Upvoted, I appreciate the concern, and thanks for expressing it! Some other folks might have noticed this and been concerned without expressing it openly, so it’s good to get this out into the open.
Intentional Insights has an international reach and aim. While we are based in the US, less than a third of our traffic comes from there, and the next three highest venues are India, Philippines, and Pakistan. We write regularly for internationally-oriented venues. We have plenty of volunteers who are from those places as well, and I encourage them regularly to join Less Wrong after they have engaged sufficiently with InIn content.
Most are currently lurkers, but as I have seen positive changes coming with the LW 2.0 transformation, I encouraged a number to be active contributors to the site. So some have responded, and naturally talked about how they found LW. I’m sad, but unsurprised, to see this met with some suspicion.
Sargin in particular volunteers at Intentional Insights for about 25 hours, and gets paid as a virtual assistant to help manage our social media for about 15 hours. He decided to volunteer so much of his time because of his desire to improve his thinking and grow more rational. He’s been improving through InIn content, and so I am encouraging him to engage with LW. Don’t discourage him please, he’s a newbie here.
However, he made a mistake by not explicitly acknowledging that he works at InIn as well as volunteers at it. It’s important to be explicit about stuff like this—his praise for InIn content should be taken with a grain of salt, just like praise from CFAR staff for CFAR content should be taken with a grain of salt. Otherwise, there is an appearance of impropriety. I added a comment to his welcome thread to make that clear.
Thanks for raising this issue, gjm, appreciate it!
EDIT: Edited with a comment I made on Sargin’s welcome thread.
Would you like to comment on Beatrice Sargin (his sister, I think) and Alex Wenceslao? Does either of those people receive any compensation from Intentional Insights?
(I’m curious. What does a person do for 25 hours a week when “volunteering at Intentional Insights”?)
Upvoted, thanks for letting me know they didn’t indicate it as well. I should have realized that if Sargin didn’t say that, others might not either. Both of them volunteer most of their time, and get paid part of their time.
I’ll make sure any future people who both volunteer and get paid at InIn make that clear. It’s important to be transparent about these things and ensure no appearance of impropriety.
Separately, I talked to Eliot, and he suggested it would be good to hold off on getting newbies engaged with Less Wrong until the LW 2.0 newbie sub is set up, so I’ll hold off on doing that except for people who already signed up with accounts.
Now, on to your question. They work on a variety of tasks, such as website management, image creation, managing social media channels such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. Here’s an image of the organizational Trello showing some of the things that they do (Trello is a platform to organize teams together). We also have a couple more who do other stuff, such as Youtube editing, Pinterest, etc.
Looks like you forgot to do it with JohnC2015, who has just appeared and is singing from the same hymnsheet as all the others: hi, I’m a newbie from the Philippines who has just happened to come across all this stuff, and wow, Gleb Tsipursky is awesome!
Any bets on whether JohnC2015 is also paid by Intentional Insights to promote them? I’m sure we wouldn’t want any appearance of impropriety.
I didn’t forget, he just had not introduced himself at the time I was replying to Alex and Beatrice (you can check the timestamps). He must not have seen the e-mail I sent after talking to Eliot by the time he posted. I did comment on his welcome thread now.
BTW, just to clarify, I have no interest in marketing InIn content to Less Wrong. That would be stupid, everyone on LW but the newbies would benefit much more from more complex writings than InIn content. InIn is an outward-facing branch of the rationality movement, not a (mostly) inward-facing one like CFAR. I’m trying to get InIn participants involved in LW to help them grow more rational after they already got familiarity with InIn content and can go beyond that, to venues such as ClearerThinking, CFAR, and LW itself. However, as I mentioned above, due to Eliot’s suggestion, I will wait to get more InIn audience members involved in LW until it has a newbie thread.
The ones you’re not paying turn up because they have some specific thing to say that they think will be interesting (e.g., about the relationship between religion and rationality). They behave more or less like typical Less Wrong participants.
