Ebenezer Dukakis
Posts 3
Comments152
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:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yND9aGJgobm5dEXqF/guide-to-norms-on-the-forum#Voting_norms
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:
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GiveDirectly does blanket cash transfers for entire communities.
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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".)
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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:
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.