No. Google shows that there’s 5 other posts that focus on 80,000 Hours, of which one is a link by somebody who doesn’t work for 80K, the most recent one is a criticism of 80K, and theotherthree all date back at least 6 months.
The most recent mention of 80k was in the my introduction for THINK, which I suspect is what paper-machine is remembering. (It was a rather blatant advertisement, although the project has many of its roots in Less Wrong community and I think posts describing various “rationality task forces” should be encouraged)
While I agree that posts describing various “rationality task forces” should be encouraged, I disagree that the present post at hand is one of those posts. It only describes 80k as a collage of marketing buzzwords.
This is the first post about 80k on LW by an 80k volunteer/staff member, and like Randaly says, the only two posts in the last 6 months to significantly feature 80k were about arguments for and against professional philanthropy.
Apologies for the ‘collage of buzzwords’ impression. I didn’t include a detailed description of 80k and its purpose, like the THINK post, because I wasn’t intending it to be an advert. Rather, I was intending it to be a survey. For this reason I also didn’t include much detail about what our existing work is about, hoping not to bias people towards mentioning certain topics. That was obviously a bad idea.
For what it’s worth. Here’s the areas we’re currently investigating. We’d be interested to hear which of these are of particular interest, and more interested to hear about similar types of question that you think are really important.
Which people can have the most impact in research careers? When does working in research trump funding research?
How should we factor our own happiness into career decisions? What leads to job satisfaction and how realistic is it to take jobs in industries we’re not passionate about?
Among the ‘effective altruist’ and xrisk organisations, which have the greatest need for more funding or skills of various sorts?
What are the best funding and career opportunities within the cause of reducing animal suffering?
Which biases and heuristics particularly affect altruistic career decisions? How can we make good career decisions?
Now vs Later issues—should I invest in training in order to earn more in the future? should I give my money now or give it later?
How many lives does someone typically save by becoming a doctor? How much can you earn as a doctor?
What opportunities are there to increase the effectiveness of large budgets by becoming some kind of grant maker?
What are the best careers tests out there? Which are based on good evidence?
Clarifying your mission statement is something you should do in the main body of your post, not something that should be somewhat buried in a comment thread.
Let’s be consequentialists about this. Are “ads” necessarily bad? Previously, I suggested that people dislike ads and advertisers because they introduce what social scientists call “market norms” somewhere where regular social norms typically prevail. (A product listing page on Amazon isn’t an ad, because you expected market norms on Amazon. Put the same information on a billboard and it becomes an ad.) But marketplace transactions frequently generate producer and consumer surplus, so from a consequentialist perspective they can be definitely be good. (You wouldn’t pay $5 for a sandwich unless the sandwich was worth more to you than the $5. The sandwich maker wouldn’t sell you the sandwich for $5 unless the $5 was worth more to them than the sandwich.)
This “ad” isn’t even an advertisement for a marketplace transaction, it’s an offer to provide a service for free: specifically, free research in to how to do more good with your career. It looks like folks are objecting to it because it kind of superficially resembles the way people typically describe marketplace transactions they wish to engage in. How about we stop reasoning by an analogy?
I agree, however, that there’s a risk with ads that the person making the ad fails to take in to account the attentional cost from people who see the ad but don’t wish to engage in any transaction. (Spam would be the extreme example of this.) So when determining whether to allow an ad or not, how about estimating attentional costs and subtracting that from estimated total producer and consumer surplus?
I suspect people dislike ads because ads have usually a very low information to noise ratio. This may be untrue for this particular ad, but always there are slippery-slope concerns. No ads rule is much easier to enforce and harder to game than a “no ads except those which have something common with LW and are honest and contain no misleading information”. Just keep this in mind when doing the consequentialist analysis.
A product listing page on Amazon isn’t an ad, because you expected market norms on Amazon. Put the same information on a billboard and it becomes an ad.
