A meta- norm I’d like commentators[1] to have is to Be Kind, When Possible.Some subpoints that might be helpful for enacting what I believe to be the relevant norms:
Try to understand/genuinely grapple with the awareness that you are talking to/about actual humans on the other side, not convenient abstractions/ideological punching bags.
For example, most saliently to me, the Manifest organizers aren’t an amorphous blob of bureaucratic institutions.
They are ~3 specific people, all of whom are fairly young, new to organizing large events, and under a lot of stress as it is.
Rachel in particular played a (the?) central role in organizing, despite being 7(?) months pregnant. Organizing a new, major multiday event under such conditions is stressful enough as it is, and I’m sure the Manifest team in general, and Rachel in particular, was hoping they can relax a bit at the end.
It seems bad enough that a hit piece in the Guardian is written about them, but it’s worse when “their” community wants to pile on, etc.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t criticize people. Criticism can be extremely valuable! But there are constructive, human, ways to criticize, and then there are...other ways.
Try to make your critiques as minimally personal as possible. Engage with arguments, don’t attack individual people if at all possible.
For example, I really appreciate Isa’s comments. Judging by upvotes and karma, many other people did as well.
It’s reasonable if you disagree with her comments. But you can engage with them on the merits, rather than making comments personal, as some of the replies seem to.
Some of the replies implied that Isa said things they did not say. Some of the other replies implied that Isa’s critiques are borne out of projection or unnecessarily taking things personally
On the object-level, I read her comments and I think that reading is just wrong. On the meta-level, even if that reading is correct, this is the type of thing that you should handle delicately, not harshly try to package it in an attack to make it harder to argue against you.
People you argue with likely have different beliefs, values, and preferences from you. They are also likely to have different beliefs, values, or preferences than what a caricature of them will have, especially caricatures of the tier that you see in political cartoons, or on Twitter.
If you find yourself arguing with implausibly stereotyped caricatures, rather than real people, you should a) consider trying to flesh out enough details about the people you’re arguing with to be at all plausible and/or b) take a step back and rethink your life choices.
I know this is difficult for some people, but you should at least try.
Try not to be ideologically captured, or at least notice when you are and don’t take yourself too seriously.
One of my greater failures as a internet commentator/dispassionate observer is during the whole SSC/NYT thing, where I failed to notice myself becoming increasingly tribal/using arguments as soldiers, etc.
The level of outrage was made worse by just how petty the underlying disputes were.
I do not think I thought or acted honorably according to my own values, and I’d prefer to minimize such tribalism going forwards
If you notice yourself in the grips of white-hot, rage, consider logging off and then do something take a shower, watch Netflix, go back to work, touch grass, crochet, or something else that’s not as corrosive to either your own soul or that of the community.
One dynamic I haven’t seen other people mention so far is the prevalence of what my friend calls “Rationality Justice Warriors,” people who (at least online) seem to champion a fairly uncompromising and aggressive stance on defending and evoking the norms and cultures of the rationality community whenever it appears to be under attack.
This comes across as fairly childish and frankly irrational to me, and I suspect most people acting under such attitudes will not reflectively endorse them.
Model the effects of your sentences on other people.
I’m worried that many comments will predictably push away valuable contributors to the community, or be very costly in other ways (eg wasted time/emotions).
If you expect your sentences to predictably cause more heat than light, consider rephrasing what you said. Or perhaps, again, consider logging off.
This is not to say you can’t ever offer harsh criticism, or you need to always be nice. Being kind is not the same as being nice, and sometimes even true kindness have to be sacrificed for higher goals.
But you should be careful about what trades you make, and maybe don’t sell out your kindness for too cheap a price (like the short-lived approval of your not-very-kind peers, or the brief euphoria of righteous rage)
It might be the case that what “needs to be said” can’t be said nicely, or rephrasing things in a diplomatic way takes more skill with the language than you have, or more time than you can afford. Under those circumstances, it is usually (not always) better to leave such criticisms than to leave them unsaid.
But you ought to be consciously making those tradeoffs, not falling into them blindly.
Effects include epistemic effects. If you say technically true things that makes people dumber, or worse, obviously wrong and/or illogical arguments in pursuit of a “higher” purpose, you are at least a little bit responsible for poisoning the discourse, and you should again ask yourself whether it’s worth it.
Thanks Linch. I appreciate the chance to step back here. So I want to apologize to @Austin and @Rachel Weinberg and @Saul Munn if I stressed them out with my comments. (Tagging means they’ll see it, right?)