The ones you’re paying turn up to gush in the comments to your articles about how wonderful the articles are, and how great Intentional Insights is, and how excited they are to be growing in rationality (without any specifics about what they’ve actually learned and how it’s helping them). They behave more or less like typical blog comment spammers.
Additionally, the individuals who suspect Gleb of manipulating upvotes to try to be taken more seriously all just updated.
I defended a post as not representing Less Wrong because it was massively downvoted, demonstrating the community attitude towards the post. The reciprocal—that upvotes equate to community support—clearly doesn’t hold, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and point.
If I was interested in manipulating upvotes, it would much more easy for me to create sock puppets or have volunteers/virtual assistants create sock puppets than have people take their time to introduce themselves and engage with Less Wrong.
“That’s not how I would do it” generally is not the best way to respond to something you take as an accusation. Especially when you include a novel element in your protest, namely, the “have volunteers/virtual assistances create sock puppets” piece.
Firstly, because you don’t want to share those kinds of ideas. Secondly, because you’ve added details to a story you’re trying to repudiate, making it seem more likely.
Like I said, it’s not surprising that they expressed enthusiasm about the idea and content of Intentional Insights. They found out about rationality from InIn, and are volunteering about 2⁄3 of their time on average, because they’re enthusiastic about this topic.
Blog comment spammers usually promote something with a link attached. These people involved with InIn take the time to introduce themselves and describe their perspectives, and do not post links.
More broadly, like I said earlier, InIn is an outward-facing arm of the rationality movement, not an inward-facing one. There’s no need or interest for InIn to promote its content to LWs.
Fair enough! I told all InIn participants to indicate their association with Intentional Insights, but I should have been more specific with those who are paid by Intentional Insights for stuff they do to acknowledge this in their welcome threads.
Upvoted, I appreciate the concern, and thanks for expressing it! Some other folks might have noticed this and been concerned without expressing it openly, so it’s good to get this out into the open.
Intentional Insights has an international reach and aim. While we are based in the US, less than a third of our traffic comes from there, and the next three highest venues are India, Philippines, and Pakistan. We write regularly for internationally-oriented venues. We have plenty of volunteers who are from those places as well, and I encourage them regularly to join Less Wrong after they have engaged sufficiently with InIn content.
Most are currently lurkers, but as I have seen positive changes coming with the LW 2.0 transformation, I encouraged a number to be active contributors to the site. So some have responded, and naturally talked about how they found LW. I’m sad, but unsurprised, to see this met with some suspicion.
Sargin in particular volunteers at Intentional Insights for about 25 hours, and gets paid as a virtual assistant to help manage our social media for about 15 hours. He decided to volunteer so much of his time because of his desire to improve his thinking and grow more rational. He’s been improving through InIn content, and so I am encouraging him to engage with LW. Don’t discourage him please, he’s a newbie here.
However, he made a mistake by not explicitly acknowledging that he works at InIn as well as volunteers at it. It’s important to be explicit about stuff like this—his praise for InIn content should be taken with a grain of salt, just like praise from CFAR staff for CFAR content should be taken with a grain of salt. Otherwise, there is an appearance of impropriety. I added a comment to his welcome thread to make that clear.
Thanks for raising this issue, gjm, appreciate it!
EDIT: Edited with a comment I made on Sargin’s welcome thread.
Would you like to comment on Beatrice Sargin (his sister, I think) and Alex Wenceslao? Does either of those people receive any compensation from Intentional Insights?
(I’m curious. What does a person do for 25 hours a week when “volunteering at Intentional Insights”?)
Upvoted, thanks for letting me know they didn’t indicate it as well. I should have realized that if Sargin didn’t say that, others might not either. Both of them volunteer most of their time, and get paid part of their time.
I’ll make sure any future people who both volunteer and get paid at InIn make that clear. It’s important to be transparent about these things and ensure no appearance of impropriety.
Separately, I talked to Eliot, and he suggested it would be good to hold off on getting newbies engaged with Less Wrong until the LW 2.0 newbie sub is set up, so I’ll hold off on doing that except for people who already signed up with accounts.
