That’s right, this is intended as a feature. All comments and posts start with a weak upvote (we assume you think the thing is good, or you wouldn’t have posted it). You can strong upvote your content, which is designed as a way for you to signal-boost contributions that you think are unusually valuable. Obviously, we don’t want people to be strong-upvoting all their content, and we’ll keep an eye on that happening.
Maxdalton
Karma: 823
The Frontpage/Community distinction
To link this to JP’s other point, you might be right that subjectivism is implausible, but it’s hard to tell how low a credence to give it.
If your credence in subjectivism + model uncertainty (+ I think also constructivism + quasi-realism + maybe others?) is sufficiently high relative to your credence in God, then this weakens your argument (although it still seems plausible to me that theistic moralities end up with a large slice of the pie).
I’m pretty uncertain about my credence in each of those views though.
Upvote for starting with praise, and splitting out separate threads.
I found the Manager Tools basics podcasts, and the Effective Manager a great way to cover the basics. (But I know others have found them less helpful.)
A great piece on this from the Forum is: Ben West’s post on Deliberate Performance in People Management.
As long as you make clear how it’s relevant to figuring out how to do as much good as possible, that sort of content is welcome.
That’s right—one of the main goals of having posts sorted by karma (as well as having two sections) - is to allow people to feel more comfortable posting, knowing that the best posts will rise to the top.
If you highlight the text, a hover appears above the text, and the link icon is one of the options—click on it, paste the url, and press enter.
I sleep a lot better when I’m cooler, and I’ve found this helpful: https://www.chilitechnology.com/. Others recommend https://bedjet.com/.
Link to Zvi’s sequence on LessWrong, which includes the posts you mentioned: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/HXkpm9b8o964jbQ89
Hi Richard, I think you’re right that “basic concepts” is incorrect: I agree that it’s important to discuss advanced ideas which build off each other. We’d want both of the posts you mention to be frontpage posts. I’ll suggest an edit to Aaron.
By default, we’re moving all content to either Frontpage or Community, since we’re trying to have a slightly less active moderation policy than LessWrong. We might revisit this at some point. You can still click on a user’s name to see their personal feed of posts.
Moderation notice: stickied on community.
Moderation notice: Stickied in Community to give context for people familiar with the old Forum.
Why the EA Forum?
I agree with your point about subjective expected value (although realized value is evidence for subjective expected value). I’m not sure I understand the point in your last paragraph?
Strong upvote. I think this is an important point, nicely put.
A slightly different version of this, which I think is particularly insidious, is feeling bad about doing a job which is your relative advantage. If I think Cause A is the most important, it’s tempting to feel that I should work on Cause A even if I’m much better at working on Cause B, and that’s my comparative advantage within the community. This also applies to how one should think about other people—I think one should praise people who work on Cause B if that’s the thing that’s best for their skills/motivations.
Hi Peter, thanks for the feedback! To respond to the things that others haven’t already responded to:
We hope to keep working on the typography to improve things.
We are definitely aiming for a lighter touch to moderation than on LW: we’ve deleted the “curated” section, and we want karma to sort out what ends up on the Frontpage. The main moderation decisions we’ll be taking are policing the Community/Frontpage distinction, commenting to encourage good discourse norms, and sending messages to people where they could improve their discourse. The norms we’re trying to promote are set out in the moderation policy, and are focused on tone/style etc. We’d love people to help us out by enforcing good norms, and by checking that we’re following the policy. The main reason that we want to be a little more active is to provide users with more positive feedback, and fewer difficult responses, so that they’re encouraged to engage more. I don’t think the current Forum is particularly bad at this, but I would like to see another nudge in that direction. I’d be interested how that sounds to you?
I would like to see a sidebar eventually. Currently we want to focus on rebuilding in some elements from LW (like sequences, and their map of local groups), but this is on our long-list
Although we’ve removed curated, we are aiming to reintroduce the sequences feature (NB these are significantly less obtrusive once you’re logged in). The reasoning behind this is that we expect some new people to come to the Forum, and we think it’s good that they are initially sent to more introductory material. We also think that it’s valuable to have some set of common knowledge for the community. This is a way to cement intellectual progress: rather than rebuilding the same wall, there can be an (expanding) set of core ideas which we can build on. Users will be able to create their own sequences, and we are consulting about what sort of things should be in the core sequences, which are most visible. We want the core sequences to be representative of the community.
Bug report has been filed for Ctrl + K
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/meta isn’t intended to be a link (we’ve called this subforum “Community” rather than “meta” (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/community)). I’m guessing you’re referring to the sidebar link, which I’ll ask that we remove.
Sorry, that should be fixed now.
Chapter 2 in particular is slightly broader, and motivates some general EA/consequentialist questions. There are technical bits throughout, but I enjoyed reading it. https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxuYmVja3N0ZWFkfGd4OjExNDBjZTcwNjMxMzRmZGE
I strong upvoted this. I think it’s great to have a reference piece on this, and particularly one which has such a good summary.