Why are you reluctant to write on the EA Forum?

I'm anticipating a lot of replies being about how to reduce the aspects of the Forum that make people feel bad about posting, such as harsh criticism, and I think this is good as far as it goes. However I think it's important to think about why people do things as being a balance between costs and benefits, and also think about how we could make the benefits larger or more salient.

"What makes you stop posting?" could be reframed as "What makes you post in the first place?", and "What might make it easier?" could be reframed as "What might make you publish posts that were more challenging for you (practically or emotionally)?"

The quality of many forum posts is very high, including from people who are not paid by a research org to write them and have no direct connection to the community (such as these two). So even if you only factor in the time cost, you would still have to suppose some pretty large benefits to explain why people write them.

I have some ideas about what these benefits are:

1. If you see yourself as a temporarily embarrassed academic who has had to get a proper job as a result of economic forces, posting on the EA Forum (or LessWrong) is about as close as you can get to publishing in an academic journal without actually doing that. Your ideas will be taken seriously by a community of people you respect, and you are actually likely to get more substantive engagement than if you were a non-top-tier academic publishing in a non-top-tier journal. This kind of intellectual discussion is exciting to a lot of people, and is reason enough in itself.
2. Related to your ideas being taken seriously, they can also steer a community of thousands of people and billions of dollars. It's reasonably common for this to happen, for instance GiveWell changed how they do their cost effectiveness analyses partly as a result of that post by @Froolow  that I linked above. There are lots of good examples from LessWrong too, such as Katja Grace's Let's think about slowing down AI which was clearly [citation needed] pivotal in getting that idea recognised as a respectable mainstream position.
3. You can get ~material benefits~ from posting on the forum. We have found that a lot of people get jobs at least via, and possibly because of, the Forum. Also it might make people relate to you better at least socially, if not professionally, if you have a couple of good Forum posts explaining your best ideas. For people in largely EA social circles this can be a big benefit.

These are all things that seem like they could be leant on to get people to publish more and better content on the Forum, for instance GiveWell did a Change Our Mind contest which clearly increased the second one.

On the issue of criticism specifically, I am a bit less optimistic about this being a lever to pull to get people to post more. I have written before about why I think reassuring people that they won't be criticised can be wrongheaded^[1]. Obviously I think it's good to make sure criticism is of ideas and not people/their values, and to be polite in a common sense way such as trying to give criticism as a compliment sandwich.

But ultimately it's not the bread from a sandwich that people remember, and even being criticised for just your ideas but not your values feels bad to most people. But in order to get the benefit of people taking your ideas seriously they do need to be open to criticism, so I think it's quite difficult to reduce this in practice.

And then on the question of whether reducing "the bad kind of criticism" (i.e. criticism of values/personal attacks) would actually make people post more^[2], one bit of evidence that goes against this is that the posts that get the most engagement tend to be "drama" posts where the comments actually involve proportionately more of "the bad kind of criticism". Obviously there are a lot of confounding factors here but one relevant idea is that "standing up against criticism of your values" can actually feel better/more wholesome than standing up against criticism of your ideas, because if your idea is proven wrong then that's just a bit embarrassing, whereas your values usually can't really be proven wrong.

So anyway, overall I think a better argument to make to try and persuade people to post more is less like "Don't worry you won't be criticised" and more like "It's brave to post on the Forum, for the same reason that it's brave to stand up and talk in front of a group of people. It's brave because you're opening yourself up to the very real downside of being criticised, but there are all these great upsides too, so you might just have to take some of the hits if you want to get them".

And then, from the perspective of people with a community-minded interest^[3] in getting more people to post more of their ideas, I think leaning on the benefits side (such as the three things I mentioned) could be at least as effective as leaning on the costs side.

Note: I am a developer on the Forum, but this comment doesn't necessarily represent the views of the whole team

1. ^{^}

   TL;DR I think it's often a false reassurance, and so people will see through it or be wrongly convinced that they won't be criticised, which is unfair to them if they then are

2. ^{^}

   As mentioned above, I think it's good to reduce this for lots of other reasons

3. ^{^}

   Which includes the actual Forum team, which I work on, but also other users who have the best interests of the community at heart

Good question.

I have a few draft forum posts over the years that I don't really have an interest in publishing. 

