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gjm comments on Open Thread March 21 - March 27, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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In the last few days, a few people have newly joined LW, posting only in a welcome thread and in articles about Gleb_Tsipursky's "Intentional Insights" work. Their comments have been very enthusiastic about II.
Now here's the thing. Intentional Insights is based in the US. Everyone on its leadership team (I think) and advisory board is in the US. Most of its activity, so far as I can see, is focused on promoting ... whatever exactly II promotes ... in US-based media like the Huffington Post. But it just happens that two of these people are a brother and sister (I think) from Nigeria, and a chap from the Philippines. The last person I recall turning up on LW and gushing about how great II is and how wonderful GT's articles are was also from the Philippines. Isn't that odd?
(For the avoidance of doubt, of course there's nothing in any way wrong about being from Nigeria or the Philippines. I'm just asking: isn't this a rather improbable sequence of events?)
Now, Gleb has an answer, sort of:
It's not clear what range of organizations Gleb is referring to, but the specific one he names (AAI) is indeed an international organization -- but I don't see any sign that it's more active in (say) Nigeria than in the US. And none of these II fans who have turned up on Less Wrong has said anything about hearing of either LW or II through any other organization.
I think there is another obvious explanation, which is that these people are being paid to publicize II, and that the reason why the II-fans we see on LW come disproportionately from developing countries is that it's much cheaper to buy publicity from people in developing countries than from people in, say, the US or Western Europe.
Am I too paranoid?
... Oh, look. Twitter feed of LW user Sarginlove. The description on the Twitter account says "works for Intentional Insight". Take a look at Sarginlove's comments and tell me this isn't a deliberate attempt to look like someone not affiliated with II who's just seen their material and been impressed by it.
I don't know quite what Gleb is actually trying to do with II, but I think this goes beyond "weird and creepy" (the usual complaint on LW hitherto, I think) to "actively deceptive".
Sarginlove, that is, Sargin Rukevwe, works as a "virtual assistant". Basically you hire him to do whatever and in this case he seems to have been hired to promote InIn.
It's interesting that his page says he graduated from the Polytechnic in 2013, but his introductory post here says he is a student at that school.
Let me repeat the observation I've made before -- Gleb_Tsipursky is a very clear case of cargo-cult behaviour. He has no clue about marketing, but he's been told which motions to make so that the planes will come and he's making them very earnestly. One of these motions is "native" (or covert) promotion which is designed to look like spontaneous endorsement -- and so he hires a lad from Lagos to post cringeworthy stuff here and everywhere...
P.S. Hey, look, Sarginlove has a Google+ account and his entire post history consists of -- drumroll, please! -- InIn reposts.
I guess he was hired on Dec 3, 2015, amiright?
He's a witch. Burn him already, on balance of probabilities.
Except, do we want to censor commercial speech per se. If people are being paid to say interesting things, why not? If people are talking rubbish and spamming, shouldn't we have a mechanism for silencing them irrespective of whether they're getting money?
I'm ranting insanely about the thyroid-bee in my empiricist-bonnet, totally for free! Why not ban me?
If someone turns up saying "I've just discovered X and I love it", the information I gain from that is quite different in the cases (1) where they really have just discovered X and love it and (2) where they're saying it because someone paid them to.
Indeed, the fact that these people are presumably being paid isn't the point. The fact that they are promoting something dishonestly is the point. The fact that they're being paid is relevant only as evidence that their promotion is dishonest.
Because your ranting is not in fact particularly insane, and because your participation in the LW community is not confined to ranting about hypothyroidism.
If you talked about literally nothing else, and if it transpired that you're only promoting your theory because someone paid you to drum up sales for thyroid hormone supplements, then you'd probably be contributing nothing of value. (Whether banning you would be a good response is a different question.) I mean, it might turn out that actually what you're saying about thyroid hormones is right (or at least enlightening) even though you were saying it on account of being paid, but the odds wouldn't be good.
What if I was so convinced I was right that I started a 'Rational Thyroid Treatment Corporation'? (Just teasing now, sorry)
And actually there wouldn't be any point, since the bloody stuff is cheap as chips. I think that might be the problem. There's never been anyone to fight its corner for it.
Which is verging on conspiracy theory. Except that there's no conspiracy, just perverse incentives.
Which is what we say when we want to say 'conspiracy theory'.
I used to know some Socialist Workers. And one of them used to refer to people as 'lumpen'. One day I asked her if that was what Socialist Workers said when they meant 'common', and she went red and said 'yes' in a very small voice.
Which increased my respect for her a lot. Unfortunately she ruined it all about a month later when at the end of an argument about the correct method of determining wage levels for firemen she completely lost it with the immortal words 'Under Socialism there WOULDN'T BE FIRES'.
If you would then hire Nigerians to promote it on LW, we would have a problem.