You don’t expect market norms on a billboard? I think a product listing page on Amazon isn’t an ad because its purpose is not advertising, it just informs you what can you find on a site you have already chosen to visit. Advertising is usually not requested—if you enter a restaurant and ask for the menu, receiving it is not advertising. If you find the menu in your mailbox, it is.
I suspect people dislike ads because ads have usually a very low information to noise ratio. This may be untrue for this particular ad, but always there are slippery-slope concerns.
“I suspect people dislike blog posts because blog posts have usually a very low information to noise ratio. This may be untrue for this particular blog post, but there are slippery-slope concerns.”
All I’m suggesting is that we treat ads like any other post—vote up the ones we recommend and vote down the ones we disrecommend. I don’t see any “slippery slope concerns”.
You don’t expect market norms on a billboard? I think a product listing page on Amazon isn’t an ad because its purpose is not advertising, it just informs you what can you find on a site you have already chosen to visit. Advertising is usually not requested—if you enter a restaurant and ask for the menu, receiving it is not advertising. If you find the menu in your mailbox, it is.
OK, but it’s still fundamentally about market vs social norms. A sign that says “hi there good looking!” or Rob wants to give you a hi five wouldn’t be an ad, even if you didn’t request it. A sign that advertised a transaction you could take part in that involved money and goods or services would be an ad.
My question is, is this aversion to marketplace transactions necessarily rational, assuming we can correctly vote ads up and down based only on their information to noise ratio?
All I’m suggesting is that we treat ads like any other post—vote up the ones we recommend and vote down the ones we disrecommend. I don’t see any “slippery slope concerns”.
I understand the recommendation. What I am saying is that it is plausible that a general norm against ads is a net win although it supresses even the few ads from which the community would profit. In other words, I consider it possible that we aren’t going to be able to consistently let the beneficial ads in while keeping the typical ads away.
OK, but it’s still fundamentally about market vs social norms. A sign that says “hi there good looking!” or Rob wants to give you a hi five wouldn’t be an ad, even if you didn’t request it. A sign that advertised a transaction you could take part in that involved money and goods or services would be an ad.
Of course absence of request isn’t sufficient for a sign to be an ad. On the other hand I think it is a more necessary condition than its being about money and goods: a political poster saying “Every responsible citizen votes for the Blue party!” is more of an ad than a price list hanging in a butchery, at least concerning the aversion it generates. Ads are made to persuade, not inform; hence the prevalence of rhetorical noise over information.
The aversion to ads is rational in this respect. Somebody else is trying to push you into increasing their utility. Not only it is in the advertiser’s interest to skew one fact a little bit and omit another, the very existence of advertising primes you to consider the advertised alternative instead of others which introduces bias in your choice. Given the number of ads we encounter it is perfectly reasonable to have some countermeasures which decrease the effectivity of advertising.
I am pretty sure that I have no aversion to marketplace transactions which I initiate.
Edit: of course there is the possibility that “market norms” in your parlance include the norm that advertising is appropriate. Then I would agree that aversion to advertising implies aversion to market norms, although somewhat tautologically so.
This post is an ad and very obviously so. Now, maybe LessWrong wants to give hits to 80,000 hours and bump their Google Pagerank, and maybe it doesn’t. But I have a feeling if it were advertising penis pills instead of 80,000 hours, you wouldn’t be complaining that paper-machine provided insufficient evidence. In case you still doubt, I’ll lay out how I noticed it was an Ad.
As of this writing, Benjamin_Todd currently has 2 posts and 6 karma. 1 post is this thread, another is in the 80,000 hours link thread someone else put up. Eg, his only presence on this LessWrong is promoting 80,000 hours.
This thread itself has two links, one to 80,000 hours and another to.… mailto:80,000 hours.
The only informational content of this post relates to 80,000 hours. Not ethics of optimal philanthropy, or anything else of use. Nothing unique to LessWrong.
