of imprisonment. Nor can it seek funds from the public fisc for investigations.
Agreed. But I’m not asking for nearly as much due process from EA as I would ask for from the government, either. Maybe that wasn’t clear. I’m asking for “CEA community health team”-level due process, as opposed to “US federal court”-level due process. It’s OK if the process is improvised and imperfect. I just want there to be some sort of procedure, or at least a gesture towards a procedure, which can itself be critiqued and improved over time.
Inserting a reminder in case it wasn’t already clear: I want to emphasize that my discussion is focused on collectively “disowning” Musk, not criticizing him in an individual capacity.
Some background on my thinking here is that I see modern society as suffering from a shortage of due process in general. Public shaming is a punishment which has, at times, been regulated. Social media has made public shaming far more accessible and severe as a vigilante action, while also greatly decreasing its implicit due process requirements (like “who would actually publish this?”) I think this is a major “root cause” of political dysfunction in the US. Same way hunter-gatherer tribes would feud with each other in the absence of due process to adjudicate crimes, we’re suffering from politically-tribal feuds due to vigilante public shaming actions. The legal tradition in the US has hundreds of years of history behind it, but I’m suggesting we think more in terms of building up from the absolute basics of a society that currently exists in a state of reputational anarchy—starting with lightweight, rough-and-ready approaches such as Community Notes. This is an area where the US legal tradition can serve as a source of inspiration, but it also can’t automatically be expected to apply.
US political dysfunction is implicated in multiple EA cause areas, so if my hypothesis is correct, this sort of institution-building could be a high-impact topic to think about. EA’s Community Health Team has had some success addressing the sort of reputation warring which has destroyed other online communities and social movements. But we didn’t catch SBF. I feel more small-scale prototyping is appropriate before eventually trying to fix problems at the nation scale.
The isolated demand for “due process” rigor
I think I would likely write similar comments in response to any post calling for the EA movement to disown someone. This isn’t the first time I’ve called for greater institutional capacity along these lines.
...is somewhat ironic given Musk’s habit of shooting from the hip with criticisms about others, including federal employees when he is a public official, employment reform is within the scope of his apparent job functions, and people are suffering concrete harm (loss of jobs and contracts) as a result of his official conduct on the topic. Further irony comes from the fact that he owns a major social media platform that is infamous for people offering uninformed hot takes. These factors do not affect how we should treat him, but the irony is palpable.
Some criminal vigilantes claim they’re doing the right thing, and fail to offer their victims due process, yet the state offers these vigilantes due process anyways. I don’t think this is particularly ironic. It seems like a fairly common situation. Due process is why we generally consider the government to be “the good guys”, and vigilantes to be “the bad guys”.
If you’re living in anarchy, someone has to be the first to start doing due process, if you want to put an end to retribution-spiraling.
Where was USAID mentioned in the PDF you linked?
people who are likely to be remotely supportive of EA
FYI, this post I linked was written by someone who also has an EA Forum account. (The post I linked is not exactly supportive of Musk, but it doesn’t exactly align with the OP either.)
I suspect many of the conservatives sympathetic to some of the things EA wants to do are the ones that think he has too much power and is taking the wrong approach...
Perhaps, but I doubt they consider it obvious. They might read a detailed explainer meant to pass their ITT, but I suspect they would consider OP in its current form to be “woke cancel culture”.
Geoffrey Miller is one of a small number of conservative EAs who posts about the importance of AI alignment. He seems neutral/positive on Musk:
So the topic of discussion here is what will annoy people in Silicon Valley and people in the Trump administration. My mental model is the key annoying thing is when the ratio of social enforcement to scholarship / rational argument gets too high. “Pearl-clutching” hashtag activism feels performative and fundamentally un-serious. If an activist truly believed something was a serious and important matter, they would inform themselves deeply about it, understand the thinking of those who disagree, and set out to persuade others based on detailed factual arguments.
This is the intuition I get from observing e.g. JD Vance (relevant because he’s both from SV, and in the Trump admin): https://xcancel.com/JDVance/with_replies
If you read the OP, it doesn’t even really attempt to defend the thesis that Elon Musk is a bad EA. The OP wants to condemn, and maybe even condemn everyone who hasn’t condemned, before there has even been a trial. You’re a lawyer. Presumably you understand the importance of due process. Why wouldn’t it be called for in the court of public opinion?
If this is important, do it right, with scholarship and steelmanning and all of that. (If you want to save time, try to focus on one or two very clearly bad things he did.) If it’s not important, forget about it and move on to the next thing.
Yougov estimates that in the US, Musk is more popular than Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill Gates:
https://today.yougov.com/ratings/politics/fame/public-figures/all
the educated, intelligent population that is EA’s primary recruitment ground
One could argue that EA should be focused on influencing people leading the US government and people working on AI in Silicon Valley.
For better or for worse, I think both of those groups are very fed up with the practice of denouncing people for their political beliefs. (And both of those groups also include Elon Musk as an important member!)
I feel good about EAs writing detailed explainers meant to pass ideological turing tests and persuade people of specific important claims.
I feel bad about about EAs pressuring others to denounce people who seem obviously bad based on what they’re seeing on social media. (You can find many views on social media about pretty much any topic.)
Even if it just gets a few upvotes, it is still likely to show up when people search the forum or read all of the posts under a particular tag. Arguably, those are the readers you care most about, since they are most likely to be working in the area you’re writing about.
There tends to be a winner-take-all effect for post upvotes. Perhaps it makes sense to assess quality according to log(upvotes)? A post with 100 upvotes is probably not 10x as good as a post with 10 upvotes. It just happened to hit the frontpage at a time when there was little competition or something like that.
This is a more general problem with social media. Many users are either getting more attention than they want, or less attention than they want. It should really be called “DIY broadcast media”, not “social media”.