I think the cool thing that could come out of this post is “a bit more consensus about the social value of working various places.” For example, if it turns out that everyone thinks “probably you shouldn’t work at a tobacco company”, then maybe fewer people will go there accidentally, and the people who are at those companies might think harder about their choices.
But I worry that this post is set up in a way that leads to polarization instead of consensus; if it is cheap to say “working at company X is probably bad/evil/etc.” and it is expensive to say the opposite (so people don’t respond or get into the discussion), then we would end up with a false consensus among LW readers that various companies are bad, and a false consensus among people at various companies that LW isn’t worth engaging with (and multiple disagreeing false consensuses seem like the typical form of polarization to me).
So I think it’d be worth putting some meta thought into the question of how we could make this post a place where people who are optimistic about any of the mentioned companies feel hopeful about sharing their opinions and reaching consensus.
[There is, of course, a background fact that it is generally harder to argue for incorrect positions than correct positions, and someone’s fear about getting into an argument about something may really be their fear that they’re incorrect. I think it is a mistake to assume that lack of willingness to engage is generally of that form, rather than first checking that in fact you haven’t make any mistakes that could lead to disconnection of information flow or a sensible lack of hope in the process.]
Anonymous replies can help, but also check out these twothreads by lc and Logan Zoellner, where they have very different views and basically are replying to each other with “it seems like you’re doing the thing that’s the opposite of helping.” What are their cruxes? How can we keep that line of communication open, instead of people getting nastier and more disconnected? [It seems to me like so far the two are ‘making actual arguments’, but also I have a suspicion that it will get 10-20% worse with each reply, and that will mean we don’t actually have the space to get all the way to the ground, or seeing those threads as “how conversation will go” will cause other people to not start threads.]
In particular, seeing a comment that starts with “I suspect my advice is the exact opposite of they Less Wrong/EY consensus, so here goes:” downvoted to invisibility seems like it’s pretty terrible from the perspective of getting all arguments represented. Probably it’s worth turning on the feature that lets people vote ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ separately from ‘upvote’ and ‘downvote’, so that we can separately track “how much voters agree on something” and “how much users should prioritize reading something.”
I think the cool thing that could come out of this post is “a bit more consensus about the social value of working various places.” For example, if it turns out that everyone thinks “probably you shouldn’t work at a tobacco company”, then maybe fewer people will go there accidentally, and the people who are at those companies might think harder about their choices.
But I worry that this post is set up in a way that leads to polarization instead of consensus; if it is cheap to say “working at company X is probably bad/evil/etc.” and it is expensive to say the opposite (so people don’t respond or get into the discussion), then we would end up with a false consensus among LW readers that various companies are bad, and a false consensus among people at various companies that LW isn’t worth engaging with (and multiple disagreeing false consensuses seem like the typical form of polarization to me).
So I think it’d be worth putting some meta thought into the question of how we could make this post a place where people who are optimistic about any of the mentioned companies feel hopeful about sharing their opinions and reaching consensus.
[There is, of course, a background fact that it is generally harder to argue for incorrect positions than correct positions, and someone’s fear about getting into an argument about something may really be their fear that they’re incorrect. I think it is a mistake to assume that lack of willingness to engage is generally of that form, rather than first checking that in fact you haven’t make any mistakes that could lead to disconnection of information flow or a sensible lack of hope in the process.]
I invite people to reply anonymously here
I’ll add the link to the post
Anonymous replies can help, but also check out these two threads by lc and Logan Zoellner, where they have very different views and basically are replying to each other with “it seems like you’re doing the thing that’s the opposite of helping.” What are their cruxes? How can we keep that line of communication open, instead of people getting nastier and more disconnected? [It seems to me like so far the two are ‘making actual arguments’, but also I have a suspicion that it will get 10-20% worse with each reply, and that will mean we don’t actually have the space to get all the way to the ground, or seeing those threads as “how conversation will go” will cause other people to not start threads.]
In particular, seeing a comment that starts with “I suspect my advice is the exact opposite of they Less Wrong/EY consensus, so here goes:” downvoted to invisibility seems like it’s pretty terrible from the perspective of getting all arguments represented. Probably it’s worth turning on the feature that lets people vote ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ separately from ‘upvote’ and ‘downvote’, so that we can separately track “how much voters agree on something” and “how much users should prioritize reading something.”
I removed my strong downvote, because you’re right, but I’d like to register my highly sincere disagreement here.
Two-axis voting is now activated, thanks to habryka.