Discussing EA drama on the forum might be bad, but discussing it on twitter is, in my view, worse.

Thoughts on the Centre for Effective Altruism, weakly held, n = 1, but feeling like things someone should say:

• EAGs seem good
• Community Health seems better than replacement. It's a hard job, not perfect, but I am glad someone is doing it.
• the Forum seems like not a place I want to be despite having previously been here a lot. Hard to make sense of what's important, somehow
• I rarely see comms work I think is good. Maybe it's in places I don't see, but on twitter, is does EA have a reputation that is helped by CEA? The odd thread I guess?
• Vision? I dunno. Is there meant to be some kind of movement-wide vision I am meant to understand and get behind? 'Do AI safety/policy work', I guess?
• Functionalness? Has there been any EA org as mired in dysfunction as CEA (other than FTX)? Has that changed recently? Base rates aren't good.
• Uni teams, no idea.

I imagine that there are lots of good, hard-working people at CEA and my intention isn't to hurt. But I think we should see the world as it is and perhaps this is information to some. It is so easy never to say anything and then wonder why nothing changes. If this seems false to you, downvote it. But if it is upvoted when you see it, update on it. CEA in some ways speaks for EA, or has been seen to. What is going on? 

People are welcome to DM me to chat about this though I prefer twitter DMs or emails to [email protected]

I tend to, on balance, be pretty grateful to community health. I am glad to be part of a community that actually takes responsibility for the things that a reasonable observer would expect them to be responsible for. 

I tend to think many companies and communities are cowardly here. And sure, recently I think EA has acted like women are made of glass and that there is no joy to be had in any kind of romance at all, but at least the team aren't cowards. Any community that is like "we don't take responsibility for what people do at our events" I want to spit them out of my mouth. I am glad that if someone is having a bad time there is a place to report that too while neither do nothing, nor just throw the accused out. 

So thanks folks. 

I feel like I want 80k to do more cause prioritisation if they are gonna direct so many people. Seems like 5 years ago they had their whole ranking thing which was easy to check. Now I am less confident in the quality of work that is directing lots of people in a certain direction.

Have your EA conflicts on... THE FORUM!

In general, I think it's much better to first attempt to have a community conflict internally before I have it externally. This doesn't really apply to criminal behaviour or sexual abuse. I am centrally talking about disagreements, eg the Bostrom stuff, fallout around the FTX stuff, Nonlinear stuff, now this manifest stuff. 

Why do I think this?

• If I want to credibly signal I will listen and obey norms, it seems better to start with a small discourse escalation rather than a large one. Starting a community discussion on twitter is like jumping straight to a shooting war. 
• Many external locations (eg twitter, the press) have very skewed norms/incentives to the forum and so many parties can feel like they are the victim. I find when multiple parties feel they are weaker and victimised that is likely to cause escalation. 
• Many spaces have less affordance for editing comments, seeing who agrees with who, having a respected mutual party say "woah hold up there"
• It is hard to say "I will abide by the community sentiment" if I have already started the discussion elsewhere in order to shame people. And if I don't intend to abide by the community sentiment, why am I trying to manage a community conflict in the first place. I might as well just jump straight to shaming. 
• It is hard to say "I am open to changing my mind" if I have set up the conflict in a way that leads to shaming if the other person doesn't change theirs. It's like holding a gun to someone's head and saying that this is just a friendly discussion. 
• I desire reconciliation. I have hurt people in this community and been hurt by them. In both case to the point of tears and sleepless night. But still I would prefer reconciliation and growth over a escalating conflict
• Conflict is often negative sum, so lets try and have it be the least negative sum as possible. 
• Probably a good chunk of it is church norms, centred around 1 Corinthians 6^[2]. I don't really endorse this, but I think it's good to be clear why I think thinks. 

Personal examples:

• Last year I didn't like that Hanania was a main speaker at manifest (iirc) so I went to their discord and said so. I then made some votes. The median user agreed with me and so Hanania didn't speak. I doubt you heard about this, because I did it on the manifold discord. I hardly tweeted about it or anything. This and the fact I said I wouldn't created a safe space to have the discussion and I largely got what I wanted. 

You might think this is a comment is directed at a specific person, but I bet you are wrong. I dislike this behaviour when it is done by at least 3 different parties that I can think of. 