Now, on to your question. They work on a variety of tasks, such as website management, image creation, managing social media channels such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. Here’s an image of the organizational Trello showing some of the things that they do (Trello is a platform to organize teams together). We also have a couple more who do other stuff, such as Youtube editing, Pinterest, etc.
EDIT: Edited to add image.
Looks like you forgot to do it with JohnC2015, who has just appeared and is singing from the same hymnsheet as all the others: hi, I’m a newbie from the Philippines who has just happened to come across all this stuff, and wow, Gleb Tsipursky is awesome!
Any bets on whether JohnC2015 is also paid by Intentional Insights to promote them? I’m sure we wouldn’t want any appearance of impropriety.
I didn’t forget, he just had not introduced himself at the time I was replying to Alex and Beatrice (you can check the timestamps). He must not have seen the e-mail I sent after talking to Eliot by the time he posted. I did comment on his welcome thread now.
BTW, just to clarify, I have no interest in marketing InIn content to Less Wrong. That would be stupid, everyone on LW but the newbies would benefit much more from more complex writings than InIn content. InIn is an outward-facing branch of the rationality movement, not a (mostly) inward-facing one like CFAR. I’m trying to get InIn participants involved in LW to help them grow more rational after they already got familiarity with InIn content and can go beyond that, to venues such as ClearerThinking, CFAR, and LW itself. However, as I mentioned above, due to Eliot’s suggestion, I will wait to get more InIn audience members involved in LW until it has a newbie thread.
The word you are looking for is “employees”. Out of four people from InIn who recently popped up on LW 100% are being paid by you.
Funny how they start growing more rational by loudly proclaiming the awesomeness of InIn...
I didn’t use that word because I’m not only trying to get people who are paid by InIn to engage with LW :-)
For example, see Lisper’s participation here and here, or RevPitkin. Neither are being paid by InIn.
Hope that clarifies things!
The differences are rather stark.
The ones you’re not paying turn up because they have some specific thing to say that they think will be interesting (e.g., about the relationship between religion and rationality). They behave more or less like typical Less Wrong participants.
The ones you’re paying turn up to gush in the comments to your articles about how wonderful the articles are, and how great Intentional Insights is, and how excited they are to be growing in rationality (without any specifics about what they’ve actually learned and how it’s helping them). They behave more or less like typical blog comment spammers.
Additionally, the individuals who suspect Gleb of manipulating upvotes to try to be taken more seriously all just updated.
I defended a post as not representing Less Wrong because it was massively downvoted, demonstrating the community attitude towards the post. The reciprocal—that upvotes equate to community support—clearly doesn’t hold, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and point.
If I was interested in manipulating upvotes, it would much more easy for me to create sock puppets or have volunteers/virtual assistants create sock puppets than have people take their time to introduce themselves and engage with Less Wrong.
“That’s not how I would do it” generally is not the best way to respond to something you take as an accusation. Especially when you include a novel element in your protest, namely, the “have volunteers/virtual assistances create sock puppets” piece.
Firstly, because you don’t want to share those kinds of ideas. Secondly, because you’ve added details to a story you’re trying to repudiate, making it seem more likely.
Good points, upvoted. I fall into this trap too often. Thanks for the helpful suggestions!
Like I said, it’s not surprising that they expressed enthusiasm about the idea and content of Intentional Insights. They found out about rationality from InIn, and are volunteering about 2⁄3 of their time on average, because they’re enthusiastic about this topic.
Blog comment spammers usually promote something with a link attached. These people involved with InIn take the time to introduce themselves and describe their perspectives, and do not post links.
More broadly, like I said earlier, InIn is an outward-facing arm of the rationality movement, not an inward-facing one. There’s no need or interest for InIn to promote its content to LWs.
Ah, planning fallacy. If you’re not surprised by the negative turn of event, you could have possibly anticipated it and corrected.
Fair enough! I told all InIn participants to indicate their association with Intentional Insights, but I should have been more specific with those who are paid by Intentional Insights for stuff they do to acknowledge this in their welcome threads.