I might be a little bit less worried about the time delay of the response. I'd be surprised if fewer than say 80% of the people who would say they find this very concerning won't end up also reading the response from ACE.

FWIW, depending on the definition of 'very concerning', I wouldn't find this surprising. I think people often read things, vaguely update, know that there's another side of the story that they don't know, have the thing they read become a lot less salient,  happen to not see the follow-up because they don't check the forum much,  and end up having an updated opinion (e.g. about ACE in this case) much later without really remembering why.

(e.g. I find myself very often saying things like "oh, there was this EA post that vaguely said X and maybe you should be concerned about Y because of this, although I don't know how exactly this ended in the end" when others talk about some X-or-Y-related topic, esp. when the post is a bit older. My model of others is that they then don't go check, but some of them go on to say "Oh, I think there's a post that vaguely says X, and maybe you be concerned about Y because of this, but I didn't read it, so don't take me too seriously" etc. and this post sounds like something this could happen with.)

Maybe I'm just particularly epistemically unvirtuous and underestimate others. Maybe for the people who don't end up looking it up but just having this knowingly-shifty-somewhat-update the information just isn't very decision-relevant and it doesn't matter much. But I generally think information that I got with lots of epistemic disclaimers and that have lots of disclaimers in my head do influence me quite a bit and writing this makes me think I should just stop saying dubious things.

And if hours went into carefully picking the original ten episodes and deciding how to sequence them, I'd like to see modifications made via a process of re-listening to different podcasts for hours and experimenting with their effects in different orders, seeing what "arcs" they form, etc., rather than via quick EA Forum comments and happy recollections of isolated episodes.

I agree that that's how I want the eventual decision to be made. I'm not sure what exactly the intended message of this paragraph was, but at least one reading is that you want to discourage comments like Brian's or otherwise extensive discussion on the contents of the podcast list. In case anyone reads it that way, I strongly disagree.

This has some flavor of 'X at EA organisation Y probably thought about this for much longer than me/works on this professionally, so I'll defer to them', which I think EAs generally say/think/do too often. It's very easy to miss things even when you've worked on something for a while (esp. if it's more in the some months than many years range) and outsiders often can actually contribute something important. I think this is already surprisingly often the case with research, and much more so the case with something like an intro resource where people's reactions are explicitly part of what you're optimizing for. (Obviously what we care about are new-people's reactions, but I still think that people-within-EA-reactions are pretty informative for that. And either way, people within EA are clearly stakeholders of what 80,000 Hours does.)

As with everything, there's some risk of the opposite ('not expecting enough of professionals?'), but I think EA currently is too far on the deferry end (at least within EA, I could imagine that it's the opposite with experts outside of EA).

Meta: Rereading your comment, I think it's more likely that your comment was either meant as a message to 80,000 Hours about how you want them to make their decision eventually or something completely different, but I think it's good to leave thoughts on possible interpretations of what people write.

1. I found tagging buggy. I tried to tag something yesterday, and I believe it didn't get through although it worked today. The 'S-risks" tag doesn't show up in my list to tag posts at all, although it's an article. But that might also be something about the difference between tags and articles that I don't understand? I use firefox and didn't check on other browsers.

2. Is there a consensus for how to use organisation tags? Specifically, is it desirable to have have every output that's ever come out of an organisation to be tagged to them or only e.g. organisational updates? I've seen the first partly, but scarcely, done and am not sure about my opinion. (I mean things like "This report is published on the EA forum and the person who worked on this report was at org X at the time and wrote it as part of their job")

edit: 3) Just adding this on here...Is there a way to tag everything that has one tag with another tag? (I'm speaking of the 'economics' tag + lots of more specific tags; 'moral philosophy' and 'metaethics' etc.)