A person named Benjamin Todd works for 80,000 hours and is responsible, among other things, for their web presence.
Putting the first phrase in google brings up 80,000 hours’ blog and reveals the EXACT ENTIRE POST is actually a copy-paste advertisement.
Maybe you think 80,000 hours is worth having advertising for. That’s fine, maybe it is. But if so, please claim that instead of trying to imply their advertising isn’t advertising.
Apologies—I wasn’t intending to hide the fact that I help to run 80k. If I were, hopefully I would have done a better job than using my real name. Point taken about it being a cross posting on the 80k blog, but I did think the content would be of special interest to LWers, and it hasn’t been cross posted anywhere else.
From what little I know regarding 80,000 hours it actually is worthwhile and one could make a good argument for being worthwhile to advertise or just discuss here. It’s just that it strongly pattern matched to other advertising, like when LG came to a technology forum I frequented so they could tell us about their fantastic products for cheap! I wouldn’t be averse to a different discussion talking about how it helps people achieve optimal philanthropy. Effective altruism is something I (and I’d wager a lot of people on this forum) find interesting.
Edit: Just one quick question, why is 80,000 hours called 80,000 hours? It’s a striking name, but a cursory read of the FAQ didn’t explain.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the fact you cross-posted it. Maybe your reception would have been a little better if you explicitly identified it as a cross-post and explained why you thought LWers would be interested, but from a consequentialist perspective, who cares?
I’m sorry, but I disagree that the post is obviously an ad. Since it is not obviously an ad, I believe you should have provided accompanying evidence that it was when writing your original comment. Yet I’m disappointed to see that the reaction to my own comment, which stated that this evidence was lacking, has been overwhelmingly negative.
As of this writing, Benjamin_Todd currently has 2 posts and 6 karma. 1 post is this thread, another is in the 80,000 hours link thread someone else put up. Eg, his only presence on this LessWrong is promoting 80,000 hours.
This by itself is only weak evidence for your claim that the post was an ad. There are many valuable comments with no ulterior motives made by users with only a handful of contributions (e.g., see the posts by David Chalmers).
This thread itself has two links, one to 80,000 hours and another to.… mailto:80,000 hours.
So what? This is exactly what you would expect in a post requesting answers to a question posed by that organization.
The only informational content of this post relates to 80,000 hours. Not ethics of optimal philanthropy, or anything else of use. Nothing unique to LessWrong.
As noted, the post was specifically requesting answers to the question “How can you best use your time to make a difference?” It wasn’t intended to be an introduction to optimal philanthropy, which has been covered extensively here (where the post appeared) and is also explained in detail on the 80000 Hours website (to which the post linked).
A person named Benjamin Todd works for 80,000 hours and is responsible, among other things, for their web presence.
Yes, and again, this is exactly what you would expect from someone writing a post on behalf of 80,000 Hours announcing that this organization is looking for answers to a certain question.
Putting the first phrase in google brings up 80,000 hours’ blog and reveals the EXACT ENTIRE POST is actually a copy-paste advertisement.
No, it doesn’t reveal that the entire post is a copy-paste advertisement. It reveals that it was a post written elsewhere. Maybe Benjamin Todd’s decision to give it more visibility by reposting it here is objectionable, but it certainly doesn’t show that the post was an ad.
Even if you disagree with my assessment of the lines of evidence above, the sheer fact that this disagreement exists is itself strong evidence that the post wasn’t obviously an ad, unless you dispute my intelligence or honesty. Posts that are obviously ads should not elicit such disagreements among honest, intelligent people.
I believe that what Benthamite was trying to get at was the fact that this post isn’t an ad for 80,000 Hours itself- it provides very little to no information about 80,000 Hours itself, what 80,000 hours does, who is involved in it, etc- the sort of information one would find in an actual ad for the organization.
