Seems sad! Seems like there is an opportunity for trade here.
Salaries in Silicon Valley are high and probably just the time for this specific moderation decision has cost around 2.5 total staff weeks for engineers that can make probably around $270k on average in industry, so that already suggests something in the $10k range of costs.
And I would definitely much prefer to just give Said that money instead of spending that time arguing, if there is a mutually positive agreement to be found.
We can also donate instead, but I don’t really like that. I want to find a trade here if one exists, and honestly I prefer Said having more money more than most charities having more money, so I don’t really get what this would improve. Also, not everyone cares about donating to charity, and that’s fine.
The amount of moderator time spent on this issue is both very large and sad, I agree, but I think it causes really bad incentives to offer money to users with whom moderation has a problem. Even if only offered to users in good standing over the course of many years, that still represents a pretty big payday if you can play your cards right and annoy people just enough to fall in the middle between “good user” and “ban”.
I guess I’m having trouble seeing how LW is more than a (good!) Internet forum. The Internet forums I’m familiar with would have just suspended or banned Said long, long ago (maybe Duncan, too, I don’t know).
I do want to note that my problem isn’t with offering Said money—any offer to any user of any Internet community feels… extremely surprising to me. Now, if you were contracting a user to write stuff on your behalf, sure, that’s contracting and not unusual. I’m not even necessarily offended by such an offer, just, again, extremely surprised.
I think if you model things as just “an internet community” this will give you the wrong intuitions.
I currently model the extended rationality and AI Alignment community as a professional community which for many people constitutes their primary work context, is responsible for their salary, and is responsible for a lot of daily infrastructure they use. I think viewing it through that lens, it makes sense that limiting someone’s access to some piece of community infrastructure can be quite costly, and somehow compensating people for the considerate cost that lack of access can cause seems reasonable.
I am not too worried about this being abusable. There are maybe 100 users who seem to me to use LessWrong as much as Said and who have contributed a similar amount to the overall rationality and AI Alignment project that I care about. At $10k paying each one of them would only end up around $1MM, which is less than the annual budget of Lightcone, and so doesn’t seem totally crazy.
I think if you model things as just “an internet community” this will give you the wrong intuitions.
This, plus Vaniver’s comment, has made me update—LW has been doing some pretty confusing things if you look at it like a traditional Internet community that make more sense if you look at it as a professional community, perhaps akin to many of the academic pursuits of science and high-level mathematics. The high dollar figures quoted in many posts confused me until now.
I’ve had a nagging feeling in the past that the rationalist community isn’t careful enough about the incentive problems and conflicts of interest that arise when transferring reasonably large sums of money (despite being very careful about incentive landscapes in other ways—e.g. setting the incentives right for people to post, comment, etc, on LW—and also being fairly scrupulous in general). Most of the other examples I’ve seen have been kinda small-scale and so I haven’t really poked at them, but this proposal seems like it pretty clearly sets up terrible incentives, and is also hard to distinguish from nepotism. I think most people in other communities have gut-level deontological instincts about money which help protect them against these problems (e.g. I take Celarix to be expressing this sort of sentiment upthread), which rationalists are more likely to lack or override—and although I think those people get a lot wrong about money too, cases like these sure seems like a good place to apply Chesterton’s fence.
Seems sad! Seems like there is an opportunity for trade here.
Salaries in Silicon Valley are high and probably just the time for this specific moderation decision has cost around 2.5 total staff weeks for engineers that can make probably around $270k on average in industry, so that already suggests something in the $10k range of costs.
And I would definitely much prefer to just give Said that money instead of spending that time arguing, if there is a mutually positive agreement to be found.
We can also donate instead, but I don’t really like that. I want to find a trade here if one exists, and honestly I prefer Said having more money more than most charities having more money, so I don’t really get what this would improve. Also, not everyone cares about donating to charity, and that’s fine.
The amount of moderator time spent on this issue is both very large and sad, I agree, but I think it causes really bad incentives to offer money to users with whom moderation has a problem. Even if only offered to users in good standing over the course of many years, that still represents a pretty big payday if you can play your cards right and annoy people just enough to fall in the middle between “good user” and “ban”.
I guess I’m having trouble seeing how LW is more than a (good!) Internet forum. The Internet forums I’m familiar with would have just suspended or banned Said long, long ago (maybe Duncan, too, I don’t know).
I do want to note that my problem isn’t with offering Said money—any offer to any user of any Internet community feels… extremely surprising to me. Now, if you were contracting a user to write stuff on your behalf, sure, that’s contracting and not unusual. I’m not even necessarily offended by such an offer, just, again, extremely surprised.
I think if you model things as just “an internet community” this will give you the wrong intuitions.
I currently model the extended rationality and AI Alignment community as a professional community which for many people constitutes their primary work context, is responsible for their salary, and is responsible for a lot of daily infrastructure they use. I think viewing it through that lens, it makes sense that limiting someone’s access to some piece of community infrastructure can be quite costly, and somehow compensating people for the considerate cost that lack of access can cause seems reasonable.
I am not too worried about this being abusable. There are maybe 100 users who seem to me to use LessWrong as much as Said and who have contributed a similar amount to the overall rationality and AI Alignment project that I care about. At $10k paying each one of them would only end up around $1MM, which is less than the annual budget of Lightcone, and so doesn’t seem totally crazy.
This, plus Vaniver’s comment, has made me update—LW has been doing some pretty confusing things if you look at it like a traditional Internet community that make more sense if you look at it as a professional community, perhaps akin to many of the academic pursuits of science and high-level mathematics. The high dollar figures quoted in many posts confused me until now.
I’ve had a nagging feeling in the past that the rationalist community isn’t careful enough about the incentive problems and conflicts of interest that arise when transferring reasonably large sums of money (despite being very careful about incentive landscapes in other ways—e.g. setting the incentives right for people to post, comment, etc, on LW—and also being fairly scrupulous in general). Most of the other examples I’ve seen have been kinda small-scale and so I haven’t really poked at them, but this proposal seems like it pretty clearly sets up terrible incentives, and is also hard to distinguish from nepotism. I think most people in other communities have gut-level deontological instincts about money which help protect them against these problems (e.g. I take Celarix to be expressing this sort of sentiment upthread), which rationalists are more likely to lack or override—and although I think those people get a lot wrong about money too, cases like these sure seems like a good place to apply Chesterton’s fence.