The trouble is that an uproar is often also what you get when you fucked up badly. Uproars really do contain information, and you ignore that information at your peril.
You don’t want to fall into the trap of being easily influenced by an uproar, because that incentivizes uproar, and partisans of all stripes have noticed. People will notice if you’re easily swayed by uproar, or if you instinctively resist it, and either way it hurts the credibility of your judgement.
Big doubt from me that uproars are particularly sensitive to whether you in particular have displayed receptiveness to uproars in the past. It seems especially implausible when you note that the original post had a call to action at least as much for the EA community (“It is probably wise to have a stronger separation between EA and rationalism”) as for Manifest, so how much notice Manifest takes is arguably only peripherally important to the goals of the post.
Checking if we actually disagree: Do you believe it is usually correct to excommunicate an innocent person if they become sufficiently unpopular?
Do you believe there are situations where people become unpopular online for fairly capricious reasons? Perhaps this situation?
Do you believe this has happened with EA in the past? Do we deserve all the backlash we got derived from SBF, the OpenAI Board, and Émile Torres?
I’m not sure what “uproars contain information” is supposed to mean. It seems almost tautologically true that uproars related to Dylan Mulvaney, SBF, the OpenAI Board, and Émile Torres “contain information”. There is information stored on servers related to those uproars. The Dylan Mulvaney uproar “informs” me that lots of Budweiser customers dislike trans influencers. So?
It’s hard to create a good set of rules. You won’t do it perfectly. And yes, uproars might correlate with weaknesses in your rules. The point is to try to avoid mob rule, and create a situation where stakeholders can feel confident that decisions are being made in a considered way.
Suppose Manifest was to publish a set of rules they’re going to follow and ask for community feedback, and the community says the rules look good. Then 6 months later the Guardian or Fox News writes a hit piece on Manifest, and their hit piece accuses a Manifest attendee of something within the agreed-upon rules, and some people in the community are up in arms. Doesn’t that seem a little suspicious? Perhaps in this hypothetical, the uproar is more of a preference cascade than a considered judgement?
Big doubt from me that uproars are particularly sensitive to whether you in particular have displayed receptiveness to uproars in the past.
I’m not claiming this is true for this particular uproar, but I think it helps explain e.g. why university administrators received so much flak for their handling of Israel/Palestine protests, and why certain controversial figures such as Dave Chappelle and Jordan Peterson eventually acquire resilience.
I happen to think Richard Hanania crossed a line with this tweet. I think Manifest should refrain from inviting him to future events, but not because he’s unpopular or because he would bring reputation risks or because he’s good or bad at forecasting. I think he violated an important social norm, of the sort that can be operationalized in writing and upheld in the future. And btw, I predict that if Hanania is excluded on these grounds, as opposed to “he has the wrong vibes” or “he’s unpopular” grounds, the risk of a right-wing backlash against Manifest will be decreased. And if their goal is bipartisanship, I think their fear of backlash should be symmetric.
I very much believe “uproars contain information” and don’t believe “uproars are always directionally correct”. I’m not sure where I’d stand on “uproars are usually directionally correct”, but in any case they are often enough directionally wrong that I don’t think you’re obligated to accept their conclusions just because they happened.
I guess I just don’t believe that people are capable of assembling decision-making committees that are so robust to making misjudgements that people trying to attack your decisions from outside can be safely assumed to be in error and ignored. Whatever you think you’ve done to come up with good rules and a good process, sometimes you’ll have missed something big or not appreciated the importance of some angle, and people being upset with you will be how you find that out. If you want the best shot you can get at achieving your own goals, you notice all that stuff, and you take it into consideration, and you ask questions like “am I making a mistake here?” and “is it possible I have a blind spot that’s clouding my judgement on this?”. Importantly, also, you’ll ask “even if I think all these people are being unreasonable in many ways, are there nevertheless kernels of truth to take away here? Is there something to learn from how this unfolded?”. Sometimes even then the answer will be no! As long as you made a genuine best effort to look for the truth in what people said, that’s enough for me.
My take is that for every outrage that’s basically a restatement of the culture war (and thereby ~useless), there’s another that’s basically someone overlooking something that is obviously correct in retrospect, that they wish they’d thought of six months ago, but somehow slipped through. And there’s, of course, a spectrum in between. This stuff is hard, and I believe in the collaborative process of developing our knowledge and experience around it.
I think if someone believed either that committees and structures are much more effective than I think they are, or that outrages are much less often right than I think they are, then that would be a good reason to disagree with this take. Though I would caution against an availability bias that makes incorrect outrages more noticeable than correct ones, both because you are likely to have a stronger reaction to the incorrect ones and because the correct ones are more quickly resolved.
Suppose Manifest was to publish a set of rules they’re going to follow and ask for community feedback, and the community says the rules look good. Then 6 months later the Guardian or Fox News writes a hit piece on Manifest, and their hit piece accuses a Manifest attendee of something within the agreed-upon rules, and some people in the community are up in arms. Doesn’t that seem a little suspicious? Perhaps in this hypothetical, the uproar is more of a preference cascade than a considered judgement?