Instead, it advertises a specific service. However, even here the word “advertise” is sneaking in negative connotations, particularly in this context- advertising has connotations of conniving Madison Avenue executives thinking of sneaky and/or pushy ways to take your money, whereas in this case 80,000 Hours is offering a free service. (Incidentally, advertising is so strongly associated with commercial products that it might be literally false that this is advertising, depending on which definition you use- for example, Google defines advertising as “The activity or profession of producing advertisements for commercial products or services;” this isn’t a commercial product or service, so it’s not advertising by that definition.)
Downvoted for not providing evidence or argument supporting the claim that the topic and content of the post constitutes an “ad” for 80,000 Hours.
Downvoted for either being disengenuous or actually being utterly naive. (Naivety is usually ok, but naivety while directly challenging another gets less leeway.)
Another ad for 80,000 hours? Haven’t we had some of these very recently?
No. Google shows that there’s 5 other posts that focus on 80,000 Hours, of which one is a link by somebody who doesn’t work for 80K, the most recent one is a criticism of 80K, and the other three all date back at least 6 months.
The most recent mention of 80k was in the my introduction for THINK, which I suspect is what paper-machine is remembering. (It was a rather blatant advertisement, although the project has many of its roots in Less Wrong community and I think posts describing various “rationality task forces” should be encouraged)
While I agree that posts describing various “rationality task forces” should be encouraged, I disagree that the present post at hand is one of those posts. It only describes 80k as a collage of marketing buzzwords.
Your post was vastly better.
This is the first post about 80k on LW by an 80k volunteer/staff member, and like Randaly says, the only two posts in the last 6 months to significantly feature 80k were about arguments for and against professional philanthropy.
Apologies for the ‘collage of buzzwords’ impression. I didn’t include a detailed description of 80k and its purpose, like the THINK post, because I wasn’t intending it to be an advert. Rather, I was intending it to be a survey. For this reason I also didn’t include much detail about what our existing work is about, hoping not to bias people towards mentioning certain topics. That was obviously a bad idea.
For what it’s worth. Here’s the areas we’re currently investigating. We’d be interested to hear which of these are of particular interest, and more interested to hear about similar types of question that you think are really important.
Which people can have the most impact in research careers? When does working in research trump funding research?
How should we factor our own happiness into career decisions? What leads to job satisfaction and how realistic is it to take jobs in industries we’re not passionate about?
Among the ‘effective altruist’ and xrisk organisations, which have the greatest need for more funding or skills of various sorts?
What are the best funding and career opportunities within the cause of reducing animal suffering?
Which biases and heuristics particularly affect altruistic career decisions? How can we make good career decisions?
Now vs Later issues—should I invest in training in order to earn more in the future? should I give my money now or give it later?
How many lives does someone typically save by becoming a doctor? How much can you earn as a doctor?
What opportunities are there to increase the effectiveness of large budgets by becoming some kind of grant maker?
What are the best careers tests out there? Which are based on good evidence?
Clarifying your mission statement is something you should do in the main body of your post, not something that should be somewhat buried in a comment thread.
Not quite. Jkaufman is a member of 80,000 Hours, though not staff or a volunteer for them.
Let’s be consequentialists about this. Are “ads” necessarily bad? Previously, I suggested that people dislike ads and advertisers because they introduce what social scientists call “market norms” somewhere where regular social norms typically prevail. (A product listing page on Amazon isn’t an ad, because you expected market norms on Amazon. Put the same information on a billboard and it becomes an ad.) But marketplace transactions frequently generate producer and consumer surplus, so from a consequentialist perspective they can be definitely be good. (You wouldn’t pay $5 for a sandwich unless the sandwich was worth more to you than the $5. The sandwich maker wouldn’t sell you the sandwich for $5 unless the $5 was worth more to them than the sandwich.)
This “ad” isn’t even an advertisement for a marketplace transaction, it’s an offer to provide a service for free: specifically, free research in to how to do more good with your career. It looks like folks are objecting to it because it kind of superficially resembles the way people typically describe marketplace transactions they wish to engage in. How about we stop reasoning by an analogy?