Nigerians! How could RTTC afford Nigerians? I paid Tammy Lowe £50 for what appears to be a three year supply of magic thyroid panacea, including several hours of her time and mine. And if I did start making my own and then spend the money to promote it properly, I'd just get undercut. There is no honour in a perfectly competitive market.
ROFL...
To quote Karl Marx on who constitutes lumpenproletariat:
The issue is not with commercial speech. The issue is with misrepresentation and deception.
For his motivations, he's already stated them; Gleb is attempting to prove he belongs here. His angle is social acceptance, but he's... critically undersocialized.
Dealing with him is going to be a matter of setting boundaries and making sure he understands them. I think he's probably too useful to get rid of, and also seems likely to go crazy-stalkery if it was attempted besides.
Being critically undersocialized in not necessarily a problem at LW :-/
I think Gleb's ambitions are broader. He wants to be the head of a large and successful charity. That would bring him a cornucopia of benefits, from social status to income.
And he is building a tower out of sticks and a runway out of mud so that the metal birds will come and bring treasure.
You do realize that I am a professor and have income, right? In fact, my wife and I are the largest donors to Intentional Insights, contributing about 88% of the 42K operating budget of the organization.
My ambition always has been to spread rationality to a broad audience. Intentional Insights is just an instrumental way to get to that goal. If I see a better way of doing it, I'll abandon InIn and jump on that other opportunity :-)
Yes, I do. But I don't think a state school pays a lot of money to assistant professors in humanities.
You know what you've spent with all that weaseling around and what you're completely out of? Credibility.
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.
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.
Maybe I'm cynic, but it's pretty commonplace for business to hire fake social supporters. Considering that we do not have certainty that those are of that kind, and that it is plausible that LW gets attended from all over the world, what is your suggested course of action?
What would you suggest that people do?
So, is InIn a business that hires fake social supporters? And is LessWrong one of those "social media channels" that they "manage"? Inquiring minds want to know.
I wasn't suggesting any particular course of action, unless you interpret "action" broadly enough to include this: I suggest that LW participants who encounter newcomers raving about how great Intentional Insights is or how wonderful Gleb's articles are should be aware that they may be raving only because they've been paid to do so, in which case their ravings give pretty much exactly zero evidence of anything either effective or appealing in II's material or Gleb's articles here.
Au contraire, they do give evidence.
To quote Maggie, "it's like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren't." And if you have to hire people to shout at street corners that you're a lady... X-)
Hmmm.... Only the true messiah denies his divinity?
I've got a visceral contempt for advertising, but I also think that's me being irrational. Plenty of good stuff needs paid promotion to get noticed. There are good ideas that spread on their own, but I don't think that spreadiness <=> good.
Good marketing isn't about saying: "Hey look at me I'm the greatest."
What about 'Coke is it!', or Muhammed Ali?
I'm sure there are more. I know nothing about marketing, but these seem to have worked.
That statement doesn't contain any direct value judgement about Coke. It's about making Coke a default.
Simon Anholt recounts in one of his talks about how Nike's "Just do it" brand is a tool for Nike to spend less time in meetings to discuss puchasing decisions for office furniture. It allows any manager to just buy the "Just do it"-desk, so they don't have to hold a meeting about whether to buy a more classy or a more hip desk.
Muhammed Ali is a special case. When he says "I'm the greatest" people might think that's he's an arrogant asshole but he's an arrogant asshole that can beat up everyone. That's a persona that's interesting for the media to talk about. He was antifragile against journalists considering him to be an arrogant asshole.
In the case of Intentional Insights there no reason to polarize people the way Muhammed Ali polarized by claiming he's the greatest and generally doing his own press interviews instead of letting his managers do them.
I have never drunk Coke or watched a boxing match, but my impression is that Coke's and Ali's slogans were only able to be effective because (1) lots of people already really liked drinking Coke and (2) Muhammed Ali was in fact a really good boxer.
I think the "real thing" / "Coke is it" slogans were adopted exactly because other companies were making their own competing products that were intended to be like Coca-Cola. So they were aimed at people who already liked Coca-Cola, or who at least knew that Coca-Cola was a drink lots of people liked, saying "That thing you admire? It's our product, not any of those inferior imitations".
So perhaps we can amend CK's comment to something like this: Good marketing isn't about saying "look at me, I'm the greatest" except in some special cases where people are already looking at you and at least considering the possibility that you might be the greatest.
I still don't know whether it's right, though. I would be entirely unsurprised to hear of a product that had a lot of success by going in with a we're-the-best marketing campaign very early in its life.
[EDITED to remove superfluous parentheses.]
The critical difference here is between good promotion and bad promotion. It is quite possible to promote the idea that you're a lady, it's just that it does not involve hiring people to shout at street corners.
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.
It's not surprising that folks who come to LW from InIn would appreciate both InIn content and stuff that looks like InIn content, namely beginner-oriented materials. 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.