X-risk discussions aren’t immune from the “grab the mic” dynamics that affect every other cause advocacy community.
There will continue to be tactics such as “X distracts from Y” and “if you really cared about X you would …” unless and until people who care about the cause for the cause’s sake can identify and exclude those who care about the cause for the sake of the cultural and social capital that can be extracted. Inclusivity has such a positive affect halo around it that it’s hard to do this, but it’s really the only way.
The karma mechanic, and the concept of scoring tied to an identity in general, is supposed to circumvent that from what I understand.
e.g. if someone with a lot of credibility such as gwern ‘grabbed the mic’ the average reader might give them 10 minutes of attention, whereas someone that just signed up under a pseudonym may be given 10 seconds. If it’s deemed to be valuable, then their credibility increases, or vice versa if it’s clearly malicious. Someone with only 10 seconds obviously gets kicked out fairly quickly, after a few malicious iterations.
Thus even in the worst case not that much time is wasted, whether or not ‘grab the mic’ tactics became the norm.
Though perhaps you believe this method of discriminating and filtering by length of allotted attention is ineffective?
X-risk discussions aren’t immune from the “grab the mic” dynamics that affect every other cause advocacy community.
There will continue to be tactics such as “X distracts from Y” and “if you really cared about X you would …” unless and until people who care about the cause for the cause’s sake can identify and exclude those who care about the cause for the sake of the cultural and social capital that can be extracted. Inclusivity has such a positive affect halo around it that it’s hard to do this, but it’s really the only way.
Longer-form of the argument: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
The karma mechanic, and the concept of scoring tied to an identity in general, is supposed to circumvent that from what I understand.
e.g. if someone with a lot of credibility such as gwern ‘grabbed the mic’ the average reader might give them 10 minutes of attention, whereas someone that just signed up under a pseudonym may be given 10 seconds. If it’s deemed to be valuable, then their credibility increases, or vice versa if it’s clearly malicious. Someone with only 10 seconds obviously gets kicked out fairly quickly, after a few malicious iterations.
Thus even in the worst case not that much time is wasted, whether or not ‘grab the mic’ tactics became the norm.
Though perhaps you believe this method of discriminating and filtering by length of allotted attention is ineffective?