Meta: I would like to see these sorts of posts receive substantially less attention.
I see the primary topic as being “drama” (for lack of a better term).
I think drama tends to be pretty mind-killing, which leads to low quality discussion, discussions that last way too long, and discussions that frequently end up being demon threads.
I think it usually leaves people feeling kinda sour and bad after reading, skimming, or participating in the discussion.
I don’t really see what people who aren’t in the same social or professional circles as the involved parties have to gain by investing time into these topics. Updating your beliefs about the EA community? Meh, maybe. It seems pretty tough to generalize much about the broader community based on the experiences of the handful of people involved in this incident. But if that is the goal, you can probably take advantage of the Pareto Principle and get perhaps 90% of the benefit with only a few minutes of effort by reading the tl;dr’s and top comment or two.
To be clear, I do think it makes sense for the people involved to be discussing this. Reputation is, in fact, important. I also think it makes sense for leaders in the EA community to want to police things a bit. What I’m proposing is that the 99% for whom this isn’t actually relevant to your life, don’t get sucked in. A few minutes is fine. A few hours probably isn’t.
Idea for how these sorts of “drama posts” might be best handled:
Voting is turned off.
The posts are only available in a special section on LessWrong. They aren’t available in the feed on the main page. This nudges users towards more of a Pit Of Success, yet makes the conversation accessible if you do want to go out of your way to join it.
They are time-boxed. Perhaps a “soft” time-box, perhaps a “hard” one. I’m not sure.
At the end, a moderator (or group of moderators) makes a judgement, writes up a summary, and we move on.
I suppose some sort of appeals process might be needed. I’m not sure. My impression: it’d probably make sense to have one to protect against grievous misjudgement in the initial case, but not as an excuse for dragging the discussion out longer than it deserves.
Edit: I see a lot of smart, high-karma, successful, and impactful people commenting (on Ben’s post) in such a way that makes me thing they’ve spent many hours reading, thinking and writing about this. That makes me sad and frustrated since I believe it is a lot of time and energy that otherwise would be put to quite good use.
I agree to some extent, but I think it would’ve been much better if you’d posted this on the original post, not on the reply. The current phrasing of “I would like to see these sorts of posts receive substantially less attention.” really doesn’t work well when it’s in a response post, rather than the original post. The current setup makes it sound (unintentionally) like accusation posts are fine, and only the responses should receive less attention, which I doubt anyone endorses.
Also, it’s absolutely silly that this is the top comment on this post. Imagine being on the receiving end of drama, responding to it, and then having the top comment be yours, rather than one which engages with the object-level claims.
So I suggest your comment might be better-suited as a top-level meta post of the form “People spend too much time on community drama” or something, where you’d probably get some interesting back and forth and pushback on that claim, and without taking up oxygen in a post where someone is trying to defend their reputation. If you did make it a full post, you could also do a Fermi estimate of the advantages and disadvantages of engaging in community drama; I’m particularly interested in your estimate, not of participating in the drama, but of posting the drama in the first place.
I agree to some extent, but I think it would’ve been much better if you’d posted this on the original post, not on the reply.
I agree that it would have been better, but disagree about it mattering much. The comment isn’t something that is specific to the post. Rather, it is about the particular type of post.
FWIW, the reason I posted it here is simply because it was the first of the two posts I saw, and my impression at the time was that Ben’s post was only on the EA Forum, not on LW. From there, it didn’t feel worth re-arranging the comments.
It might be better-suited as a top-level meta post of the form “People spend too much time on community drama” or something
Yeah, maybe. I’m not sure.
If you did make it a full post, you could also do a Fermi estimate of the advantages and disadvantages of engaging in community drama; I’m particularly interested in your estimate, not of participating in the drama, but of posting the drama in the first place.
I feel moderately confident that it is a net harm. From behind a veil of ignorance, I wouldn’t want it posted.
My model is that it sucks people in, wastes their time, and increases the general degree of hostility without really accomplishing much.
The main thing I see it accomplishing is reinforcing the precedent of accountability; that if you do something bad, the community will hold you accountable and penalize you. However, my sense is that the community already does a pretty good job of this, a good enough job such that there isn’t really a need to tug harder on the accountability string.
