I don’t really like this post. It reads like one of those fake advice websites set-up by companies selling products that target those advice seekers. Like “How To Get Rid of Acne” with not-so-subtle links to an order page for Clearasil. After I get over my exasperation at the tone, feel, and SIAI pitch I don’t see anything new here to get excited about. Good collection of links I guess. Everyone else seems to love it though, so I suppose it just rubbed me the wrong way.
Thanks for your thoughtful criticism. Could you point out the worst abuses of my tone? I’m happy to modify it to improve things if anyone has specific suggestions from the text.
Also, you’re incredibly fortunate to have learned nothing from my summary. I suggest that in your case (and probably others who agreed with you), you’re a Less Wrong legend. Heck, you’re #6 all-time in comment karma! For reference, Yvain is #8. Anyone who’s been here long enough to be that right, that often, will find (almost) nothing new in this article. But if you had counter-factually never seen Less Wrong and arrived here in the past month or two, amazing as it may seem, you likely wouldn’t know the majority of this “basic” information.
Did you at least get a little out of points #8 and #10? Those were the two bits that were actually my own original contributions and not generally part of the Less Wrong cannon. Also, several of the links in #5 are unique to me including the heading link which didn’t exist before I posted my friend Dennis’ presentation online. Also, did anyone who read this actually sign up for any of ActiveInboxHQ.com, Mint.com or 43things.com? I would be tremendously less effective without each of those. They help on different time frames (daily, monthly, and yearly respectively).
Again, I’m sorry if this post is mostly repetitive and unnecessary for those of us who have been here awhile. But as FormallyknownasRoko points out, this article somehow didn’t exist. Just like Roko, I needed to point a smart friend with no background in this stuff to something about optimal philanthropy. I felt like linking them straight to Anna’s “Back of the Envelope” talk from 2009 or Eliezer’s “Money the unit of caring” were both “too zoomed in” a spot to dump someone who didn’t have an overview of why they might want to be an optimal philanthropist to begin with.
Anyway, I think this article is actually really important to get right. So your issue with the tone is very important and I’d like to address it if you think it would be a stumbling block for outside readers as well. Please point out the most egregious links and phrasings and I’ll seriously consider revising them. I’d love to have this piece improved by the collective optimizing power of Less Wrong.
Wait. I am? Yikes! Where is this information available? I think I probably just make a lot of comments. You’re right though, I’ve been around here a while I should adjust for that.
Re: Style and tone
I have pattern-match aversions that are stronger than I’d like sometimes (though at other times this is extremely helpful). It’s possible that I’m reading things into your post that the you and the people who liked it didn’t.
Just to start with, your post includes lots of links to pages that explain your point in detail- but it is so overhyperlinked that the signal/noise ratio is greatly diminished. I don’t understand why you linked to the wikipedia page on Ghandi, Code Pink, one.org, the Red Cross, Oxfam, PETA and Greenpeace, the entire Metaethics sequence, wikipedia on axiology, the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative… and that’s only halfway through point number two! People will be a lot more likely to click the links you think are important if they’re the only links on the page.
Numbers 8 and 10 included some decent, new points.
I think the main issue though was that if you just look at points 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8 (half the post) and pay particular attention to the links that you endorse this just comes off as an advertisement for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. This seems even more apparent to me now that I’ve looked closer at it. Basically the message I get from this post is that I should make as much money as I can and give as much of it as I can to SIAI as soon as possible. As a result the other points in the post just come off as attempts at establishing credibility and objectivity—so that the message will seem more persuasive. To me, whether you intended it or not, this looks just like how those advice sites will give some decent but uncontroversial advice so the reader will say “Ah! This guy knows what he is talking about. Oh, he recommends this brand of acne cream? Lets get some!”.
Now I know lots of people here think rational people should be making as much money as they can and giving as much of it, as early as they can, to SIAI. But I’d like to see the argument “SIAI is the most per dollar effective charity you can give to” divorced from the argument “Be smart and effective in who you give your money to”. And when people want to promote SIAI, better they do so explicitly via posts with titles like “The Best Way to Save the World is to Give Money to SIAI” rather than posts ostensibly about something more general.
I imagine a number of the upvotes my comment got were from people who feel that SIAI stuff has a tendency to dominate discussions around here and live little room for other rationalist enterprises. It’s hard for Less Wrong to be a place for rationalists generally when it often comes across as a place for Singulatarians mostly. Maybe the minority needs to be more vocal about finding something different for us to do… but that seems like a path that could lead to factions (or maybe the minority just wants to hang out, I don’t know).
