The downvoting was related to the poor content of the article. It was essentially this:
How can you best use your time to make a difference?
Discuss.
Sincerely, 80,000 Hours
If the same article would be written by someone else, I would recommend them to ask the same question in the Open Thread. Should I vote differently just because of the person who wrote it? So now voting about articles is no longer about their quality, but becomes a political question?
Our allies are also expected to follow the local rules. We could make exception if this were the first article about 80,000 Hours on LW, so the main information of the article would be "80,000 Hours exists", but obviously that's not the case. The best way to promote friendship with our allies, is to write articles about them that actually provide information. For example, I would upvote a well-written article about "What is 80,000 Hours, what are their goals, and what exactly did they accomplish in the recent year". Because such article would contain interesting information.
It was essentially this:
How can you best use your time to make a difference? Discuss. Sincerely, 80,000 Hours
I don't see how you got that summary. Benjamin Todd was not looking to start a vague discussion. He was looking to gather questions important to people trying to make a difference so that people 80K could research well thought out answers to those questions. This is a simple but important step in guiding ongoing research to focus on answering questions that matter, and we should not expect great depth in the presentation of this step. The in-d...
Less Wrong was created to produce rationalists, so that many causes could benefit from the efforts of those rationalists. The point is not just to have nice place to talk about rationality, but to really make ourselves stronger, to apply the lessons that we learn here to improve our own lives, and to improve the world.
80,000 Hours is an organization created to provide direct domain specific help to people who want to support charitable causes, the same causes Less Wrong is supposed to produce rationalists to support. 80,000 Hours has goals clearly aligned with ours. Provided we think they are pursuing their aligned goals effectively, we should be excited about this. We should be happy when they reach out to us, to see how we can work together.
So, I am very disappointed to see the negative reception of a Less Wrong post by 80,000 Hours member Benjamin Todd, asking us what questions we would like 80,000 Hours to answer for us. They are basically offering to do free research for us on things that we care about, because our goals are aligned. And yet, as of this writing, that post has a score of -7, and it has received comments complaining that it is an ad. To be clear, ads of the sort that we want to avoid do not offer free services relevant to a core purpose of our community. I won't argue whether or not the post was an ad, but I will say that it belongs on Less Wrong and we should give it a good reception.
I would like to thank Benjamin Todd and others at 80,000 hours for their work in helping people be more effective philanthropists and otherwise support important causes, and for engaging Less Wrong in this project. I also thank everyone who responded to post with their actual questions about making a difference.
And, please, can we be nice to people who help us?