The main thing I see it accomplishing is reinforcing the precedent of accountability; that if you do something bad, the community will hold you accountable and penalize you. However, my sense is that the community already does a pretty good job of this, a good enough job such that there isn’t really a need to tug harder on the accountability string.
Yeah, we’re so great at that that we caught FTX in advance, right?
No, seriously, given stuff like FTX, what exactly gives you the impression that we’re good enough at accountability? Even if we consider FTX to be a one-off outlier, outliers with outsized impact deserve outsized consideration nonetheless.
I think I would like it if there were some soft nudges away from drama posts.
Something like “hi, you’ve been reading this post for 30 minutes today, here’s a button for blocking it for the rest of the day (you can read and catch up on comments tomorrow).”
Yeah, me too. I’m a little embarrassed to admit, I’ve checked in on this and on Ben’s post a few times in the past few hours, spending perhaps 30-45 minutes skimming around, which is about 25-40 minutes more time than I endorse me and people similar to me spending on this.
This isn’t exactly implementing any of your ideas, but do note that these kinds of posts are not on the LessWrong frontpage, i.e. they are hidden by-default from new users unless they deactivate the frontpage-only filter.
I… do want to flag something like “You say you want less attention on posts like this, but, then you commented 15 times on this+the-other-post. Do you endorse that?”
It’s not obvious to me whether people-in-general or you-in-particular are spending too much time on this. But.… as the saying goes “You’re not ‘stuck in traffic.’ You are traffic.” And, you’re not stuck in drama. You are drama.
I do think there are things we could do on the margin to nudge people somewhat away from drama posts (it turns out EA Forum automatically hides community posts with lots of comments from their Recent Discussion section and I kinda like that idea).
I think I basically do want established community members putting thought into this, but I think my preferred outcome is something like… jury duty? Like, either explicitly or organically, a few senior members put a lot of time into understanding the situation, hearing evidence from various sources, and writing up their thoughts. But not everyone needs to get consumed.
But, regardless want to flag that if you think there’s too much attention here, adding comments is a fairly odd.
I… do want to flag something like “You say you want less attention on posts like this, but, then you commented 15 times on this+the-other-post. Do you endorse that?”
No, I got sucked in and don’t endorse it.
It’s been a planning fallacy sort of thing. “Zooming in on this one thing, it doesn’t seem too time consuming or bad to jump into. Zooming out: I spent how many hours on this?”
I’m going to try from here on out to be pretty selective about reading and commenting more. I’m not sure how successful I’ll end up being though.
I appreciate you pointing this out. I was thinking of bringing it up.
I think I basically do want established community members putting thought into this, but I think my preferred outcome is something like… jury duty?
I like that jury duty analogy. It sounds like a good approach to me.
That said, I think such discussions are very important. If there are bad things happening in the EA community, it is better if we can detect and fix them. Because the possible alternatives include a huge scandal later in media, or EA becoming something different than what we wanted it to be. If you believe that EA could dramatically improve the world, then corrupting EA could dramatically worsen it.
Sometimes the alternative to “drama” is the “missing stair”.
The technical details are not important for most of us, only the general pattern is. It would be more effective if only Ben checked them and told us the summary (which he did). But when Ben is accused of doing this unfairly, I suppose other people needs to check the details, too. Not everyone needs to, I agree.
I agree that it is important to detect and fix bad things that happen in the community.
I think though that such situations can be handled by a handful of leaders/moderators as opposed to thousands and thousands of people who visit LessWrong. It sounds like you agree with this.
Relatedly, we agree that we can’t rely on few people having this power without having some sort of checks on that power.
I also think that it has a net negative impact for most non leaders/moderators to invest more than a few minutes into this. I’m not clear on whether or not you agree with this, but I’d bet that you agree.
I think it would be difficult to implement what you’re asking for without needing to make the decision about whether investing time in this (or other) subjects is worth anyone’s time on behalf of others.
If you notice in yourself that you have conflicting feelings about whether something is good for you to be doing, e.g., in the sense which you’ve described: that you feel pulled in by this, but have misgivings about it, then I recommend considering this situation to be that you have uncertainty about what you ought to be doing, as opposed to being more certain that you should be doing something else, and only that you have some kind of addiction to drama or something like that.
