My complaint was the incentive structure:

Not necessarily because you want to, but just because that's how the system is set up.

I used a personal example, but the complaint was about people being incentivized to  downvote (past and future) stuff by the outgroup while upvoting the ingroup, whether or not it's "mass" voting:

it incentivizes detractors to go back and downvote your other stuff as well. [...]

So if you want the forum to remain dominated by your ingroup, better upvote your ingroup's posts/comments

which I then expanded on with examples like:

If someone is spreading opinions you disagree with, then the karma system makes strong-downvoting them an excellent way to hinder their ability to do so.
If your friend makes mediocre posts but he also upvotes all your mediocre posts, then upvoting them is a great way to ensure your posts get more exposure.

If you had done it

I had done it, see: my screenshotted comment.

I don't believe that is true for admins

They literally say so:

Voting activity is generally private (even admins don't know who voted on what), but if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting (e.g. by mass-downvoting many of a different user's comments and posts), we reserve the right to check what account is doing this.

That's why I said:

Voting is anonymous, so unless you "mass" vote it will remain undetected.

The examples I gave --downvoting based on opinion not content, downvoting based on ideology, upvoting your ingroup, upvoting because they're you friends-- are all things that can be done while staying anonymous.

But in any case, I encourage you to prove me wrong. I encourage you to reach out to the admins, and then report back here when nothing useful happens, as you seem to be predicting.

You think I haven't done that? I even send a comment to Ben West publicly and people downvoted me for it:

Are all the voting theorists on the 'disagree' side or is there a voting theorist on the 'agree' side I don't know about?

Do you post on the EA subreddit?  Everyone's vote power is equal there:

Yes, I do post there. It's...fine. I don't exactly love it, but it at least doesn't give me an active feeling of disgust every time I use it (which the forum does).

Retributive downvoting appears to be a bannable offense, according to the forum guide:

This is unenforceable. In fact that whole section is unenforceable:

Additionally, please avoid: 

• Asking your friends or coworkers to vote on a post, especially if you might be biased (e.g. because the post is criticizing your work, or because your friend wrote the post)
  • We think sharing a post in a public channel and saying “Hey, I quite like this post that summarizes my organization’s work is cool, check it out” is fine. If you see a message like this, evaluate the post on its own merits; don’t just go upvote because someone you know wrote it.
  • But posting — or even worse, saying this on a call — “Hey, everyone, please go upvote this post that our organization just shared, we need everyone on the Forum to see it” is bad. Even worse is asking people to downvote criticism of something you work on.
• Deferring entirely to someone else (your vote should be your own)

Additionally, please try to judge each post or comment on its own merits; don’t just vote based on whether or not you like the poster’s other activity. 

Other than that, you can vote using your preferred criteria. Here are our suggestions: 

Action	If…	Not if…
Strong-upvote	Reading this will help people do good. You learned something important. You think many more people might benefit from seeing it. You want to signal that this sort of behavior adds a lot of value.	“I agree and want others to see this opinion first.”
Upvote	You think it adds something to the conversation, or you found it useful. People should imitate some aspect of the behavior in the future. You want others to see it. You just generally like it.	“Oh, I like the poster, they’re cool.”
Downvote	There’s a relevant error. The comment or post didn’t add to the conversation, and maybe actually distracted.	“There are grammatical errors in this comment.”
Strong-downvote	It contains many factual errors and bad reasoning It’s manipulative or breaks our norms in significant ways (consider reporting it) It’s literally spam (consider reporting it)	“I disagree with this opinion.”

I agree that if everyone followed these norms there wouldn't be a problem, however they aren't, and there isn't a way to make them. Worse, the incentives work against a lot of these norms:

If someone is spreading opinions you disagree with, then the karma system makes strong-downvoting them an excellent way to hinder their ability to do so.
If your friend makes mediocre posts but he also upvotes all your mediocre posts, then upvoting them is a great way to ensure your posts get more exposure.
If an HBDer sees me sharing studies that undermine HBD, then a great way to lessen my ability to do so is downvote other posts and comments I've written (and downvote the posts and comments I write in the future too). Worst case scenario, my reach decreases. Best case scenario, I start to self-censor or leave the forum (aka what happened).

Voting is anonymous, so unless you "mass" vote it will remain undetected. It's good that they have written down these norms, but it'll barely do anything even if it was better known. The karma system simply works against it. It's not enough to say "pretty-please don't act on the bad incentives we've created", you have to actually give people good incentives.

