At the risk of starting a messy discussion, I'm curious how folks feel the heavy linking between the EA Forum and LessWrong affects both content on the Forum itself and the EA community more generally.
I know many people identify as part of both spaces (and I myself peruse LW), but I'm wondering if the connection has larger cultural effects, from normalized writing styles to a perhaps disproportionate rationalist representation. Thoughts?
Personally, I'm not a fan of LessWrong's thinking style, writing style, or intellectual products. As such, I think EA would be better off with less LW influence in the near-medium term.
However, I'm not familiar enough with EA's intellectual history to judge how useful LW was to it; I certainly can't predict EA's intellectual future. It seems possible that future exchange would be useful, if only for viewpoint diversity. On balance though I'd lean against heavy exchange.
What do you dislike about the LW style? Can you provide more specifics? There's a big range of authors that have been publishing on LW for several years now.
I can try! But apologies as this will be vague - there'll be lots of authors this doesn't apply to, and this is my gestalt impression given I avoid reading much of it. And as I say, I don't know how beneficial LW was to EA's development, so am not confident on how future exchange should go.
I tend to be frustrated by the general tendencies towards over-confidence, in-group jargon, and overrating the abilities or insights of their community/influences vs. others (esp. expert communities and traditional academic sources). Most references I see to 'epistemics' seem under-specified and not useful, and usually a short-hand way to dismiss a non-conforming view. I find it ironic that denigrating others’ ‘epistemics’ is a common LW refrain given my impression that the epistemic quality of LW seems poor.
There's a kind of Gell-Mann amnesia effect I get where the LW discourse on things I know about decently well (medical advice, neuroscience, global health) I can easily see as wrong, poorly conceived and argued, and over-confident. I don't have a clear personal view on the LW discourse on things I don't know well like AI, but have occasionally seen ~similar takes to mine from some people who know AI well.
There are definitely writers/thinkers I admire from LW, but I usually admire them despite their LW-like tendencies. Losing their input would be a true loss. But for overall effect on EA, I doubt (with weak confidence) these exemplars outweigh the subpar majority.
I'm in favor of a clear separation between the forums. They are made for different audiences and not everything that is meant for one is meant for the other. As somebody who writes some pieces that are meant for both audiences, the cross posting feature is somewhat convenient for me (but not hugely so; I can just copy and paste). And as a reader, sometimes it's nice to see a post is cross posted so that I can go see the comments on the other forum.
I'd be interested to see how much the easy cross posting has increased the number of cross posts, and if so what kinds of posts are now more likely to be cross posted. This seems like an analysis the forum team could do and is harder to do anecdotally.
The EA Forum and LessWrong have some of the best technical infrastructure on the internet, and I think the EA Forum derives huge benefit from that. However, it does make me a little uneasy that it's made by the Lightcone team, who are in charge of LessWrong. I like the people on that team, but I expect probably some decisions that are good for LessWrong but not so good for the EA Forum might just end up propagating here by default. This is just a suspicion; I don't have any particular examples.
A lot of separation does exist. LessWrong posts are moderated pretty differently, the commenter audiences are often very different, and the types of posts are mostly different. So the connection as is isn't currently a huge concern of mine.
Clarifying a couple of points:
I'm a bit confused about crossposting, are you saying it was always available? I don't remember seeing any crossposts a year ago, or being able to use the feature. In fact I used to crosspost a lot of things and specifically remember the first time I saw the crossposting feature. But maybe I just didn't notice this before.
Didn't know that about the dev teams, that's useful to know!
Crossposting has been a huge win in my opinion.
It used to be what you did was post on one site and then manually crosspost to the other. This was annoying and somewhat error prone and you had to setup the links yourself by editing at least one post after it was published.
Automatic crossposting eliminates that mess, and it adds the nice feature of letting you know if there's comments on the other site (since you don't want to read the same thing twice but you might want to know about the conversation on the other site).
The feature is also fairly easy to ignore if you don't like the other site, and there's not a ton of cross posts so it's not generating a lot of noise.
I guess if you don't like Less Wrong it might feel annoying to see Less Wrong content on EAF, but honestly you were going to see it anyway, it just would have been less clearly labeled.
As a datum from the LessWrong side as a moderator, when the crossposting was first implemented, initially there were a bunch of crossposts that weren't doing well (from a karma perspective) and seemed to be making the site worse. To address this, we added a requirement that to crosspost from EAF to LW, you need 100 karma on LW. I believe the karma requirement is symmetrical: in order to crosspost an LW post onto EAF, you need 100 EAF karma
The theory being, a bit of karma shows that you probably have some familiarity with the crosspost-destination site culture, and probably aren't just crossposting out of a vague sense of wanting to maximize your post's engagement. I don't think it's been a problem (in the EAF->LW crossposting direction) since.
This was a clever solution. I didn't know this was a thing.
While I think some threshold barrier is a good idea, I don't think the UX makes it clear that's happening. I've never been able to successfully crosspost, and just realized this is probably why..