It may in fact be that you feel pulled in because you actually can add value to the discussion, or at least that watching this is giving you some new knowledge in some way. It’s at least a possibility.
Ultimately, it should be up to you, so if you’re convinced it’s not for you, so be it. However, I feel uncomfortable not allowing people to decide that for themselves.
Meta: I would like to see these sorts of posts receive substantially less attention.
I see the primary topic as being “drama” (for lack of a better term).
I think drama tends to be pretty mind-killing, which leads to low quality discussion, discussions that last way too long, and discussions that frequently end up being demon threads.
I think it usually leaves people feeling kinda sour and bad after reading, skimming, or participating in the discussion.
I don’t really see what people who aren’t in the same social or professional circles as the involved parties have to gain by investing time into these topics. Updating your beliefs about the EA community? Meh, maybe. It seems pretty tough to generalize much about the broader community based on the experiences of the handful of people involved in this incident. But if that is the goal, you can probably take advantage of the Pareto Principle and get perhaps 90% of the benefit with only a few minutes of effort by reading the tl;dr’s and top comment or two.
To be clear, I do think it makes sense for the people involved to be discussing this. Reputation is, in fact, important. I also think it makes sense for leaders in the EA community to want to police things a bit. What I’m proposing is that the 99% for whom this isn’t actually relevant to your life, don’t get sucked in. A few minutes is fine. A few hours probably isn’t.
Idea for how these sorts of “drama posts” might be best handled:
Voting is turned off.
The posts are only available in a special section on LessWrong. They aren’t available in the feed on the main page. This nudges users towards more of a Pit Of Success, yet makes the conversation accessible if you do want to go out of your way to join it.
They are time-boxed. Perhaps a “soft” time-box, perhaps a “hard” one. I’m not sure.
At the end, a moderator (or group of moderators) makes a judgement, writes up a summary, and we move on.
I suppose some sort of appeals process might be needed. I’m not sure. My impression: it’d probably make sense to have one to protect against grievous misjudgement in the initial case, but not as an excuse for dragging the discussion out longer than it deserves.
Edit: I see a lot of smart, high-karma, successful, and impactful people commenting (on Ben’s post) in such a way that makes me thing they’ve spent many hours reading, thinking and writing about this. That makes me sad and frustrated since I believe it is a lot of time and energy that otherwise would be put to quite good use.
I agree to some extent, but I think it would’ve been much better if you’d posted this on the original post, not on the reply. The current phrasing of “I would like to see these sorts of posts receive substantially less attention.” really doesn’t work well when it’s in a response post, rather than the original post. The current setup makes it sound (unintentionally) like accusation posts are fine, and only the responses should receive less attention, which I doubt anyone endorses.
Also, it’s absolutely silly that this is the top comment on this post. Imagine being on the receiving end of drama, responding to it, and then having the top comment be yours, rather than one which engages with the object-level claims.
So I suggest your comment might be better-suited as a top-level meta post of the form “People spend too much time on community drama” or something, where you’d probably get some interesting back and forth and pushback on that claim, and without taking up oxygen in a post where someone is trying to defend their reputation. If you did make it a full post, you could also do a Fermi estimate of the advantages and disadvantages of engaging in community drama; I’m particularly interested in your estimate, not of participating in the drama, but of posting the drama in the first place.
I agree that it would have been better, but disagree about it mattering much. The comment isn’t something that is specific to the post. Rather, it is about the particular type of post.
FWIW, the reason I posted it here is simply because it was the first of the two posts I saw, and my impression at the time was that Ben’s post was only on the EA Forum, not on LW. From there, it didn’t feel worth re-arranging the comments.
Yeah, maybe. I’m not sure.
I feel moderately confident that it is a net harm. From behind a veil of ignorance, I wouldn’t want it posted.
My model is that it sucks people in, wastes their time, and increases the general degree of hostility without really accomplishing much.
The main thing I see it accomplishing is reinforcing the precedent of accountability; that if you do something bad, the community will hold you accountable and penalize you. However, my sense is that the community already does a pretty good job of this, a good enough job such that there isn’t really a need to tug harder on the accountability string.