I agree, however, that there’s a risk with ads that the person making the ad fails to take in to account the attentional cost from people who see the ad but don’t wish to engage in any transaction. (Spam would be the extreme example of this.) So when determining whether to allow an ad or not, how about estimating attentional costs and subtracting that from estimated total producer and consumer surplus?
I suspect people dislike ads because ads have usually a very low information to noise ratio. This may be untrue for this particular ad, but always there are slippery-slope concerns. No ads rule is much easier to enforce and harder to game than a “no ads except those which have something common with LW and are honest and contain no misleading information”. Just keep this in mind when doing the consequentialist analysis.
You don’t expect market norms on a billboard? I think a product listing page on Amazon isn’t an ad because its purpose is not advertising, it just informs you what can you find on a site you have already chosen to visit. Advertising is usually not requested—if you enter a restaurant and ask for the menu, receiving it is not advertising. If you find the menu in your mailbox, it is.
“I suspect people dislike blog posts because blog posts have usually a very low information to noise ratio. This may be untrue for this particular blog post, but there are slippery-slope concerns.”
All I’m suggesting is that we treat ads like any other post—vote up the ones we recommend and vote down the ones we disrecommend. I don’t see any “slippery slope concerns”.
OK, but it’s still fundamentally about market vs social norms. A sign that says “hi there good looking!” or Rob wants to give you a hi five wouldn’t be an ad, even if you didn’t request it. A sign that advertised a transaction you could take part in that involved money and goods or services would be an ad.
My question is, is this aversion to marketplace transactions necessarily rational, assuming we can correctly vote ads up and down based only on their information to noise ratio?
I understand the recommendation. What I am saying is that it is plausible that a general norm against ads is a net win although it supresses even the few ads from which the community would profit. In other words, I consider it possible that we aren’t going to be able to consistently let the beneficial ads in while keeping the typical ads away.
Of course absence of request isn’t sufficient for a sign to be an ad. On the other hand I think it is a more necessary condition than its being about money and goods: a political poster saying “Every responsible citizen votes for the Blue party!” is more of an ad than a price list hanging in a butchery, at least concerning the aversion it generates. Ads are made to persuade, not inform; hence the prevalence of rhetorical noise over information.
The aversion to ads is rational in this respect. Somebody else is trying to push you into increasing their utility. Not only it is in the advertiser’s interest to skew one fact a little bit and omit another, the very existence of advertising primes you to consider the advertised alternative instead of others which introduces bias in your choice. Given the number of ads we encounter it is perfectly reasonable to have some countermeasures which decrease the effectivity of advertising.
I am pretty sure that I have no aversion to marketplace transactions which I initiate.
Edit: of course there is the possibility that “market norms” in your parlance include the norm that advertising is appropriate. Then I would agree that aversion to advertising implies aversion to market norms, although somewhat tautologically so.
Downvoted for not providing evidence or argument supporting the claim that the topic and content of the post constitutes an “ad” for 80,000 Hours.
This post is an ad and very obviously so. Now, maybe LessWrong wants to give hits to 80,000 hours and bump their Google Pagerank, and maybe it doesn’t. But I have a feeling if it were advertising penis pills instead of 80,000 hours, you wouldn’t be complaining that paper-machine provided insufficient evidence. In case you still doubt, I’ll lay out how I noticed it was an Ad.
As of this writing, Benjamin_Todd currently has 2 posts and 6 karma. 1 post is this thread, another is in the 80,000 hours link thread someone else put up. Eg, his only presence on this LessWrong is promoting 80,000 hours.
This thread itself has two links, one to 80,000 hours and another to.… mailto:80,000 hours.
The only informational content of this post relates to 80,000 hours. Not ethics of optimal philanthropy, or anything else of use. Nothing unique to LessWrong.
