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Just going over posts I've previously upvoted, I find it really remarkable how many impacted my thinking and actions, and how many I keep returning to. It's really inspiring :)
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It seems to me that much of what richard_ngo highlighted in the EA Archives Reading List sequence should be available to vote on.
I could go through the list and crosspost what is neither already posted nor book-length/not-forum-friendly, but this sounds like a fair bit of work, so I am posting this comment to invite others to also makes some review crosspost posts based on that sequence.
What's the copyright situation here? If a crosspost is just a link to a post outside the EA forum, that's one thing; but if it involves copying the entire text to the forum, crossposting presumably requires the permission of the author.
Yes, you shouldn't crosspost the entire text of something without an author's permission.
But I think you can go beyond a link and share a brief excerpt of basically anything — paper abstracts are public, book reviews often quote extended sections of a book, etc.
In cases where the Forum's team has crossposted full articles, we check in with the author before doing so (e.g. for the Replacing Guilt sequence).
Realistically, though, we've had hundreds of things crossposted here by other users and have only had complaints in two cases I can remember — in both cases, when a private Google Doc was shared without the consent of all the people who'd been working on it. So we don't proactively remove types of content that seem very safe (e.g. posts from bloggers in the EA community who share all their content for free on their blogs), though we would remove something like a link to a pirated book if we became aware of it.
I am extremely happy that this is happening. And an annual review would be an excellent successor to the Forum Prize.
Edit: looks like this happened, thanks!
Request: let authors review their own posts.
This request is motivated by the fact that I can't review my linkposts, but more generally, I think it could conceivably be useful for authors to share their current thoughts on their old posts in a way that is particularly visible to those participating in the Review — that is, I think it could be useful for authors to review their own posts.
(Or maybe authors already can, but those posts just have to be nominated first? In that case, can someone nominate my linkposts for me?)
If anyone is wondering what is Quadratic Voting:
There is a good explanation from Lesswrong of how Quadratic Voting is used in the Forum Review.
Succinct explanation:
In Quadratic Voting, you can vote more for a single choice. Since you can vote more, you can express your degree of agreement, which probably captures preferences and the Truth better.
The quadratic part of Quadratic Voting makes sure that your additional votes for the same item costs increasingly more. This basically ensures voting multiple times won't break down (tempers extremes cases).
Wikipedia has more information.
Background:
What's sort of neat is that interest in Quadratic voting is probably the work of one person, Glen Weyl.
Loosely speaking, Weyl seems to be adjacent to EA, in the same way Vitalik Buterin is, who is his collaborator (Management Science is a top journal that is hard to publish in and it is impressive the outsider Buterin has a pub there). Both Buterin and Weyl are mentioned on EA Forum and Lesswrong a bit.
I'm uncertain, but I think the highly technical aesthetic of Weyl and Buterin's work and the related small social movement diverges from mainstream politics and even many mainstream economists. Tractability of their policies seems low according to this post and karma of related posts is low.
However, mechanism design is a neat field. It's neat to see a modest implementation of these ideas that is well designed and implemented by internal experts of a community.
The voting mechanism here seems to sort of be the other way around. A "9" vote counts as 9 "1" votes, where as in QV it'd cost 9 to get 3 times "1".
Yes, you are referring to this:
Yes, like you said, these numbers [1,4,9] are how many times you vote for each entry.
The quadratic voting being implemented here isn't really connected to the values of these options. Instead, a calculation happens after you select your votes, e.g. when you choose the "vote 9 times" option, it will cost you more than 900% than "voting 1 time".
So I think that the set of voting options you see above is arbitrary. The choices could be [1,2,3] or [1,10,100] instead of [ 1,4,9].
The actual values just happen to squares. I guess that is sort of a "mental collision" with quadratic voting.
Maybe the designers (at LessWrong) choose 1,4,9, because these values are the best, or because it is sort of a cute callback to quadratic voting.
I noticed that when I go to the voting dashboard, I can't see this post listed there – is that a bug?
Thanks for this report — we're looking into it.
I can no longer see any of the posts I've voted on on the dashboard.
Can you share a screenshot of what you see instead?
We have extended the end of the review phase to the 15th, to give a full month for reviews.
It's nice that I can sort not-yet-nominated posts by karma (and it would be even nicer if the default setting for not-yet-nominated posts was sorted by karma, and filtered all-time rather than by year). Similarly valuable would be sorting nominated posts by karma when voting, unless it's intentional for some reason that nominated posts are in no order (or are they?).
I can be relatively OCD about voting, but it's important to me to either:
- know that not voting for a post is equivalent to voting zero, or
- be able to cancel a vote.
Based on the current UI, it looks like I can't not vote for a post after I've voted for it. And with quadratic voting, if my votes are normalized in certain ways (e.g., such that their mean is zero), then there is a big difference between not voting and voting zero.
(I assume votes won't be problematically normalized; e.g., if someone only gives upvotes, it should boost all of those posts relative to the posts they don't vote on. But wanted to make sure.)
I'm checking in with the LW team about these questions — I'll update this answer and send you a DM to notify you when I have an update.