Thanks for your suggestions. They’re very helpful. I removed six of the less relevant links. Mostly from the beginning. The signal to noise ratio in them was indeed too high. Thanks again for pointing that out. I also removed a link to SIAI from point #6 based on your suggestions.
I left the links to other charities in the first paragraph for now because I feel like they are similar to the list of below-average charities I link to in #2 -- I mention them in the context of failure. So I think most people will realize they are not recommending them as helpful resources but just citing them as well-known examples. Although maybe I should remove the links just to deny those groups PageRank juice… especially since I mention them so high up in the article. I’m gonna go “nofollow” them now.
I don’t want to quibble too much because my intent isn’t to be right, but to make the best article I’m capable of making that people can link their friends to. So if you still have objections, could you elaborate on how I’m being partisan in #7 and #8? Here’s how it looks to me now that I’ve made updates:
3 - Guilty. I’m definitely being partisan here. I make a direct link to SIAI. Although I then immediately link to a video which goes a long way to support my claim that SIAI is in fact a high leverage charity. I think scope insensitivity prevents most people (including me) from imagining that a cause with something approaching existential risk reduction’s potential to create value could even be possible. That video which I link to for support has been out for a year now. There were hundreds of people who saw that presentation. And over a thousand have watched it online. I’ve never seen anyone make any counter-claims or a better estimates. I’m sure a refinement must be possible—one which I’d love to see if anyone’s up to the challenge. But I feel like it’s a solid argument in a broad sense and justifies me linking to SIAI at least once directly.
6 - Link to SIAI removed.
7 - I link to a post about why money is superior to volunteering (in all but the most extreme cases) which justifies it’s conclusion rather well. Even in the derivative links, I don’t think there’s an appeal to support any particular charity.
8 - I link to an outside academic reference which explains x-risks rather well to someone who knows nothing. But it’s in the context of a list of other causes activists might care about. I think it’s pretty neutral. It’s not like existential risk reduction is some taboo form of charitable undertaking that’s inferior to poverty reduction or disease eradication. My current calibration tells me that x-risk reduction may be superior, but I’m only making the weaker, implicit claim that it’s at least equal.
In the final analysis, I’m not undecided on the matter, so I don’t think my piece needs to be entirely objective. It should be possible for someone reading my article to figure out what conclusion I’ve come to if they’d actually like to know.
First, can you tell me how you know about comment karma? Do you have admin powers or talk to someone who does? It is a little creepy.
Second, I’m not sure at this point what your goal is with this piece. Is it merely to provide general advice that will help people become more effective at saving the world? Or are you trying to get people to give money to SIAI, by convincing them this is what they should do to save the world? I think there is some inferential distance between our positions as the result of you considering those questions more closely related than I do. There is so much SIAI-cluster stuff in here that it seems like your goal is the latter.
I ask because while you’ve been more than admirable in responding to my individual criticisms (I upvoted the above comment) it’s begun to feel like what you want this article to be just isn’t something I would upvote even if we kept going through iterations of criticism and revision. Less Wrong is a fine place to test run articles promoting rationality generally, I’m not crazy about it as a place to run test articles promoting SIAI.
If you just want to drop in an endorsement of SIAI I recommend doing it in first person and possibly in a parenthetical. Instead of:
But once that’s out of the way, I devote the vast majority of my time and resources to contributing to other non-profits [link] with staggeringly higher pay-offs [link].
say
But once you’ve satisfied that emotional need, devote your time and money to charities that do the most good for the least money. (I’ve been convinced [link to your video] that SIAI [link to the website] is the best use of my hours and dollars).
And then leave it there! Number two has the exact same problem as number three (and the exact same Anna Salamon video, incidentally).
The links in number six still aren’t about spreading awareness generally, the x-risk career network isn’t going to be a helpful for most people who read your article; same goes for the thing about Less Wrong search engine optimization. Unless your goal is to get people involved with the SIAI/FHI cluster of organizations it doesn’t make sense to link to them unless they are accompanied by a bunch of other examples for other kinds of charity.
Seven and eight aren’t problematic on their own they’re problematic after you endorse a charity. They’re particularly problematic after I get curious, do ten seconds of googling and find out you’re the Volunteer Coordinator for the charity you endorsed. They aren’t credible because it looks like a conflict of interest.
Which is why I’m asking what your goal is because it kind of looks like the goal is to get people who are curious about saving the world interested in SIAI- my advice isn’t good if that’s your goal as I’m giving suggestions that will make the other content of the post more convincing by making the SIAI related content less central and seem less authoritative. There’s nothing wrong with having this as your goal, but I don’t think Less Wrong is the place to post SIAI pamphlet copy unless Eliezer has decided to give up the pretension about this being a place for rationalists generally.
