Epistemic status: grumpy, not committed.
There was quite a lot of discussion of the karma system in the comments to the forum 2.0 announcement, but it didn’t seem very conclusive and as far as I know, hasn’t been publicly discussed since.
That seems enough concern that it’s worth revisiting. My worries are:
- Karma concentration exacerbates groupthink by allowing a relatively small number of people to influence which threads and comments have greatest visibility
- It leads to substantial karma inflation over time, strongly biasing recent posts to get more upvotes
Point 1) was discussed a lot in the original comments. The response was that because it’s a pseudo-logarithmic scale, this shouldn’t be much of a concern. I think we now have reasons to be sceptical of this response:
- There are plenty of people with quite powerful upvotes now - mine are currently worth 5 karma, very close to 6, and I’ve posted less than a dozen top level posts. That will give me 3-6 times the strong voting power of a forum beginner, which seems like way too much.
- While top level posts are the main concern, comments get a much lower level of interest, so the effect of one or two strong votes can stand out much more if you’re skimming through them.
- The people with the highest karma naturally tend to be the most active users, who’re likely already the most committed EAs. This means we already have a natural source of groupthink (assuming the more committed you are to a social group the more likely you are to have bought into any given belief it tends to hold). So groupthinky posts would already tend to get more attention, and having these active users have greater voting power multiplies this effect.
Point 2) is confounded by the movement and user base having grown, so a higher proportion of posts having been made in later years, when there were more potential upvoters. Nonetheless, unless you believe that the number of posts has proliferated faster than the number of users (so that karma is stretched evenly), it seems self-evident that there is at least some degree of karmic inflation.
So my current stance is that, while the magnitude of both effects is difficult to gauge because of complementary factors, both effects are probably in themselves net negative, and therefore things we should not be using tools to complement - we might even want to actively counteract them. I don’t have a specific fix in mind, though plenty were discussed in the comments section linked above. This is just a quick post to encourage discussion of alternative… so over to you, commenters!
From the Forum user manual:
I wonder if this negative weighting for the Frontpage should be greater and/or used more, as I worry that the community looks too gossip-y/navel-gazing to newer users. E.g. I'd classify the 13 posts currently on the Frontpage (when not logged in) as only talking about more object-level stuff around half of the time:
Tagged 'Community'
About the community but not tagged as such
Unclear
Not about the community
- Types of information hazards
- Will there be an E
... (read more)I agree that -25 may not be enough at the current stage, maybe -75 or -100 will be better.
Thanks, Arepo. I think that this is a really important conversation. Although I've been interested in EA for quite some time, I only recently joined the EA Forum. There are some things that I would like to post, but I can't because I have no karma.
I'm not sure what a good alternative to the karma system is. I've often thought that a magazine or an academic journal on EA would be worthwhile, but I assume that it would do little to reduce group think since the peer reviewers would likely be EA's thought leaders and the same sorts of people with the most karma. It may also be that we don't need a system at all. People could then search for the content that interests them. Of course, this would cause other problems. But I think it's at least worth entertaining.
P.S. I hope this comment earns me some karma. I need it to write original posts, not just comments!
Personally I'd rather want the difference to be bigger, since I find it much more informative what the best-informed users think.
Ideally the karma system would also be more sensitive to the average quality of users' comments/posts. Right now sheer quantity is awarded more than ideal, in my view. But I realise it's non-trivial to improve on the current system.
We could give weight to the average vote per comment/post, e.g. a factor calculated by adding all weighted votes on someone's comments and posts and then dividing by the number of votes on their comments (not the number of comments/posts, to avoid penalizing comments in threads that aren't really read).
We could also use a prior on this factor, so that users with a small number of highly upvoted things don't get too much power.
I think that a fairly large fraction of posts is of a generalist nature. Also, my guess is that people with a large voting power usually don't vote on topics they don't know (though no doubt there are exceptions).
I'd welcome topic-specific karma in principle, but I'm unsure how hard it is to implement/how much of a priority it is. And whether karma is topic-specific or not, I think that large differences in voting power increase accuracy and quality.
OK, thanks for explaining your reasoning.
On the object level issue, maybe we'll have to agree to disagree. Fwiw I don't think the karma system has to be perfect to be useful.
A single user with a decent amount of karma can unilaterally decide to censor a post and hide it from the front page with a strong downvote. Giving people unilateral and anonymous censorship power like this seems bad.
