Co-Founder and CTO at Empiricast
- In general I've noticed a pattern (of which the above two linked posts are an example) where 80k posts something like "our posts stating that 'A is true' have inadvertently caused many people to believe that A is true, here's why A is actually false" while leaving up the old posts that say 'A is true' (sometimes without even a note that they might be outdated). This is especially bad when the older 'A is true' content is linked conveniently from the front page while the more recent updates are buried in blog history.
Do you have examples of this?
The RadicalxChange movement is very explicit about engaging artists. To learn about the movement, I recommend this 80,000 Hours episode.
Other than that, a lot of startups have short explainer videos above the fold on their homepage. See for example https://frontapp.com/. Such companies optimize vigorously, so it's safe to assume that they are effective. I can imagine that a lot of EA-related organizations would benefit greatly from such videos.
The overall point is, if donors can coordinate, as they obviously can in the real world, then the optimal provisioning of goods theorem no longer holds.
I don't find this to be obvious. In my understanding, coordination/collusion can be limited by keeping donations anonymous. (See the first two paragraphs on page 16 in the paper for an example.)
This does not sound like collusion, at least according to the Merriam-Webster definition:
secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose
To me, it seems more like promotion.
Great post. Reminds me of Eric Weinstein on excellence vs. genius: https://youtu.be/bsgWSPWX-6A?t=553