Yeah, we’re so great at that that we caught FTX in advance, right?
No, seriously, given stuff like FTX, what exactly gives you the impression that we’re good enough at accountability? Even if we consider FTX to be a one-off outlier, outliers with outsized impact deserve outsized consideration nonetheless.
I think I would like it if there were some soft nudges away from drama posts.
Something like “hi, you’ve been reading this post for 30 minutes today, here’s a button for blocking it for the rest of the day (you can read and catch up on comments tomorrow).”
Yeah, me too. I’m a little embarrassed to admit, I’ve checked in on this and on Ben’s post a few times in the past few hours, spending perhaps 30-45 minutes skimming around, which is about 25-40 minutes more time than I endorse me and people similar to me spending on this.
This isn’t exactly implementing any of your ideas, but do note that these kinds of posts are not on the LessWrong frontpage, i.e. they are hidden by-default from new users unless they deactivate the frontpage-only filter.
It did show up in the podcast, which I believe is just filtered by upvotes?
I… do want to flag something like “You say you want less attention on posts like this, but, then you commented 15 times on this+the-other-post. Do you endorse that?”
It’s not obvious to me whether people-in-general or you-in-particular are spending too much time on this. But.… as the saying goes “You’re not ‘stuck in traffic.’ You are traffic.” And, you’re not stuck in drama. You are drama.
I do think there are things we could do on the margin to nudge people somewhat away from drama posts (it turns out EA Forum automatically hides community posts with lots of comments from their Recent Discussion section and I kinda like that idea).
I think I basically do want established community members putting thought into this, but I think my preferred outcome is something like… jury duty? Like, either explicitly or organically, a few senior members put a lot of time into understanding the situation, hearing evidence from various sources, and writing up their thoughts. But not everyone needs to get consumed.
But, regardless want to flag that if you think there’s too much attention here, adding comments is a fairly odd.
No, I got sucked in and don’t endorse it.
It’s been a planning fallacy sort of thing. “Zooming in on this one thing, it doesn’t seem too time consuming or bad to jump into. Zooming out: I spent how many hours on this?”
I’m going to try from here on out to be pretty selective about reading and commenting more. I’m not sure how successful I’ll end up being though.I appreciate you pointing this out. I was thinking of bringing it up.
I like that jury duty analogy. It sounds like a good approach to me.
I agree about the “drama” potential.
That said, I think such discussions are very important. If there are bad things happening in the EA community, it is better if we can detect and fix them. Because the possible alternatives include a huge scandal later in media, or EA becoming something different than what we wanted it to be. If you believe that EA could dramatically improve the world, then corrupting EA could dramatically worsen it.
Sometimes the alternative to “drama” is the “missing stair”.
The technical details are not important for most of us, only the general pattern is. It would be more effective if only Ben checked them and told us the summary (which he did). But when Ben is accused of doing this unfairly, I suppose other people needs to check the details, too. Not everyone needs to, I agree.
I suspect that we don’t disagree.
I agree that it is important to detect and fix bad things that happen in the community.
I think though that such situations can be handled by a handful of leaders/moderators as opposed to thousands and thousands of people who visit LessWrong. It sounds like you agree with this.
Relatedly, we agree that we can’t rely on few people having this power without having some sort of checks on that power.
I also think that it has a net negative impact for most non leaders/moderators to invest more than a few minutes into this. I’m not clear on whether or not you agree with this, but I’d bet that you agree.
I think it would be difficult to implement what you’re asking for without needing to make the decision about whether investing time in this (or other) subjects is worth anyone’s time on behalf of others.
If you notice in yourself that you have conflicting feelings about whether something is good for you to be doing, e.g., in the sense which you’ve described: that you feel pulled in by this, but have misgivings about it, then I recommend considering this situation to be that you have uncertainty about what you ought to be doing, as opposed to being more certain that you should be doing something else, and only that you have some kind of addiction to drama or something like that.
It may in fact be that you feel pulled in because you actually can add value to the discussion, or at least that watching this is giving you some new knowledge in some way. It’s at least a possibility.
Ultimately, it should be up to you, so if you’re convinced it’s not for you, so be it. However, I feel uncomfortable not allowing people to decide that for themselves.