I have access to a copy of the LW database because I’m coordinating the addition of new features to the site between SIAI and Tricycle. I don’t have any admin privileges on the live site or promotion powers or anything else that anyone else doesn’t have though.
I’ve been trying to think of more site stats to add for people. I think a top commenter list might be nice… or at least having it appear in people’s profiles so everyone can check their own stats. If there’s interest, I can work on that or get someone else to add it.
I would love to be able to sort my own contributions by (Popular, New, Old, Controversial) the same way we can sort comments on a post. I’d also like Unpopular as a sort key there.
Basically, I use comment karma as a way of getting feedback on what people think is good and bad, but having to page through all of my comments looking for items with a high absolute value is awkward. The current arrangement seems to assume that comment karma scores don’t vary much after a few days, and that just isn’t true.
Less valuably but still interestingly, I’d like to be able to do the same with other people’s contributions… e.g., find the most popular comments someone else has made.
I’d also like to be able to do this, especially for other people. When I’m checking someone’s profile and wondering “who is this person?”, being able to see their highest karma posts/comments would be a quick way to get some information about them.
“I’ve been trying to think of more site stats to add for people.”
I’d like to see average score per comment. I.e., karma from comments divided by number of comments made. Hacker News puts this number in the profile.
(Actually, I prefer karma divided by words posted but karma divided by comments posted conforms better to people’s expectations because other sites like HN use it.)
means to me (it sounds like the karma gotten from comments rather than posts). Which would be much better evidence of my having been around a while than a poll I once did. But I am #6 there so I guess thats what he was talking about.
ETA: Actually it looks like that comment is still getting upvotes. It has no business being on that page as it is meta and no longer useful. If people want to down vote it off page I would totally endorse that (just find a comment of mine you like or up vote the karma dump that is attached to it. I’ll edit the comment accordingly.
I did. Mint.com and 43things.com, this weekend. So far the act of writing down some things I wanted to do has been good enough to spark action on a couple of random things I’d been procrastinating on (unsubscribing from blockbuster.com after exporting my queue, buying a new mattress, and signing up for a cashback credit card). We’ll see if they do anything longterm.
I don’t really like this post. It reads like one of those fake advice websites set-up by companies selling products that target those advice seekers. Like “How To Get Rid of Acne” with not-so-subtle links to an order page for Clearasil. After I get over my exasperation at the tone, feel, and SIAI pitch I don’t see anything new here to get excited about. Good collection of links I guess. Everyone else seems to love it though, so I suppose it just rubbed me the wrong way.
Thanks for your thoughtful criticism. Could you point out the worst abuses of my tone? I’m happy to modify it to improve things if anyone has specific suggestions from the text.
Also, you’re incredibly fortunate to have learned nothing from my summary. I suggest that in your case (and probably others who agreed with you), you’re a Less Wrong legend. Heck, you’re #6 all-time in comment karma! For reference, Yvain is #8. Anyone who’s been here long enough to be that right, that often, will find (almost) nothing new in this article. But if you had counter-factually never seen Less Wrong and arrived here in the past month or two, amazing as it may seem, you likely wouldn’t know the majority of this “basic” information.
Did you at least get a little out of points #8 and #10? Those were the two bits that were actually my own original contributions and not generally part of the Less Wrong cannon. Also, several of the links in #5 are unique to me including the heading link which didn’t exist before I posted my friend Dennis’ presentation online. Also, did anyone who read this actually sign up for any of ActiveInboxHQ.com, Mint.com or 43things.com? I would be tremendously less effective without each of those. They help on different time frames (daily, monthly, and yearly respectively).
Again, I’m sorry if this post is mostly repetitive and unnecessary for those of us who have been here awhile. But as FormallyknownasRoko points out, this article somehow didn’t exist. Just like Roko, I needed to point a smart friend with no background in this stuff to something about optimal philanthropy. I felt like linking them straight to Anna’s “Back of the Envelope” talk from 2009 or Eliezer’s “Money the unit of caring” were both “too zoomed in” a spot to dump someone who didn’t have an overview of why they might want to be an optimal philanthropist to begin with.
Anyway, I think this article is actually really important to get right. So your issue with the tone is very important and I’d like to address it if you think it would be a stumbling block for outside readers as well. Please point out the most egregious links and phrasings and I’ll seriously consider revising them. I’d love to have this piece improved by the collective optimizing power of Less Wrong.
Wait. I am? Yikes! Where is this information available? I think I probably just make a lot of comments. You’re right though, I’ve been around here a while I should adjust for that.