Ironically, I felt somewhat upset reading OP, I think for the reason you point out. (No criticism towards OP, I was actually amused at myself when I noticed)

I think some reason-specific heterogeneity in how easily something is expressible/norms in your society also play a role:

1. I think some reasons are just inherently fuzzier (or harder to crisply grasp), e.g. why certain language makes you feel excluded. (It's really hard to point at a concrete damage (or in summer circles, something that can't be countered with "that's not how it's meant [, but if you want to be sensitive, we can accommodate that].")) I think that's double troubling because the other person often takes you less seriously and because you might take yourself less seriously. I think at least I'm more prone to be emotional when I feel like my reasons are of this type, and maybe that's similar for others?
2. some kinds of reasoning are more socially excepted in different circles. E.g. In some EA circles, I imagine the "anti"-vegan argument would be associated with higher social status, and in some EA circles it would be the other way around. At least in my case, I'm more prone to be emotional when I feel like I have the less socially approved opinion/reasoning process.

I guess the common thread here is feeling threatened and like one needs to defend one's opinion because it's likely to be undermined. I guess the remedy would be... Really making sure the other person feels taken seriously (including by themselves) and safe and says everything they want? (Maybe someone else can come up with something more helpful and concrete) That's obviously just the side of the non-offended person, but I feel like the ways the upset person could try to improve in such situations is even more generic and vague.

Obviously, this is just one type of being emotional during conversations. E.g if what I say explains any meaningful variance at all, it probably does so less for 4) than for 3). (Maybe not coincidentally since I'm not male)

Thanks for the reply!

Honestly, I'm confused by the relation to gender. I'm bracketing out genders that are both not-purely-female and not-purely-male because I don't know enough about the patterns of qualifiers there.

• In general, I think anxious qualifying is more common for women. EA isn't known for having very many women, so I'm a bit confused why there's seemingly so much of it in EA.
• (As a side: This reminds me of a topic I didn't bring into the original post: How much is just a selection effect and how much is EA increasing anxious qualifying. Intuitively, I at least think it's not purely a selection effect, but I haven't thought closely about this.)
• Given the above, I would expect that women are also more likely to take the EA culture, and transform it into excessive use of anxious qualifiers, but that's just speculation. Maybe the percentage change of anxious qualifier use is also higher for men, just because their baseline is lower
• I'm not sure how this affects gender diversity in EA as a whole. I can imagine that it might actually be good because underconfident people might be less scared off if the online communication doesn't seem too confident, and they feel like they can safely use their preferred lots-of-anxious-signalling communication strategy.
• That being said, I guess that what would do the above job (at least) equally good is what I call "3" in my reply to Misha. Or, at least I'm hopeful that there are some other communication strategies that would have that benefit without encouraging anxious signalling.
• edit: I noticed that the last bullet point doesn't make much sense because I claim elsewhere that 3 can encourage 4 because they look so similar, and I stand by that.

Interestingly, maybe not instructively, I was kind of hesitant to bring gender into my original post. Partly for good reasons, but partly also because I worried about backlash or at least that some people would take it less seriously as a result. I honestly don't know if that says much about EA/society, or solely about me. (I felt the need to include "honestly" to make it distinguishable from a random qualifier and mark it as a genuine expression of cluelessness!)

Reply 3/3

"displaying uncertainty or lack of knowledge sometimes helps me be more relaxed"

I think there's a good version of that experience and I think that's what you're referring to, and I agree that's a good use of qualifiers. Just wanted to make a note to potential readers because I think the literal reading of that statement is a bit incomplete. So, this is not really addressed at you :)

I think displaying uncertainty or lack of knowledge always helps to be more relaxed even when it comes from a place of anxious social signalling. (See my first reply for what exactly I mean with that and what I contrast it to) That's why people do it. If you usually anxiously qualify and force yourself not to do it, that feels scary. I still think, practicing not to do it will help with self-confidence, as in taking yourself more seriously, in the long run. (Apart from efficient communication)*

Of course, sometimes you just need to qualify things (in the anxious social signalling sense) to get yourself in the right state of mind (e.g. to feel safe to openly change your mind later, freely speculate, or to say anything at all in the first place), or allowing yourself the habit of anxious social signalling makes things so much more efficient, that you should absolutely go for it and not beat yourself up over it. Actually, an-almost ideal healthy confidence probably also includes some degree of what I call anxious social signalling and it's unrealistic to get rid of all of it.

• I just found one other frame for what I meant with anxious social signalling partly being rewarded in EA. Usually, that kind of signaling means others take you less seriously. I think it's great that that's not so much the case in EA, but I worry that sometimes it may look like people in EA take you more seriously when you do it. Maybe because EA actually endorses what I call 3 in my first reply, but - to say the same thing for the 100th time - I worry that it also encourages anxious social signalling.