1. ^{^}

    

2. ^{^}

    If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? ² Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? ³ Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! ⁴ Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, do you ask for a ruling from those whose way of life is scorned in the church? ⁵ I say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers? ⁶ But instead, one brother takes another to court—and this in front of unbelievers!

   ⁷ The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?

I have made a semi-functional rich person impact ranker. It requires votes (and optionally, longform analyses from humans or AIs). If you want to help flesh it out, dm me on here or on twitter or if you have my details, anywhere I am contactable and I'll send it to you. 

If anyone who disagrees with me on the manifest stuff who considers themselves inside the EA movement, I'd like to have some discussions with a focus on consensus-building. ie we chat in DMs and the both report some statements we agreed on and some we specifically disagreed on.  

Edited:

@Joseph Lemien asked for positions I hold:

• The EA forum should not seek to have opinions on non-EA events. I don't mean individual EAs shouldn't have opinions, I mean that as a group we shouldn't seek to judge individual event. I don't think we're very good at it.
•  I don't like Hanania's behaviour either and am a little wary of systems where norm breaking behaviour gives extra power, such as being endlessly edgy. But I will take those complaints to the manifold community internally.
• EAGs are welcome to invite or disinvite whoever CEA likes. Maybe one day I'll complain. But do I want EAGs to invite a load of manifest's edgiest speakers? Not particularly. 
• It is fine for there to be spaces with discussion that I find ugly. If people want to go to these events, that's up to them.
• I dislike having unresolved conflicts which ossify into an inability to talk about things. Someone once told me that the couples who stay together are either great at settling disputes or almost never fight. We fight a bit and we aren't great at settling it. I guess I'd like us to fight less (say we aren't interested in conflicty posts) or to get better at making up (come to consensus afterwards, grow and change)
• Only 1-6% of attendees at manifest had issues along eugenicsy lines in the feedback forms. I don't think this is worth a huge change. 
• I would imagine it's worth $10mns to avoid EA becoming a space full of people who fearmonger based on the races, genders or sexualities of others. I don't think that's very likely.
• To me, current systems for taxing discussion of eugenics seem fine. There is the odd post that gets downvoted. If it were good and convincing it would be upvoted. so far it hasn't been. seems fine. I am not scared of bad arguments ^[1]
• Black people are probably not avoiding Manifest because of these speakers because that theory doesn't seem to hold up for tech, rationalism^[2], EA or several other communities. 
• I don't know what people want when they point at "distancing EA from rationalism"
• Manifest was fun for me, and it and several other events I went to in the bay felt like I let out a breath that I never knew I was holding. I am pretty careful what I say about you all sometimes and it's tiring. I guess that's true for some of you too. It was nice (and surprisingly un-edgy for me) to be in a space where I didn't have to worry about offending people a lot. I enjoy having spaces where I feel safer.
• There is a tradeoff between feeling safe and expression. I would have more time for some proposals if people acknowledged the costs they are putting on others. Even small costs, even costs I would willingly pay are still costs and to have that be unmentionable feels gaslighty. 
• There are some incentives in this community to be upset about things and to be blunt in response. Both of these things seem bad. I'd prefer incentives towards working together to figure out how the world is and impliment the most effective morally agreeable changes per unit resource. This requires some truthseeking, but probably not the maximal amount. and some kindness, but probably not the maximal amount. 

1. ^{^}

   Unless there was some kind of flooding of the forum to boost posts repeatedly.

2. ^{^}

   LessWrong doesn't have any significant discussion of eugenics either. As I (weakly) understand it they kicked many posters off who wanted to talk about such things.

Some things I don't think I've seen around FTX, which are probably due to the investigation, but still seems worth noting. Please correct me if these things have been said.

• I haven't seen anyone at the FTXFF acknowledge fault for negligence in not noticing that a defunct phone company (north dimension) was paying out their grants.
  • This isn't hugely judgemental from me, I think I'd have made this mistake too, but I would like it acknowledged at some point
  • Since writing this it's been pointed out that there were grants paid from FTX and Alameda accounts also. Ooof.