I think the current arms-length community interaction is good, but mostly because I'm scared EAs are going to do something crazy which destroys the movement, and that Lesswrongers will then be necessary to start another spinoff movement which fills the altruistic gap. If Lesswrong is too close to EA, then EA may take down Lesswrong with it.
Lesswrongers seem far less liable to play with metaphorical fire than EAs, given less funding, better epistemics, less overall agency, and fewer participants.
Pro starting messy discussions around things that are elephants in rooms (not all of them, but on the margin, and this one seems good!)
Thanks for posting this.
My gut feeling is that LessWrong is cringe and the heavy link to the Effective Altruism forum is making the forum cringe.
Trying to explain this feeling I'd say some features I don't like are:
I disagree-voted.
I think pure open dialogue is often good for communities. You will find evidence for this if you look at most any social movement, the FTX fiasco, and immoral mazes.
Most long pieces of independent research that I see are made by open-phil, and I see far more EAs deferring to open-phil's opinion on a variety of subjects than Lesswrongers. Examples that come to mind from you would be helpful.
It was originally EAs who used such explicit expected value calculations during Givewell periods, and I don't think I've ever seen an EV calculation done on LessWrong.
I think the more-karma-more-votes system is mostly good, but not perfect. In particular, it seems likely to reduce the impact of posts which are popular outside EA but not particularly relevant to EAs, a problem many subreddits have.
I strong downvoted this because I don't like online discussions that devolve into labeling things as cringe or based. I usually replace such words with low/high status, and EA already has enough of that noise.
I think I like this norm where people say what they voted and why (not always, but on the margin). Not 100% it would be better for more people to do, but I like what you did here.
I think some statements or ideas here might be overly divisive or a little simplistic.
- Ignoring emotional responses and optics in favour of pure open dialogue. Feels very New Atheist.
- The long pieces of independent research that are extremely difficult to independently verify and which often defer to other pieces of difficult-to-verify independent research.
- Heavy use of expected value calculations rather than emphasising the uncertainty and cluelessness around a lot of our numbers.
- The more-karma-more-votes system that encourages an echo chamber.
For counterpoints, if you go look at respected communities of say, medical professionals (surgeons), as well as top athletes/military/lawyers, they effectively do all of the things you criticize. All of these communities have complex systems of beliefs, use jargon, in-groups and have imperfect levels of intellectual honesty. Often, decisions and judgement are made by senior leaders opaquely, so that a formal "expected value calculation" would be transparent in comparison. Despite all this, these groups are respected, trusted and often very effective in their domains.
Similarly, in EA, in order to make progress, authority needs to be used. EA can't avoid internal authority, as proven by EA's history and other movements. Instead, we have to do this with intention, that is, there needs to be some senior people, who are correct and virtuous, who need to be trusted.
The problem is that LessWrong has in the past, monopolized implicit positions of authority, using a particular style of discourse and rhetoric, which allows it masks what it is doing. As it does this, the fact that it is a distinct entity, actively seeking resources from EA, is mostly ignored.
Getting to the object level on LessWrong: what could be great is a true focus on virtue/“rationality”/self improvement. In theory, LessWrong and rationality is fantastic, and there should be more of this. The problem is that without true ability, bad implementation and co-option occurs. For example, one person, with narcissistic personality disorder, overbearingly dominated discourse on LessWrong and appropriated EA identity elsewhere. Only recently, when it has become egregiously clear that this person has negative value, has the community done much to counter him. This is both a moral mistake and a strong smell that something is wrong. The fact this person and their (well telegraphed) issues persisted, casts doubt on the LessWrong intellectual aesthetics, as well and their choice to steer numerous programs to one cause (which they decided on long ago).
To the bigger question “RE: fixing EA”. Some people are working on this, but the squalor and instability of the EA ecosystem is hampering this and shielding itself from reform. For one example, someone I know was invested in a FTX FF worldview submission, until the contest was cancelled in November for almost the worst reason possible. In the aftermath, this person needs to go and handhold a long list of computer scientists / other leaders. That is, they need to defend the very AI-safety worldview caused by this disaster, after their project was destroyed by the same disaster. While this is going on, there are many side considerations. For example, despite desperately wanting to communicate and correct EA, they need worry about any public communication being seized and used by “Zoe Cramer”-style critiques, which have been enormously empowered. These critiques are misplaced at best, but writing why “democracy” and “voting” is bad, looks ridiculous, given the issues in the paragraph above.
The solution space is small and the people who think they can solve this are going to have visible actions/personas that will look different than other people.
one person, with narcissistic personality disorder, overbearingly dominated discourse on LessWrong and appropriated EA identity elsewhere. Only recently, when it has become egregiously clear that this person has negative value, has the community done much to counter him.
!?
I like that you were open about your gut feeling and thinking that something is cringe. I generally don't think that's a good reason to do or not do things, but it might track important things, and you fleshed yours out.
I think EA is at its best when it takes the high epistemic standards of LW and applies them to altruistic goals. I see the divergence growing, and that worries me.
Can you give me an example of EA using bad epistemic standards and an example of EA using good epistemic standards?
I agree with this.
(I don't know whether the divergence is growing, shrinking, or staying the same.)