FWIW I have not actually read the Guardian article and made all my judgements based on the direct reported experiences and attitudes of people on the Forum. I think (though not confidently) that most people are overstating the importance of the Guardian article in what happened here. I think most of the people who are now objecting to (say) Richard Hanania at Manifest would have objected just as much if they’d heard about it sooner, and only didn’t because they didn’t notice (or didn’t think there was a good opportunity to be heard about it).
The trouble is that an uproar is often also what you get when you fucked up badly. Uproars really do contain information, and you ignore that information at your peril.
Big doubt from me that uproars are particularly sensitive to whether you in particular have displayed receptiveness to uproars in the past. It seems especially implausible when you note that the original post had a call to action at least as much for the EA community (“It is probably wise to have a stronger separation between EA and rationalism”) as for Manifest, so how much notice Manifest takes is arguably only peripherally important to the goals of the post.
Checking if we actually disagree: Do you believe it is usually correct to excommunicate an innocent person if they become sufficiently unpopular?
Do you believe there are situations where people become unpopular online for fairly capricious reasons? Perhaps this situation?
Do you believe this has happened with EA in the past? Do we deserve all the backlash we got derived from SBF, the OpenAI Board, and Émile Torres?
I’m not sure what “uproars contain information” is supposed to mean. It seems almost tautologically true that uproars related to Dylan Mulvaney, SBF, the OpenAI Board, and Émile Torres “contain information”. There is information stored on servers related to those uproars. The Dylan Mulvaney uproar “informs” me that lots of Budweiser customers dislike trans influencers. So?
It’s hard to create a good set of rules. You won’t do it perfectly. And yes, uproars might correlate with weaknesses in your rules. The point is to try to avoid mob rule, and create a situation where stakeholders can feel confident that decisions are being made in a considered way.
Suppose Manifest was to publish a set of rules they’re going to follow and ask for community feedback, and the community says the rules look good. Then 6 months later the Guardian or Fox News writes a hit piece on Manifest, and their hit piece accuses a Manifest attendee of something within the agreed-upon rules, and some people in the community are up in arms. Doesn’t that seem a little suspicious? Perhaps in this hypothetical, the uproar is more of a preference cascade than a considered judgement?
I’m not claiming this is true for this particular uproar, but I think it helps explain e.g. why university administrators received so much flak for their handling of Israel/Palestine protests, and why certain controversial figures such as Dave Chappelle and Jordan Peterson eventually acquire resilience.
I happen to think Richard Hanania crossed a line with this tweet. I think Manifest should refrain from inviting him to future events, but not because he’s unpopular or because he would bring reputation risks or because he’s good or bad at forecasting. I think he violated an important social norm, of the sort that can be operationalized in writing and upheld in the future. And btw, I predict that if Hanania is excluded on these grounds, as opposed to “he has the wrong vibes” or “he’s unpopular” grounds, the risk of a right-wing backlash against Manifest will be decreased. And if their goal is bipartisanship, I think their fear of backlash should be symmetric.
I recommend taking comments like these and making them two separate comments.
I really wanted to upvote one section and downvote another, and now I’m just not voting at all.
Generally speaking, it’s good to break your long comments into shorter ones where each makes a particular point.
I very much believe “uproars contain information” and don’t believe “uproars are always directionally correct”. I’m not sure where I’d stand on “uproars are usually directionally correct”, but in any case they are often enough directionally wrong that I don’t think you’re obligated to accept their conclusions just because they happened.
I guess I just don’t believe that people are capable of assembling decision-making committees that are so robust to making misjudgements that people trying to attack your decisions from outside can be safely assumed to be in error and ignored. Whatever you think you’ve done to come up with good rules and a good process, sometimes you’ll have missed something big or not appreciated the importance of some angle, and people being upset with you will be how you find that out. If you want the best shot you can get at achieving your own goals, you notice all that stuff, and you take it into consideration, and you ask questions like “am I making a mistake here?” and “is it possible I have a blind spot that’s clouding my judgement on this?”. Importantly, also, you’ll ask “even if I think all these people are being unreasonable in many ways, are there nevertheless kernels of truth to take away here? Is there something to learn from how this unfolded?”. Sometimes even then the answer will be no! As long as you made a genuine best effort to look for the truth in what people said, that’s enough for me.
My take is that for every outrage that’s basically a restatement of the culture war (and thereby ~useless), there’s another that’s basically someone overlooking something that is obviously correct in retrospect, that they wish they’d thought of six months ago, but somehow slipped through. And there’s, of course, a spectrum in between. This stuff is hard, and I believe in the collaborative process of developing our knowledge and experience around it.
I think if someone believed either that committees and structures are much more effective than I think they are, or that outrages are much less often right than I think they are, then that would be a good reason to disagree with this take. Though I would caution against an availability bias that makes incorrect outrages more noticeable than correct ones, both because you are likely to have a stronger reaction to the incorrect ones and because the correct ones are more quickly resolved.
FWIW I have not actually read the Guardian article and made all my judgements based on the direct reported experiences and attitudes of people on the Forum. I think (though not confidently) that most people are overstating the importance of the Guardian article in what happened here. I think most of the people who are now objecting to (say) Richard Hanania at Manifest would have objected just as much if they’d heard about it sooner, and only didn’t because they didn’t notice (or didn’t think there was a good opportunity to be heard about it).