The FTX Foundation grants were funded via transfers from a variety of bank 
accounts, including North Dimension-8738 and Alameda-4456 (Primary Deposit Accounts), as 
well as Alameda-4464 and FTX Trading-9018

• I haven't seen anyone at CEA acknowledge that they ran an investigation in 2019-2020 on someone who would turn out to be one of the largest fraudsters in the world and failed to turn up anything despite seemingly a number of flags.
  • I remain confused
• As I've written elsewhere I haven't seen engagement on this point, which I find relatively credible, from one of the Time articles:

"Bouscal recalled speaking to Mac Aulay immediately after one of Mac Aulay’s conversations with MacAskill in late 2018. “Will basically took Sam’s side,” said Bouscal, who recalls waiting with Mac Aulay in the Stockholm airport while she was on the phone. (Bouscal and Mac Aulay had once dated; though no longer romantically involved, they remain close friends.) “Will basically threatened Tara,” Bouscal recalls. “I remember my impression being that Will was taking a pretty hostile stance here and that he was just believing Sam’s side of the story, which made no sense to me.”"

• My comment on the above "While other things may have been bigger errors, this once seems most sort of "out of character" or "bad normsy". And I know Naia well enough that this moves me a lot, even though it seems so out of character for [will] (maybe 30% that this is a broadly accurate account). This causes me consternation, I don't understand and I think if this happened it was really bad and behaviour like it should not happen from any powerful EAs (or any EAs frankly)."

I know of at least 1 NDA of an EA org silencing someone for discussing what bad behaviour that happened at that org. Should EA orgs be in the practice of making people sign such NDAs?

I suggest no.

An alternate stance on moderation (from @Habryka.)

This is from this comment responding to this post about there being too many bans on LessWrong. Note how the LessWrong is less moderated than here in that it (I guess) responds to individual posts less often, but more moderated in that I guess it rate limits people more without reason. 

I found it thought provoking. I'd recommend reading it.

Thanks for making this post! 

One of the reasons why I like rate-limits instead of bans is that it allows people to complain about the rate-limiting and to participate in discussion on their own posts (so seeing a harsh rate-limit of something like "1 comment per 3 days" is not equivalent to a general ban from LessWrong, but should be more interpreted as "please comment primarily on your own posts", though of course it shares many important properties of a ban).

This is a pretty opposite approach to the EA forum which favours bans.

Things that seem most important to bring up in terms of moderation philosophy: 

Moderation on LessWrong does not depend on effort

"Another thing I've noticed is that almost all the users are trying.  They are trying to use rationality, trying to understand what's been written here, trying to apply Baye's rule or understand AI.  Even some of the users with negative karma are trying, just having more difficulty."

Just because someone is genuinely trying to contribute to LessWrong, does not mean LessWrong is a good place for them. LessWrong has a particular culture, with particular standards and particular interests, and I think many people, even if they are genuinely trying, don't fit well within that culture and those standards. 

In making rate-limiting decisions like this I don't pay much attention to whether the user in question is "genuinely trying " to contribute to LW,  I am mostly just evaluating the effects I see their actions having on the quality of the discussions happening on the site, and the quality of the ideas they are contributing. 

Motivation and goals are of course a relevant component to model, but that mostly pushes in the opposite direction, in that if I have someone who seems to be making great contributions, and I learn they aren't even trying, then that makes me more excited, since there is upside if they do become more motivated in the future.

I sense this is quite different to the EA forum too. I can't imagine a mod saying I don't pay much attention to whether the user in question is "genuinely trying". I find this honesty pretty stark. Feels like a thing moderators aren't allowed to say. "We don't like the quality of your comments and we don't think you can improve".

Signal to Noise ratio is important

Thomas and Elizabeth pointed this out already, but just because someone's comments don't seem actively bad, doesn't mean I don't want to limit their ability to contribute. We do a lot of things on LW to improve the signal to noise ratio of content on the site, and one of those things is to reduce the amount of noise, even if the mean of what we remove looks not actively harmful. 

We of course also do other things than to remove some of the lower signal content to improve the signal to noise ratio. Voting does a lot, how we sort the frontpage does a lot, subscriptions and notification systems do a lot. But rate-limiting is also a tool I use for the same purpose.

Old users are owed explanations, new users are (mostly) not

I think if you've been around for a while on LessWrong, and I decide to rate-limit you, then I think it makes sense for me to make some time to argue with you about that, and give you the opportunity to convince me that I am wrong. But if you are new, and haven't invested a lot in the site, then I think I owe you relatively little. 

