Nathan Young
Bio
Participation4
Builds web apps (eg viewpoints.xyz) and makes forecasts. Currently I have spare capacity.
How others can help me
Talking to those in forecasting to improve my forecasting question generation tool
Writing forecasting questions on EA topics.
Meeting EAs I become lifelong friends with.
How I can help others
Connecting them to other EAs.
Writing forecasting questions on metaculus.
Talking to them about forecasting.
Posts 146
Comments2610
Topic contributions20
No, they thought it was controversial, but I took on board many suggestions to soften it.
Separately if it's a useful data point, reading these comments made me not wish to engage with this piece at the object level, at least at the moment.
So in your view I’m being defensive/unpleasant in the comments? Or at least significantly more so?
Thank you.
The discussion in the comments so far focuses on two claims:
- We can't easily tell from this data whether EA is better or worse than baseline
- I agree, though I do think it's some evidence we're not much worse.
- Why does it even matter whether EA is better or worse than baseline? Community members are welcome to hold EA to a much higher-than-baseline standard, if they want to.
Yes this seems right and hope it's a thing people will take forward.
I appreciate the straightforwardness of this comment. Feels clear that we actually disagree.
I feel like I see comments as a natural bid to discuss things, but maybe you don't.
I guess there are some things that we could discuss but that I'm not gonna bid for here.
- "Importantly, I have reported zero of these instances to the community health team; there are several reasons for this, including some standard ones"
- "if these kinds of behaviors had happened at a non-EA conference, I would've immediately known they weren't allowed"
- "he definitions and measures of harassment differ across the data sources you cite, charting them on the same axis ("annual rate") constitutes bad analysis."
Were we to chat, I think the area I'd like to start is here "I do think that things have improved in recent years". So even with this improvement you think that EA is still significantly worse than other communities?
Interesting take. I don't like it.
Perhaps because I like saying overrated/underrated.
But also because overrated/underrated is a quick way to provide information. "Forecasting is underrated by the population at large" is much easier to think of than "forecasting is probably rated 4/10 by the population at large and should be rated 6/10"
Over/underrated requires about 3 mental queries, "Is it better or worse than my ingroup thinks" "Is it better or worse than my ingroup thinks?" "Am I gonna have to be clear about what I mean?"
Scoring the current and desired status of something requires about 20 queries "Is 4 fair?" "Is 5 fair" "What axis am I rating on?" "Popularity?" "If I score it a 4 will people think I'm crazy?"...
Like in some sense your right that % forecasts are more useful than "More likely/less likely" and sizes are better than "bigger smaller" but when dealing with intangibles like status I think it's pretty costly to calculate some status number, so I do the cheaper thing.
Also would you prefer people used over/underrated less or would you prefer the people who use over/underrated spoke less? Because I would guess that some chunk of those 50ish karma are from people who don't like the vibe rather than some epistemic thing. And if that's the case, I think we should have a different discussion.
I guess I think that might come from a frustration around jargon or rationalists in general. And I'm pretty happy to try and broaden my answer from over/underrated - just as I would if someone asked me how big a star was and I said "bigger than an elephant". But it's worth noting it's a bandwidth thing and often used because giving exact sizes in status is hard. Perhaps we shouldn't have numbers and words for it, but we don't.