Last call for reviews! You can still submit reviews after the end of this phase, but if you want your reviews to count for inclusion in the next phase, you'll need to submit the reviews before midnight UTC the night of the 15th. That's midnight GMT, or 7pm EST.
The timeline says there's preliminary voting until December 14th (already passed) and final voting starts January 12th. What about the time in between (e.g., now)?
If I vote now, will my votes be counted for the final vote (assuming I don't revise them later), or should I wait until January 12th?
Today's the last day of the Nominations Phase!
Suggestion/request: all past Forum Prize winners should be automatically nominated.
We considered doing this, but eventually decided it felt wrong for the spirit of the event.
We've had 573 posts nominated so far, so people are clearly finding lots of content they liked. If none of the Forum's users think to nominate a given Prize winner, that seems to indicate it wasn't especially impactful after the fact, and thus shouldn't be automatically nominated.
I have two questions:
- Is it reasonable to crosspost academic papers as a " review crosspost"?(Presumably we should not crosspost paywalled papers for copyright reasons?)
- I already sent an Intercom message about this, but could we adjust the post dates on everything already under the EA Forum Archives user and classic repost tag so they become eligible?
- Academic papers are great to crosspost! If they are paywalled, I recommend linking to the paper and sharing the abstract (or whatever other bits of it are clearly open for anyone to read).
- Adjusted!
Thank you!
Thank you for your crossposting contributions Tessa!
Am I right in thinking that posts with the 'Community' tag are not eligible?
No, they should be eligible.
I've updated the post to clarify that people can't vote on their own posts — maybe that's what you were seeing? Otherwise, what's the post where you don't see voting available?
The Review uses the following process:
- Users cast preliminary votes to nominate posts they’ve found valuable for the final voting stage. (December 1 - December 14)
- Users review posts — explaining how the posts have been useful (or not), which of their ideas seem best (or worst), and so on. (December 15 - January 11)
- Users cast final votes on posts, based on their own experience and others’ reviews. The posts with the most votes are, hopefully, those that have provided the most collective value to the community. (January 12 - January 26) To see what this looks like in practice, check out LessWrong’s 2019 Review and its results.
I hope that in the review phase, we'll be able to see preliminary votes? For example, if there's an old moderately popular post that I believe is quite wrong, I would probably want to write a high-effort negative review on it if and only if it was significantly upvoted in the nomination stage. Presumably that's the point of having the nomination phase before the review phase? I'd appreciate if this was clarified, though.
Edit: just read the complementary post on LessWrong, and it looks like the answer is yes.
Update: it's the review stage, and I can't see how much posts were upvoted. (By the way, how are they sorted?) I would like to be able to so that I can better prioritize review-writing.
For example, one post that I strong-downvoted was nominated, and I'd like to review it iff it received more than a couple upvotes (or if it gets positive reviews).
I'm noticing that the EA Forum contains a lot of 'meta-level' content (i.e. discussions about the community, announcements, and similar), but a lot of object-level content (e.g. research reports, other forms of intellectual progress, or reports about successful EA projects) has been posted elsewhere.
I mainly want to upvote object-level content (and in fact have long felt pretty unhappy with the Forum's emphasis of meta-level content). But I don't really have time to crosspost more content myself. If someone wanted to do this, I'd be excited.
I'm willing to do a few more crossposts― are there pieces of object-level content that you'd really like to see crossposted?
Here's a somewhat random and non-exhaustive selection of (in my view) excellent content that's not on the Forum (disclosure: a lot is by CLR, the org I used to co-run):
Thanks for taking the time to put together this list, this is great! I found that a few of these were on the forum already:
I have crossposted the following, and may crosspost more if I feel like it (and will add them to this list if I do:
Also, to my pleasant shock, if you copy-paste from one website into the EA Forum WYSIWYG editor, it formats tables and images correctly? This makes cross-posting way easier than I'd realized!
Thanks for crossposting these. It seems that it's not possible to review or vote on some of those posts (specifically, these three posts). Is there an explanation for this? I also noticed I can't vote on this post by Carl Shulman, which I crossposted, though in that case I can write a review.
In general you're allowed to review, but not vote on your own posts.
Okay, that explains why I can't vote on the post by Carl I crossposted. But why can I (and everyone else, presumably) neither review nor vote on the three posts above?
They were not nominated during the nominations phase. I'll treat Tessa's posting as a nomination though, and nominate them manually. You should now be able to vote on and review them.
Very cool, thanks a lot! :)
FYI for anyone else who might crosspost Brian Tomasik posts: I learned thanks to a crosspost of The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering that he doesn't like crossposting since it makes updating the content of posts more difficult. I have updated my crossposts from him to only include the summary paragraphs and a table of contents (with a caveat that the contents are as of the time of cross-posting).
Chloe Cockburn’s Summer 2020 Charities for Racial Justice: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GGgEZ8ebFd6--C4wLeJV9XrX1OPPg40NL6F1QDo53Bs/edit
The Forum team has crossposted some of the best object-level content (e.g. most of Open Phil's blog, almost all FHI papers). However, there's far too much relevant object-level info scattered across far too many sources for us to capture everything. We appreciate all the users who take the time to share things they found valuable!