I think in doing the above rate-limits, we did not do enough to give established users the affordance to push back and argue with us about them. I do think most of these users are relatively recent or are users we've been very straightforward with since shortly after they started commenting that we don't think they are breaking even on their contributions to the site (like the OP Gerald Monroe, with whom we had 3 separate conversations over the past few months), and for those I don't think we owe them much of an explanation. LessWrong is a walled garden. 

You do not by default have the right to be here, and I don't want to, and cannot, accept the burden of explaining to everyone who wants to be here but who I don't want here, why I am making my decisions. As such a moderation principle that we've been aspiring to for quite a while is to let new users know as early as possible if we think them being on the site is unlikely to work out, so that if you have been around for a while you can feel stable, and also so that you don't invest in something that will end up being taken away from you.

Feedback helps a bit, especially if you are young, but usually doesn't

Maybe there are other people who are much better at giving feedback and helping people grow as commenters, but my personal experience is that giving users feedback, especially the second or third time, rarely tends to substantially improve things. 

I think this sucks. I would much rather be in a world where the usual reasons why I think someone isn't positively contributing to LessWrong were of the type that a short conversation could clear up and fix, but it alas does not appear so, and after having spent many hundreds of hours over the years giving people individualized feedback, I don't really think "give people specific and detailed feedback" is a viable moderation strategy, at least more than once or twice per user. I recognize that this can feel unfair on the receiving end, and I also feel sad about it.

I do think the one exception here is that if people are young or are non-native english speakers. Do let me know if you are in your teens or you are a non-native english speaker who is still learning the language. People do really get a lot better at communication between the ages of 14-22 and people's english does get substantially better over time, and this helps with all kinds communication issues.

Again this is very blunt but I'm not sure it's wrong. 

We consider legibility, but its only a relatively small input into our moderation decisions

It is valuable and a precious public good to make it easy to know which actions you take will cause you to end up being removed from a space. However, that legibility also comes at great cost, especially in social contexts. Every clear and bright-line rule you outline will have people budding right up against it, and de-facto, in my experience, moderation of social spaces like LessWrong is not the kind of thing you can do while being legible in the way that for example modern courts aim to be legible. 

As such, we don't have laws. If anything we have something like case-law which gets established as individual moderation disputes arise, which we then use as guidelines for future decisions, but also a huge fraction of our moderation decisions are downstream of complicated models we formed about what kind of conversations and interactions work on LessWrong, and what role we want LessWrong to play in the broader world, and those shift and change as new evidence comes in and the world changes.

I do ultimately still try pretty hard to give people guidelines and to draw lines that help people feel secure in their relationship to LessWrong, and I care a lot about this, but at the end of the day I will still make many from-the-outside-arbitrary-seeming-decisions in order to keep LessWrong the precious walled garden that it is.

I try really hard to not build an ideological echo chamber

When making moderation decisions, it's always at the top of my mind whether I am tempted to make a decision one way or another because they disagree with me on some object-level issue. I try pretty hard to not have that affect my decisions, and as a result have what feels to me a subjectively substantially higher standard for rate-limiting or banning people who disagree with me, than for people who agree with me. I think this is reflected in the decisions above.

I do feel comfortable judging people on the methodologies and abstract principles that they seem to use to arrive at their conclusions. LessWrong has a specific epistemology, and I care about protecting that. If you are primarily trying to... 

• argue from authority, 
• don't like speaking in probabilistic terms, 
• aren't comfortable holding multiple conflicting models in your head at the same time, 
• or are averse to breaking things down into mechanistic and reductionist terms, 

then LW is probably not for you, and I feel fine with that. I feel comfortable reducing the visibility or volume of content on the site that is in conflict with these epistemological principles (of course this list isn't exhaustive, in-general the LW sequences are the best pointer towards the epistemological foundations of the site).

It feels cringe to read that basically if I don't get the sequences lessWrong might rate limit me. But it is good to be open about it. I don't think the EA forum's core philosophy is as easily expressed.

If you see me or other LW moderators fail to judge people on epistemological principles but instead see us directly rate-limiting or banning users on the basis of object-level opinions that even if they seem wrong seem to have been arrived at via relatively sane principles, then I do really think you should complain and push back at us. I see my mandate as head of LW to only extend towards enforcing what seems to me the shared epistemological foundation of LW, and to not have the mandate to enforce my own object-level beliefs on the participants of this site.