I would be in favor of eliminating strong downvotes entirely. If a post or comment is going to be censored or given less visibility, it should be because a lot of people wanted that to happen rather than just two or three.
I'd also include norms against promoting violence or coercion.
I think there should be a place to discuss voluntary eugenics, i.e. parents selecting for certain positive traits or against certain negative traits in their children before birth, and if there should be anywhere it can be discussed publicly online where basically anyone can participate, I think the EA Forum may be among the best places. If you were to strong downvote a post discussing it, I would hope you'd explain why in the comments (or someone else would).
Previously, I've recommended strong downvotes be required to be accompanied by explanations. The explanations could still be anonymous, although I'm not sure whether it's better or worse for them to be anonymous.
Enough people look at the All-Posts page that this is rarely an issue, at least on LessWrong where I've looked at the analytics for this. Indeed, many of the most active voters prefer to use the all-posts page, and a post having negative karma tends to actually attract a bit more attention than a post having low karma.
Ah, I wasn't aware of the All-Posts page. That's helpful, but I'd wonder if it's also being used as much on the EA Forum. I'm probably relatively active on the EA Forum, and I only check Pinned Posts and Frontpage Posts, and I sometimes hit "Load more" for the latter.
Note also that one strong downvote might not put a post into negative karma, but just low positive karma, if the submitter has enough karma themself or others have upvoted the post.
You can now look at Forum posts from all time and sort them by inflation-adjusted karma. I highly recommend that readers explore this view!
I think we need to adjust further, since most of the top posts are about 1 year old or newer, and 4 of the top 9 to 11 posts are about 3 months old or newer.
EDIT: Maybe rather than average, use the average of the top N or top p% of the month?
For those who enjoy irony: the upvotes on this post pushed me over the threshold not only to 6-karma strong upvotes, but for my 'single' upvoted now being double-weighted.
A suggestion that might preserve the value of giving higher karma users more voting power, while addressing some of the concerns: give users with karma the option to +1 a post instead of +2/+3, if they wish.
I think the issue is more that different users have very disparate norms about how often to vote, when to use a strong vote, and what to use it on. My sense (from a combination of noticing voting patterns and reading specific users' comments about how they vote) is that most are pretty low-key about voting, but a few high-karma users are much more intense about it and don't hesitate to throw their weight around. These users can then have a wildly disproportionate effect on discourse because if their vote is worth, say, 7 points, their opinion on one piece of content vs. another can be and often is worth a full 14 points.
In addition to scaling down the weight of strong votes as MichaelStJules suggested, another corrective we could think about is giving all users a limited allocation of strong upvotes/downvotes they can use, say, each month. That way high-karma users can still act in a kind of decentralized moderator role on the level of individual posts and comments, but it's more difficult for one person to exert too much influence over the whole site.
This post has a fair number of downvotes but is also generating, in my mind, a valuable discussion on karma, which heavily guides how content on EAF is disseminated.
I think it would be good if more people who've downvoted share their contentions (it may well be the case that those who've already commented contributed the contentions).
Can the OP give instances of groupthink?
A major argument of this post is "groupthink".
Unfortunate... (read more)
Fwiw I didn't downvote this comment, though I would guess the downvotes were based on the somewhat personal remarks/rhetoric. I'm also finding it hard to parse some of what you say.
This still leaves a lot of room for subjective interpretation, but in the interests of good faith, I'll give what I believe is a fairly clear example from my own recent investigations: it seems that somewhere between 20-80% of the EA community believe that the orthogonality thesis shows that AI is extremely likely to wipe us all out. This is based on a drastic misreading of an often-cited 10-year old paper, which is available publicly for any EA to check.
Another odd belief, albeit one which seems more muddled than mistaken is the role of neglectedness in 'ITN' reasoning. What we ultimately care about is the amount of good done per resource unit, ie, roughly, <importance>*<tractability>. Neglectedness is just a heuristic for estimating tractability absent more precise methods. Perhaps it's a heuris... (read more)
Here's a hopefully helpful suggestion...
Turn off the automated karma system, and replace it with a prominent section where the mods highlight their favorite posts. The editors certainly have the right to steer the course of their own forum, and I would personally prefer their analysis and judgement to that of click happy anonymous unknown voters, who may not have even read the posts they are voting on.
So, for example, if I wanted my posts to have prominent placement on the forum, I would have to address the topics of most interest to the editors, and do so... (read more)