Reply 2/3

I like the suggestions, and they probably-not-so-incidentally are also things that I often tell myself I should do more and that I hate. One drawback with them is that they are already quite difficult, so I'm worried that it's too ambitious of an ask for many. At least for an individual, it might be more tractable to (encourage them to) change their excessive use of qualifiers as a first baby step than to jump right into quantification and betting. (Of course, what people find more or less difficult confidence-wise differs. But these things are definitely quite high on my personal "how scary are things" ranking, and I would expect that that's the case for most people.) OTOH, on the community level, the approach to encourage more quantification etc. might well be more tractable. Community wide communication norms are very fuzzy and seem hard to influence on the whole. (I noticed that I didn't draw the distinction quite where you drew it. E.g. "Acknowledgements that arguments changed your mind" are also about communication norms.) I am a little bit worried that it might have backfire effects. More quantification and betting could mostly encourage already confident people to do so (while underconfident people are still stuck at "wouldn't even dare to write a forum comment because that's scary."), make the online community seem more confident, and make entry for underconfident people harder, i.e scarier. Overall, I think the reasons to encourage a culture of betting, quantification etc. are stronger than the concerns about backfiring. But I'm not sure if that's the case for other norms that could have that effect. (See also my reply to Emery )

Reply 1/3 Got it now, thanks! I agree there's confident and uncertain, and it's an important point. I'll spend this reply on the distinction between the two, another response on the interventions you propose, and another response on your statement that qualifiers often help you be more relaxed.

The more I think about it, the more I think that there's quite a bit for someone to unpack here conceptually. I haven't done so, but here a start:

1. There's stating epistemic degree of epistemic uncertainty to inform others how much they should update based on your belief (e.g. "I'm 70% confident in my beliefs, i.e. I think it's 70% likely I'd still hold them after lots of reflection.")
2. There's stating probabilities which looks similar, but just tells others what your belief is, not how confident you are in it ("I think event X is 70% likely to occur")
3. There's stating epistemic uncertainty for social reasons that are not anxiety/underconfidence driven: Making a situation less adversarial; showing that you're willing to change your mind; making it easy for others to disagree; just picking up this style of talking from people around you
4. There's stating epistemic uncertainty for social reasons that is anxiety/underconfidence driven: Showing you're willing to change your mind, so others don't think you're cocky; Saying you're not sure, so you don't look silly if you're wrong/any other worry you have because you think maybe you're saying something 'dumb'; Making a situation less adversarial because you want to avoid conflict because you don't want others to dislike you
5. There's stating uncertainty about the value of your contribution. That can honestly be done in full confidence, because you want to help the group allocate to attention optimally, so you convey information and social permission to not spend too much time on your point. I think online most of the reasons to do so do not apply (people can just ignore you), so I'm counting it mostly as anxious social signalling or in the best case, a not so useful habit. An exception are if you want to help people decide whether to read a long piece of text.

I think you're mostly referring to 1 and 2. I think 1 and 2 are good things to encourage and 4 and 5 are bad things to encourage. Although I think 4/5 also have their functions and shouldn't be fully discouraged (more in my (third reply)[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rWSLCMyvSbN5K5kqy/chi-s-shortform?commentId=un24bc2ZcH4mrGS8f]). I think 3 is a mix. I like 3. I really like that EA has so much of 3. But too much can be unhelpful, esp. the "this is just a habit" kind of 3. I think 1 and 2 look quite different from 4 and 5. The main problem that it's hard to see if something is 3 or 4 or both, and that often, you can only know if you know the intention behind a sentence. Although 1 can also sometimes be hard to tell apart from 3, 4, and 5, e.g. today I said "I could be wrong", which triggered my 4-alarm, but I was actually doing 1. (This is alongside other norms, e.g. expert deference memes, that might encourage 4.)

I would love to see more expressions that are obviously 1, and less of what could be construed as any of 1, 3, 4, or 5. Otherwise, the main way I see to improve this communication norm is for people to individually ask themselves which of 1,3,4,5 is their intention behind a qualifier. edit: No idea, I really love 3