I had a short discussion of a similar idea in a past piece I wrote.
Your pieces on Charles Koch is pretty ungenerous to him—it’s almost entirely criticism, accuses him of acting in bad faith, etc. Is this what you were thinking of doing with Musk? I’m not sure attacking him would be the best method of persuading someone who his already sympathetic to EA (and his followers).
I decided against writing a piece, but I think I actually engage honestly with Koch’s claims. I think there’s a strong case that Charles Koch has done more harm than almost anyone alive in the last 40 years, which I make in the piece. If you’d like more evidence for this, I recommend the book Dark Money.
If you can point to specific things you think I got wrong, I’d be happy to hear them. If we can’t be honest about the impact and motivations of people as odious as Charles Koch, I think we should reevaluate some things.
I wouldn’t have approached writing about Musk in the same way for a few reasons:
I wasn’t writing the CA piece in the hopes that Koch would read it and change his ways.
Musk has been sympathetic to EA ideas in the past and seems more genuinely motivated to help others (in his own way) than Koch
His core business may actually be net positive, while Koch’s is almost certainly not.
To be fair, that article was written for Current Affairs, not exactly a news outlet widely known for accuracy or nuance. I hope the Guardian is better.
Is that a defence? (Like, assuming arguendo that we agree with Larks’s characterisation, does the fact that one was published in a mean uncharitable magazine reduce the badness of writing a mean uncharitable article?)
I think so, at least a little. If I learned that someone wrote a bombastic/uncharitable/inaccurate article in a magazine otherwise known for levelheadedness/charitabilty/accuracy, this seems more blameworthy than if the value-above-replacement is 0.
This is a very similar argument to why we at least in part judge historical figures “for their time” and not entirely based on modern sensibilities.
I’m less interested in the blameworthiness angle, and more in the question of how one should use this sort of evidence when deciding how to interact with / relate to a given writer in the future. (For this and other reasons this seems quite different to the historical figure case to me.)
There are some defences I could see reducing the size of the update I would make on seeing that someone wrote something I find mean/uncharitable/otherwise unvirtuous – for example, “I wanted to reach that audience on some key issue, and needed to write in a nastier style to do that”, or “journalism work is hard to come by, sometimes you have to hold your nose and jump in the mud”. But these seem like pretty small counter-updates relative to the first-order evidence that someone wrote something mean and uncharitable.
Hmm, thinking personally, my tweets are definitely more off the cuff and don’t live up to the same standard of rigor as my academic papers. I think this is reasonable, since that’s what people are expecting from tweets vs academic papers, so I expect the audience will update differently based on them. Also, it’s probably good for society/the marketplace of ideas for there to be different venues with different standards (eg., op-eds vs news articles; preprints vs peer-reviewed papers, etc). The case here seems potentially* somewhat similar (let’s say, hypothetically, that we’re 75% sure that Koch is acting in bad faith; I wouldn’t want CNN then saying that he’s probably acting in bad faith, but it seems reasonable for a piece in CA to do so).
*note I haven’t actually read the piece in question, but I think the general point stands
Your pieces on Charles Koch is pretty ungenerous to him—it’s almost entirely criticism, accuses him of acting in bad faith, etc. Is this what you were thinking of doing with Musk? I’m not sure attacking him would be the best method of persuading someone who his already sympathetic to EA (and his followers).
I decided against writing a piece, but I think I actually engage honestly with Koch’s claims. I think there’s a strong case that Charles Koch has done more harm than almost anyone alive in the last 40 years, which I make in the piece. If you’d like more evidence for this, I recommend the book Dark Money.
If you can point to specific things you think I got wrong, I’d be happy to hear them. If we can’t be honest about the impact and motivations of people as odious as Charles Koch, I think we should reevaluate some things.
I wouldn’t have approached writing about Musk in the same way for a few reasons:
I wasn’t writing the CA piece in the hopes that Koch would read it and change his ways.
Musk has been sympathetic to EA ideas in the past and seems more genuinely motivated to help others (in his own way) than Koch
His core business may actually be net positive, while Koch’s is almost certainly not.
To be fair, that article was written for Current Affairs, not exactly a news outlet widely known for accuracy or nuance. I hope the Guardian is better.
Is that a defence? (Like, assuming arguendo that we agree with Larks’s characterisation, does the fact that one was published in a mean uncharitable magazine reduce the badness of writing a mean uncharitable article?)
I think so, at least a little. If I learned that someone wrote a bombastic/uncharitable/inaccurate article in a magazine otherwise known for levelheadedness/charitabilty/accuracy, this seems more blameworthy than if the value-above-replacement is 0.
This is a very similar argument to why we at least in part judge historical figures “for their time” and not entirely based on modern sensibilities.
I’m less interested in the blameworthiness angle, and more in the question of how one should use this sort of evidence when deciding how to interact with / relate to a given writer in the future. (For this and other reasons this seems quite different to the historical figure case to me.)
There are some defences I could see reducing the size of the update I would make on seeing that someone wrote something I find mean/uncharitable/otherwise unvirtuous – for example, “I wanted to reach that audience on some key issue, and needed to write in a nastier style to do that”, or “journalism work is hard to come by, sometimes you have to hold your nose and jump in the mud”. But these seem like pretty small counter-updates relative to the first-order evidence that someone wrote something mean and uncharitable.
Hmm, thinking personally, my tweets are definitely more off the cuff and don’t live up to the same standard of rigor as my academic papers. I think this is reasonable, since that’s what people are expecting from tweets vs academic papers, so I expect the audience will update differently based on them. Also, it’s probably good for society/the marketplace of ideas for there to be different venues with different standards (eg., op-eds vs news articles; preprints vs peer-reviewed papers, etc). The case here seems potentially* somewhat similar (let’s say, hypothetically, that we’re 75% sure that Koch is acting in bad faith; I wouldn’t want CNN then saying that he’s probably acting in bad faith, but it seems reasonable for a piece in CA to do so).
*note I haven’t actually read the piece in question, but I think the general point stands