Re: Style and tone
I have pattern-match aversions that are stronger than I’d like sometimes (though at other times this is extremely helpful). It’s possible that I’m reading things into your post that the you and the people who liked it didn’t.
Just to start with, your post includes lots of links to pages that explain your point in detail- but it is so overhyperlinked that the signal/noise ratio is greatly diminished. I don’t understand why you linked to the wikipedia page on Ghandi, Code Pink, one.org, the Red Cross, Oxfam, PETA and Greenpeace, the entire Metaethics sequence, wikipedia on axiology, the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative… and that’s only halfway through point number two! People will be a lot more likely to click the links you think are important if they’re the only links on the page.
Numbers 8 and 10 included some decent, new points.
I think the main issue though was that if you just look at points 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8 (half the post) and pay particular attention to the links that you endorse this just comes off as an advertisement for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. This seems even more apparent to me now that I’ve looked closer at it. Basically the message I get from this post is that I should make as much money as I can and give as much of it as I can to SIAI as soon as possible. As a result the other points in the post just come off as attempts at establishing credibility and objectivity—so that the message will seem more persuasive. To me, whether you intended it or not, this looks just like how those advice sites will give some decent but uncontroversial advice so the reader will say “Ah! This guy knows what he is talking about. Oh, he recommends this brand of acne cream? Lets get some!”.
Now I know lots of people here think rational people should be making as much money as they can and giving as much of it, as early as they can, to SIAI. But I’d like to see the argument “SIAI is the most per dollar effective charity you can give to” divorced from the argument “Be smart and effective in who you give your money to”. And when people want to promote SIAI, better they do so explicitly via posts with titles like “The Best Way to Save the World is to Give Money to SIAI” rather than posts ostensibly about something more general.
I imagine a number of the upvotes my comment got were from people who feel that SIAI stuff has a tendency to dominate discussions around here and live little room for other rationalist enterprises. It’s hard for Less Wrong to be a place for rationalists generally when it often comes across as a place for Singulatarians mostly. Maybe the minority needs to be more vocal about finding something different for us to do… but that seems like a path that could lead to factions (or maybe the minority just wants to hang out, I don’t know).
Thanks for your suggestions. They’re very helpful. I removed six of the less relevant links. Mostly from the beginning. The signal to noise ratio in them was indeed too high. Thanks again for pointing that out. I also removed a link to SIAI from point #6 based on your suggestions.
I left the links to other charities in the first paragraph for now because I feel like they are similar to the list of below-average charities I link to in #2 -- I mention them in the context of failure. So I think most people will realize they are not recommending them as helpful resources but just citing them as well-known examples. Although maybe I should remove the links just to deny those groups PageRank juice… especially since I mention them so high up in the article. I’m gonna go “nofollow” them now.
I don’t want to quibble too much because my intent isn’t to be right, but to make the best article I’m capable of making that people can link their friends to. So if you still have objections, could you elaborate on how I’m being partisan in #7 and #8? Here’s how it looks to me now that I’ve made updates:
3 - Guilty. I’m definitely being partisan here. I make a direct link to SIAI. Although I then immediately link to a video which goes a long way to support my claim that SIAI is in fact a high leverage charity. I think scope insensitivity prevents most people (including me) from imagining that a cause with something approaching existential risk reduction’s potential to create value could even be possible. That video which I link to for support has been out for a year now. There were hundreds of people who saw that presentation. And over a thousand have watched it online. I’ve never seen anyone make any counter-claims or a better estimates. I’m sure a refinement must be possible—one which I’d love to see if anyone’s up to the challenge. But I feel like it’s a solid argument in a broad sense and justifies me linking to SIAI at least once directly.
6 - Link to SIAI removed.
7 - I link to a post about why money is superior to volunteering (in all but the most extreme cases) which justifies it’s conclusion rather well. Even in the derivative links, I don’t think there’s an appeal to support any particular charity.
8 - I link to an outside academic reference which explains x-risks rather well to someone who knows nothing. But it’s in the context of a list of other causes activists might care about. I think it’s pretty neutral. It’s not like existential risk reduction is some taboo form of charitable undertaking that’s inferior to poverty reduction or disease eradication. My current calibration tells me that x-risk reduction may be superior, but I’m only making the weaker, implicit claim that it’s at least equal.
In the final analysis, I’m not undecided on the matter, so I don’t think my piece needs to be entirely objective. It should be possible for someone reading my article to figure out what conclusion I’ve come to if they’d actually like to know.