A person named Benjamin Todd works for 80,000 hours and is responsible, among other things, for their web presence.
Putting the first phrase in google brings up 80,000 hours’ blog and reveals the EXACT ENTIRE POST is actually a copy-paste advertisement.
Maybe you think 80,000 hours is worth having advertising for. That’s fine, maybe it is. But if so, please claim that instead of trying to imply their advertising isn’t advertising.
Apologies—I wasn’t intending to hide the fact that I help to run 80k. If I were, hopefully I would have done a better job than using my real name. Point taken about it being a cross posting on the 80k blog, but I did think the content would be of special interest to LWers, and it hasn’t been cross posted anywhere else.
From what little I know regarding 80,000 hours it actually is worthwhile and one could make a good argument for being worthwhile to advertise or just discuss here. It’s just that it strongly pattern matched to other advertising, like when LG came to a technology forum I frequented so they could tell us about their fantastic products for cheap! I wouldn’t be averse to a different discussion talking about how it helps people achieve optimal philanthropy. Effective altruism is something I (and I’d wager a lot of people on this forum) find interesting.
Edit: Just one quick question, why is 80,000 hours called 80,000 hours? It’s a striking name, but a cursory read of the FAQ didn’t explain.
80,000 hours = total amount of time spent at work over a stereotypical firstworld lifespan.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the fact you cross-posted it. Maybe your reception would have been a little better if you explicitly identified it as a cross-post and explained why you thought LWers would be interested, but from a consequentialist perspective, who cares?
I’m sorry, but I disagree that the post is obviously an ad. Since it is not obviously an ad, I believe you should have provided accompanying evidence that it was when writing your original comment. Yet I’m disappointed to see that the reaction to my own comment, which stated that this evidence was lacking, has been overwhelmingly negative.
This by itself is only weak evidence for your claim that the post was an ad. There are many valuable comments with no ulterior motives made by users with only a handful of contributions (e.g., see the posts by David Chalmers).
So what? This is exactly what you would expect in a post requesting answers to a question posed by that organization.
As noted, the post was specifically requesting answers to the question “How can you best use your time to make a difference?” It wasn’t intended to be an introduction to optimal philanthropy, which has been covered extensively here (where the post appeared) and is also explained in detail on the 80000 Hours website (to which the post linked).
Yes, and again, this is exactly what you would expect from someone writing a post on behalf of 80,000 Hours announcing that this organization is looking for answers to a certain question.
No, it doesn’t reveal that the entire post is a copy-paste advertisement. It reveals that it was a post written elsewhere. Maybe Benjamin Todd’s decision to give it more visibility by reposting it here is objectionable, but it certainly doesn’t show that the post was an ad.
Even if you disagree with my assessment of the lines of evidence above, the sheer fact that this disagreement exists is itself strong evidence that the post wasn’t obviously an ad, unless you dispute my intelligence or honesty. Posts that are obviously ads should not elicit such disagreements among honest, intelligent people.
I believe that what Benthamite was trying to get at was the fact that this post isn’t an ad for 80,000 Hours itself- it provides very little to no information about 80,000 Hours itself, what 80,000 hours does, who is involved in it, etc- the sort of information one would find in an actual ad for the organization.
Instead, it advertises a specific service. However, even here the word “advertise” is sneaking in negative connotations, particularly in this context- advertising has connotations of conniving Madison Avenue executives thinking of sneaky and/or pushy ways to take your money, whereas in this case 80,000 Hours is offering a free service. (Incidentally, advertising is so strongly associated with commercial products that it might be literally false that this is advertising, depending on which definition you use- for example, Google defines advertising as “The activity or profession of producing advertisements for commercial products or services;” this isn’t a commercial product or service, so it’s not advertising by that definition.)
Downvoted for either being disengenuous or actually being utterly naive. (Naivety is usually ok, but naivety while directly challenging another gets less leeway.)