I feel like I've found it pretty stressful each time I've posted or even commented.  (yes, even this) After posting, I waste so much time checking the comments and changes in karma. I, naturally, feel every downvote or negative comment far more than upvotes or positive comments. Positive comments are actively discouraged (downvoted) here, which might make this worse.

Some of the most frustrating comments are ones that correct some minor details that, don't impact the posts core point, or mention some exceptions as if they discount the whole idea.

I think this is a big part of why I don't finish my draft posts. The drafts are short and just cover the main point I have, but I need to 10x my time, effort and length so that I address every obvious exception, edge case, rebuttal... 

I think ultimately I find it to be a very negative feedback loop. Posting is stressful. Every single time. It's not like I'm anxious before posting and then after I post I get a big hit of dopamine from the responses. This would provide some positive feed back loop like posting on social media. 

My neurotransmitters take no account of expected value calculations.

One reason that people might make people hesitant would be that people tend to be very critical of posts, particularly if they are not in line with or adjacent to established cause areas or lines of inquiry.

Something that might make things better:

• If you're criticizing a post, is the point you are making core to the idea that the poster is making? Is it possible that small revisions or extensions would make their idea address your criticism?
• Think of the idea in EV terms. Perhaps if you have an intuition regarding its EV, there might be a way to test whether  an idea is a particularly effective way of doing good. 
• Try to identify the key question(s) on which your disagreement with the poster depends. This creates an empirical framework that could potentially lead to agreement in the future, if further understanding regarding the key point(s) is capable of being attained.

Generally, I think the EA community is very good with being critical and identifying potential flaws in ideas or limitations.  But I think there is a tendency to assume that all good ideas have already been explored or exhausted, especially if something sounds similar to something that the EA is familiar with. I think open-minded curiosity, with a mind towards constructing empirical tests that might be probative, would probably be far more helpful than just the exhaustive redteaming that is typical of EA forum responses.

I think there's at least two categories:

1. The beginner who is scared of ridicule.
2. The senior, who don't have time to write to the forum standard without risking reputation.

I'm more interested in what we can do to encourage the latter group. My impression is that many senior people are reluctant to post, as they don't have time to write something sufficiently well-argued and respond to the comments.

Instead many good discussions take place in signal groups, google docs and email threads. In a perfect world, these discussions would be in the forum. The issue right now is that if those conversations would take place on the forum, too many people chime in with long, eloquently written, but wrong arguments that the subject matter experts now have to spend additional time shutting down or look like they are dodging a hard question.

Additionally lowering their bar for public engagement, puts them at risk of attack. There are people reading this forum just to find ammunition for hit pieces. A poorly worded comment from the leader of an organization will be used against them.

In short, for me it is much less about feeling like the EA Forum is unwelcome of posts from people with less expertise (e.g. me) than others. It is more that if I share a post, I want it to be adding significantly new insights and not be an iteration of what has been written about already. This consequently takes time to roughly know what content exists already. My status quo when coming across something that is novel to me, I by default assume that it has probably been covered by others already.

However, I have not figured out whether I should start posting because the personal benefits of it (having a project to work towards, formulating arguments, etc.) could be sufficient enough for me to post, without paying too much attention to the benefits for other Fourm readers.

If you compare this recent post I did, it has about the same karma on lesswrong and the forum, but on Lesswrong there are 36 comments, on here, 6. If I were gonna focus on writing forecasting articles, I'd write for LessWrong. 

Perhaps it sounds strange from me that is so active on the forum: But what is the value of the forum, and therefore of contributing to it? Maybe the answer is lying around somewhere, but I have not seen anything. Don't get me wrong, I think perhaps the forum is super valuable, kind of, or perhaps even more important than EAGs - these venues, virtual and physical are more or less the only and therefore core venues for the community to interact. 

If there is some cost effectiveness calc for the forum, I would be super keen to see that written up as a post clearly and easy-to-read. Ideally also with some follow on effectiveness calc or estimate for people volunteering time to post here.

The results have now been released!

Here are the top reasons given, from 20 responses:

Read the full post here.

My two cents (acknowledging I'm just getting acquainted to the community):

TL;DR's seem important, also "calls to action" may help. If those are included, I imagine less barrier to post. In reading the other posts, it looks like there's a karma system that makes things challenging here. I wonder if a living "posting guide" might help celebrate discourse and conversation, rather than get bogged down by criticism?

Main question: Are articles making it clear what kind of response would be celebrated?