Comments
Some people might find that this post is written from a place of agitation which is fully okay. I think that even if you do there are two things that I would want to point out as really good points:
- A dependence on funders and people with money as something that shapes social capital and incentives, therefore thought in itself. We should therefore be quite vary of the effect that has on people, this can definetely be felt in the community and I think it is a great point.
- That the karma algorithm could be revisited and that we should think about what incentives are created for the forum through it.
I think there's a very very interesting project of democratizingthe EA community in a way that makes it more effective. There are lots of institutional design that we can apply to ourselves and I would be very excited to see more work in this direction!
Edit:
Clarification on why I believe it to cause some agitation for some people:
- I remember that some of the situation around Cremer being a bit politically loaded and that the emotions were running hot at that time and so citing that specific situation makes it lack a bit of context.
- There are some object level things that people within the community disagree with when it comes to these comments that point at deeper issues of epistemics and cause prioritization that is actually difficult to answer.
- The post makes it seem more one-sided than that situation was. Elitism in EA is something covered in the in-depth fellowship for example and there's a bunch of back and forth there but it is an issue that you will arrive at different consequences on depending on what modelling assumptions you do.
- I don't want to make a value judgement on this here, I just want to point out that specifice piece of Cremer's writing has always felt a bit thorny which makes the references feel a bit inflammatory?
- For me it's the vibe that it is written from a perspective of being post EA and something about when leaving something behind you want to get back at the thing itself by pointing out how it's wrong? So it is kind of written from a emotionally framed perspective which makes the epistemics fraught?
- There's some sort of degree where the framing of the post in itself pattern matches onto other critiques that have felt bad faith and so it is "inflammatory" that it raises the immune system of people reading it. I do still think it is quite a valuable point, it is just that part of the phrasing makes it come across more like this than it has to be?
- I think that might be because of LLMs often liking to argue towards a specific point but I'm not sure?
(You've got some writing that is reminiscent of claude so I could spot the use of it: e.g):
- I think that might be because of LLMs often liking to argue towards a specific point but I'm not sure?
This isn’t just a technical issue. This is a design philosophy — one that rewards orthodoxy, punishes dissent, and enforces existing hierarchies.
I liked the post, I think it made a good point, I strong upvoted it but I wanted to mention it as a caveat.
I think it would be good if you could highlight what is new here, vs re-hashing one half of standard arguments (and not covering why people disagree).
When it comes to reforming EA, what is more important is perhaps not how novel the critique is but rather how much the critic's proposals are engaged with, and it looks like as of now that isn't happening enough yet.
I don't think it's reasonable to repeatedly post the same content, even after it got hundreds of comments, many of which engaged with various ideas at quite some length. There are reasons why rejected ideas were rejected - you should proactively address them, or otherwise introduce new content if you want to achieve something.
I don't think it would be accurate to classify most of the ideas here as rejected, at least not without qualification. My recollection is that there was substantial support for many of these propositions in addition to voices in opposition. On the whole, if I had to sum up the prior discussion on these topics in a single word, I would probably choose inconclusive.[1] That there was no real action on these points suggests that those with the ability to most effectively act on them weren't convinced, or that they had more important issues on their plate, but that only tells us the reaction from a small part of the community.
And I think that matters from the standpoint of what we can reasonably expect from someone in Maxim's shoes. If the ideas had been rejected by community consensus on their merits, then the argument that proponents need new arguments/evidence or changed circumstances would be stronger in my book. The prior rejection would be at least some evidence that the ideas were wrong on the merits.
Of course, posting the same ideas every month would just be annoying. But I don't think there's been a ton of discussion on these ideas as of late, and there are a significant number of new people each year (plus some people who may be in a better position to act on the ideas than they were in the past).
I do recognize that some specific ideas on the topic of democracy appear to have been rejected by community consensus on the merits.
I agree that what you describe could have been a decent new post. However, I disagree it characterizes what was actually shared here. Consider for the first example (I have editted the formatting):
Somehow the omitted is the idea that... maybe the feedback was negative because the paper wasn't very good. Which would explain everything else... bad work typically shouldn't be published, bad work is evidence that future work will also be low quality which is an argument against funding in the future, and it is reasonable for people subject to low-quality criticism to be annoyed. Yet Bob's post here doesn't even mention this explanation, despite the 161 upvotes, and simply presents hostility and anti-democraticness as the only explanation.
Eternal September is meant to be descriptive, not a normative ideal!