First, can you tell me how you know about comment karma? Do you have admin powers or talk to someone who does? It is a little creepy.
Second, I’m not sure at this point what your goal is with this piece. Is it merely to provide general advice that will help people become more effective at saving the world? Or are you trying to get people to give money to SIAI, by convincing them this is what they should do to save the world? I think there is some inferential distance between our positions as the result of you considering those questions more closely related than I do. There is so much SIAI-cluster stuff in here that it seems like your goal is the latter.
I ask because while you’ve been more than admirable in responding to my individual criticisms (I upvoted the above comment) it’s begun to feel like what you want this article to be just isn’t something I would upvote even if we kept going through iterations of criticism and revision. Less Wrong is a fine place to test run articles promoting rationality generally, I’m not crazy about it as a place to run test articles promoting SIAI.
If you just want to drop in an endorsement of SIAI I recommend doing it in first person and possibly in a parenthetical. Instead of:
say
And then leave it there! Number two has the exact same problem as number three (and the exact same Anna Salamon video, incidentally).
The links in number six still aren’t about spreading awareness generally, the x-risk career network isn’t going to be a helpful for most people who read your article; same goes for the thing about Less Wrong search engine optimization. Unless your goal is to get people involved with the SIAI/FHI cluster of organizations it doesn’t make sense to link to them unless they are accompanied by a bunch of other examples for other kinds of charity.
Seven and eight aren’t problematic on their own they’re problematic after you endorse a charity. They’re particularly problematic after I get curious, do ten seconds of googling and find out you’re the Volunteer Coordinator for the charity you endorsed. They aren’t credible because it looks like a conflict of interest.
Which is why I’m asking what your goal is because it kind of looks like the goal is to get people who are curious about saving the world interested in SIAI- my advice isn’t good if that’s your goal as I’m giving suggestions that will make the other content of the post more convincing by making the SIAI related content less central and seem less authoritative. There’s nothing wrong with having this as your goal, but I don’t think Less Wrong is the place to post SIAI pamphlet copy unless Eliezer has decided to give up the pretension about this being a place for rationalists generally.
I have access to a copy of the LW database because I’m coordinating the addition of new features to the site between SIAI and Tricycle. I don’t have any admin privileges on the live site or promotion powers or anything else that anyone else doesn’t have though.
I’ve been trying to think of more site stats to add for people. I think a top commenter list might be nice… or at least having it appear in people’s profiles so everyone can check their own stats. If there’s interest, I can work on that or get someone else to add it.
I would love to be able to sort my own contributions by (Popular, New, Old, Controversial) the same way we can sort comments on a post. I’d also like Unpopular as a sort key there.
Basically, I use comment karma as a way of getting feedback on what people think is good and bad, but having to page through all of my comments looking for items with a high absolute value is awkward. The current arrangement seems to assume that comment karma scores don’t vary much after a few days, and that just isn’t true.
Less valuably but still interestingly, I’d like to be able to do the same with other people’s contributions… e.g., find the most popular comments someone else has made.
I’d also like to be able to do this, especially for other people. When I’m checking someone’s profile and wondering “who is this person?”, being able to see their highest karma posts/comments would be a quick way to get some information about them.
“I’ve been trying to think of more site stats to add for people.”
I’d like to see average score per comment. I.e., karma from comments divided by number of comments made. Hacker News puts this number in the profile.
(Actually, I prefer karma divided by words posted but karma divided by comments posted conforms better to people’s expectations because other sites like HN use it.)
http://lesswrong.com/topcomments/
Ah....
Thats not what
means to me (it sounds like the karma gotten from comments rather than posts). Which would be much better evidence of my having been around a while than a poll I once did. But I am #6 there so I guess thats what he was talking about.
ETA: Actually it looks like that comment is still getting upvotes. It has no business being on that page as it is meta and no longer useful. If people want to down vote it off page I would totally endorse that (just find a comment of mine you like or up vote the karma dump that is attached to it. I’ll edit the comment accordingly.
Woah!
Font hurts my eyes!
Yeah, that was weird. Not sure how that happened. Fixed.
That’s tracked somewhere? Where?
Bottom of the right column—just above the sitemeter.
That’s total karma, which I do not believe was being referred-to above.
See: http://lesswrong.com/topcomments/
I did. Mint.com and 43things.com, this weekend. So far the act of writing down some things I wanted to do has been good enough to spark action on a couple of random things I’d been procrastinating on (unsubscribing from blockbuster.com after exporting my queue, buying a new mattress, and signing up for a cashback credit card). We’ll see if they do anything longterm.
I think this may be an entry to my competition.
I have a similar opinion.