Clara Torres Latorre ️'s Quick takes

(Not trying to represent an institutional take here, other mods may disagree)

Would you mind spelling out the problem a bit? In my view, the current karma total is important info for me deciding whether to up or downvote something. 

For example, I might have downvoted this quick take if it was over 60 or so (because quick-takes above 60 are generally worth reading for a wide group), and yet I wouldn't downvote it at the number I found it (1) because it doesn't deserve to have negative karma^[1]. 

In other words, I think of karma almost as the question "is this post/comment under-, over-, or correctly rated?", and I don't currently think that that's a problem. 

1. ^{^}

   Also TBF I generally avoid upvoting or downvoting anything about the Forum itself, since I might be biased. 

I try to avoid downvoting things that are already in the red, personally. Unless it's very bad. 

For context: Clara is right, there is good experimental evidence that this occurs in online comment forums. This is on top of the simple mechanism that more highly upvoted content is more likely to be seen for various reasons.

I'd assume this holds true for EA forum content. I do the same thing @Toby Tremlett🔹 is describing to some extent, but I'd be surprised if my system 2 thinking outweighs my system 1 on net in this regard. I suspect I personally do this most with very low Karma posts, which I neglect to upvote because of a vague embarrassment over the possibility of promoting content with some flaw I missed. 

I'm not sure I understood what you are saying here? Do you add more in the direction they are already tilting, or are just more likely to vote if its a high-vote-volume post? 

I am aware I vote based upon the current karma count.  If someone has a bunch of karma, then I don't mind downvoting. If the post or user has super little karma, I upvote it much more readily. Something has to be truly egregious for me to push it further into negative karma.

In the midrange I am less likely to vote at all, and vote more accurately: if it was personally valuable to me, if I feel its underrepresented, or if I feel like it would be better that more eyes see it then I upvote. My favorite thing is to disagree vote and then give karma for a valuable contribution. Then I feel like I'm (a True Rationalist =P) counteracting the natural "like+agree+karma" impulse. I try to vote like this as often as possible.

Tentatively and naively, I think this is accurate.

I'm wondering if there would be any way to target/access this population? If this campaigns existed, what action would it take? Some groups of people are relatively easy to access/target due to physical location or habits (college-aged people often congregate at/around college, vegan people often frequent specific websites or stores, etc.).

I imagine that someone much more knowledgeable about advertising/marketing than I am would have better ideas. All I can come up with off the top of my head is targeted social media advertisements: people who work at one of these several companies and who have recently searched for one of these few terms, etc.

My take is that I think there are strong arguments for why AI x-risk is overwhelmingly more important than narrow AI, and I think those arguments are the main reason why x-risk gets more attention among EAs.

1. Look into logarithmic utility of money; there is some rich literature here
2. For an altruistic actor, money becomes more linear again, but I don't have a quick reference here.