Now some more comments on the object-level: 

I overall feel good about rate-limiting everyone on the above list. I think it will probably make the conversations on the site go better and make more people contribute to the site. 

Us doing more extensive rate-limiting is an experiment, and we will see how it goes. As kave said in the other response to this post, the rule that suggested these specific rate-limits does not seem like it has an amazing track record, though I currently endorse it as something that calls things to my attention (among many other heuristics).

Also, if anyone reading this is worried about being rate-limited or banned in the future, feel free to reach out to me or other moderators on Intercom. I am generally happy to give people direct and frank feedback about their contributions to the site, as well as how likely I am to take future moderator actions. Uncertainty is costly, and I think it's worth a lot of my time to help people understand to what degree investing in LessWrong makes sense for them. 

People voting without explaining is good. 

I often see people thinking that this is bragading or something when actually most people just don't want to write a response, they either like or dislike something

If it were up to me I might suggest an anonymous "I don't know" button and an anonymous "this is poorly framed" button.

When I used to run a lot of facebook polls, it was overwhelmingly men who wrote answers, but if there were options to vote, the gender was much more even. My hypothesis was that a kind of argumentative usually man tended to enjoy writing long responses more. And so blocking lower effort/less antagonistic/ more anonymous responses meant I heard more from this kind of person. 

I don't know if that is true on the forum, but I would guess that the higher effort it is to respond the more selective the responses become in some direction. I guess I'd ask if you think that the people spending the most effort are likely to be the most informed. In my experience, they aren't.

More broadly I think it would be good if the forum optionally took some information about users - location, income, gender, cause area, etc and on answers with more than say 10 votes would display some kind of breakdown. I imagine it would sometimes be interesting to find out how exactly agreement and disagreement cut on different issues. 

edit More broadly I think it would be good if the forum tried to find clusters and pattterns in votes, perhaps allowing users to self nominate categories and then showing how categories split once there were enough votes. I'm a little wary of the forum deciding what categories are important and embedding that, but I'd like to see if an opinion was mainly liked by longtermists, women, etc.

Also I think it's good to be able to anonymously express unpopular views. For most of human history it's been unpopular to express support for LGBT+, the rights of women, animals. But if anonymous systems had existed we might have seen more support for such views. Likewise, pushing back against powerful people is easier if you can do it anonymously.

Suggestion. 

Debate weeks every other week and we vote on what the topic is.

I think if the forum had a defined topic (especially) in advance, I would be more motivated to read a number of post on that topic. 

One of the benefits of the culture war posts is that we are all thinking about the same thing. If we did that on topics perhaps with dialogues from experts, that would be good and on a useful topic.

Feels like we've had about 3 months since the FTX collapse with no kind of leadership comment. Uh that feels bad. I mean I'm all for "give cold takes" but how long are we talking.

This is an annoying feature of search: (this is the wrong will macaskill)

The front page agree disagree thing is soo coool. Great work forum team. 

I am not confident that another FTX level crisis is less likely to happen, other than that we might all say "oh this feels a bit like FTX".

Changes:

• Board swaps. Yeah maybe good, though many of the people who left were very experienced. And it's not clear whether there are due diligence people (which seems to be what was missing).
• Orgs being spun out of EV and EV being shuttered. I mean, maybe good though feels like it's swung too far. Many mature orgs should run on their own, but small orgs do have many replicable features.
• More talking about honesty. Not really sure this was the problem. The issue wasn't the median EA it was in the tails. Are the tails of EA more honest? Hard to say
• We have now had a big crisis so it's less costly to say "this might be like that big crisis". Though notably this might also be too cheap - we could flinch away from doing ambitious things
• Large orgs seem slightly more beholden to comms/legal to avoid saying or doing the wrong thing.
• OpenPhil is hiring more internally

Non-changes:

• Still very centralised. I'm pretty pro-elite, so I'm not sure this is a problem in and of itself, though I have come to think that elites in general are less competent than I thought before (see FTX and OpenAI crisis)
• Little discussion of why or how the affiliation with SBF happened despite many well connected EAs having a low opinion of him
• Little discussion of what led us to ignore the base rate of scamminess in crypto and how we'll avoid that in future