Not only that, it incentivizes detractors to go back and downvote your other stuff as well. When I was coming out against HBD, older things I had written also got downvoted (and I lost voting power).
This doesn't make sense on other forums but here it's perfectly reasonable since with karma you're not just deciding "how good is this post/comment?" but also "who gets voting power?". So if you want the forum to remain dominated by your ingroup, better upvote your ingroup's posts/comments while downvoting everything by the outgroup. Not necessarily because you want to, but just because that's how the system is set up.

The only reason why I don't go full disagree is because I could see a system akin to "liquid democracy" where you can give proxies or where once in a while we vote on which people will have more voting power for the next term.

In any case, we should expect some heavy survivorship bias here in favor of the status-quo since EAs or potential EAs who get turned off by the karma system will either fully or largely leave the forum (e.g. me).

Are you an EU citizen? If so, please sign this citizen’s initiative to phase out factory farms (this is an approved EU citizen’s initiative, so if it gets enough signatures the EU has to respond):
stopcrueltystopslaughter.com

It also calls for reducing the number of animal farms over time, and introducing more incentives for the production of plant proteins.

(If initiatives like these interest you, I occasionally share more of them on my blog)

EDIT: If it doesn't work, try again in a couple hours/days. The collection has just started and the site may be overloaded. The deadline is in a year, so no need to worry about running out of time.

Hi Arturo,

You might be interested in this graph, from me and Jobst's paper: "Should we vote in non-deterministic elections?"

It visualizes the effective power groups of voters have in proportion to their percentage of the votes. So for most winner-takes-all systems (conventional voting systems) it is a step function; if you have 51% of the vote you have 100% of the power (blue line).
Some voting systems try to ameliorate this by requiring a supermajority; e.g. to change the constitution you need 2/3rds of the votes. This slows down legislation and also doesn't really change the problem of proportionality.

Our paper talks about non-deterministic voting systems, systems that incorporate an element of chance. The simplest version would be the "random ballot"; everyone sends in their ballot, then one is drawn at random. This system is perfectly proportional. A voting bloc with 49% of the votes is no longer in power 0% of the time, but is now in power 49% of the time (green line).

Of course not all non-deterministic voting systems are as proportional as the random ballot. For example, say that instead of picking one ballot at random, we keep drawing ballots at random until we have two that pick the same candidate. Now you get something in between the random ballot and a conventional voting systems (red line).

There are an infinite amount of non-deterministic voting systems so these are just two simple examples and are not the actual non-deterministic voting systems we endorse. For a more sophisticated non-deterministic voting system you can take a look at MaxParC.

Also, as you may have noticed, EAs are mostly focused on individualistic interventions and are not that interested in this kind of systemic change (I don't bother with my papers on this forum). If you want to discuss these types of ideas you might have more luck on the voting subreddit, the voting theory forum, or the electo wiki.

and they seem to be down on socialism, except maybe some non-mainstream market variants.

I did try to find a survey for sociology, political science, and economics, not only today but also when I was writing my post on market socialism (I too wondered whether economists are more in favor of market socialism), but I couldn't really find one. My guess is that the first two would be more pro-socialism and the last more anti, although it probably also differs from country to country depending on their history of academia (e.g. whether they had a red scare in academia or not).

I feel like this is the kind of anti science/empiricism arrogance that philosophers are often accused of

This is probably partly because of the different things they're researching. Economics tends to look at things that are easier to quantify, like GDP and material goods created, which capitalism is really good at, while philosophers tend to look at things that capitalism seems to be less good at, like alienation, which is harder to quantify (though proxies like depression, suicide and loneliness do seem to be increasing).

Not to mention, they might agree on the data but disagree on what to value. Rust & Schwitzgebel (2013) did a survey of philosophy professors specializing in ethics, philosophy professors not specializing in ethics, and non-philosophy professors. 60% of ethicists felt eating meat was wrong, while just under 45% of non-ethicists agreed, and only 19.6% of non-philosophers thought so. I personally think one of the strongest arguments against capitalism is the existence of factory farms. With such numbers, it seems plausible that while an average economist might think of the meat industry as a positive, the average philosopher might think of it as a negative (thinking something akin to this post).

Let me try to steelman this:

We want people to learn new things, so we have conferences where people can present their research. But who to invite? There are so many people, many of whom have never done any studies.
Luckily for us, we have a body of people that spend their lives researching and checking each other's research: Academia. Still, there are many academics, and there's only so many time slots you can assign before you're filled up; ideally, we'd be representative.
So now the question becomes: why was the choice made to spend so many of the limited time slots on "scientific racists", which is a position that's virtually universally rejected by professional researchers, while topics like "socialism", which has a ton of support in academia (e.g., the latest philpapers survey found that when asked about their politics, a majority of philosophers selected "socialism" and only a minority selected "capitalism" or "other"), tend to get little to no time allotted to them at these conferences?