I want to be very clear that while I disagree with some of the choices made, I have absolutely no ill will towards them or any other Manifest organizer, I very much want Manifold and Manifest to succeed, and I very much respect their rights to have their conference the way they want. If I see any of them I will be very warm and friendly and there’s really no need from me to talk about this further if they don’t want to. I hope we can be friends and engage productively in other areas—even if I don’t attend Manifest or trade on Manifold, I’d be happy to interact with them in other ways that don’t involve Hanania.
While I dislike Hanania’s ideas greatly, and I still think inviting Hanania was a mistake, and I still will not attend events or participate in places where Hanania is given a platform… I don’t want to practice guilt by association for those who do not hold Hanania’s detestable ideas. Just because someone interacted with him does not make them also bad people. I apologize for not being clear about this from the beginning and I regret that I may have lead people to think otherwise.
There’s a lot of good stuff here, but I think there’s another side to “[c]onsider the virtue of silence.” There is the belief/norm, quite common in the broader world, that qui tacet consentire videtur (often translated to “silence means consent” but apparently more literally to ~ “he who is silent is taken to agree”). Whether or not one thinks that should be a norm, it is a matter of social reality at this point in time.
I wish we had a magic button we could press that would contain any effects from the Manifest organizers’ decisions to Manifest itself, preventing any reputational or other adverse effects from falling on anyone else. To me, it is the need to mitigate those third-party adverse effects that makes silence problematic here. After all, all of us have much better things to do with our lives than gripe about other people’s choices that don’t impose adverse effects onto other people (or other moral patients).
Fwiw I think that posts and comments on the EA Forum do a lot to create an association. If there wasn’t any coverage of Hanania attending Manifest on the forum, I think something like 10x+ fewer EAs would know about the Hanania stuff, and it would be less likely to be picked up by journalists (a bit less relevant as it was already covered by the Guardian). It seems like there’s a nearby world where less than 1% of weekly active forum users know that an EAish organisation at a commercial venue run by EAish people invited Hanania to attend an event—which I personally don’t think creates much association between EA and Hanania (unlike the current coverage).
Of course, some people here might think that EA should be grappling with racism outside of this incident, in which case opportunities like this are helpful for creating discourse. But insofar as people think that Manifest’s actions were ok-ish, it’s mostly sad that they are associated with EA and make EA look bad, meaning they personally don’t want to attend Manifest; I think debating the topic on the forum is pretty counterproductive. My impression is that the majority of people in the comments are in the latter camp.
If you think that it’s important that Manifest knows why you personally aren’t attending, emailing them seems like a very reasonable action to me (but of course, this doesn’t achieve the goal of letting people who don’t organise the event know why you aren’t attending).
My recollection is that the recent major scandals/controversies were kickstarted by outsiders as well: FTX, Bostrom, Time and other news articles, etc. I don’t think any of those needed help from the Forum for the relevant associations to form. The impetus for the Nonlinear situation was of inside origin, but (1) I don’t think many on the outside cared about it, and (2) the motivation to post seemed to be protecting community members from perceived harm, not reputational injury.
In any event, this option potentially works only for someone’s initial decision to post at all. Once something is posted, simply ignoring it looks like tacit consent to what Manifest did. Theoretically, everyone could simply respond with: “This isn’t an EA event, and scientific racism is not an EA cause area” and move on. The odds of that happening are . . . ~0. Once people (including any of the organizers) start defending the decision to invite on the Forum, or people start defending scientific racism itself, it is way too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Criticism is the only viable way to mitigate reputational damage at that point.
But insofar as people think that Manifest’s actions were ok-ish, it’s mostly sad that they are associated with EA and make EA look bad, [ . . . .]
To clarify my own position, one can think Manifest’s actions were very much not okay and yet be responding with criticism only because of the negative effects on EA. Also, I would assert that the bad effects here are not limited to “mak[ing] EA look bad.”
There’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on in the world, and each of us have only a tiny amount of attention and bandwidth in relation to the scope of bad stuff in the world. If there’s no relationship to one of my communities, I don’t have a principled reason for caring more about what happens at Manifest than I do about what happens in the (random example) Oregon Pokemon Go community. I wouldn’t approve if they invited some of these speakers to their Pokemon Go event to speak, but I also wouldn’t devote the energy to criticizing.
some people here might think that EA should be grappling with racism outside of this incident, in which case opportunities like this are helpful for creating discourse
I think sort of the opposite. Even though I commented elsewhere that I think there’s a strong racist/eugenicist element in EA, I think Manifest has little to do with EA and could probably be ignored here if it weren’t for the guardian article.
But the problem is that once it came to be discussed here, the discussion itself proved much more damning to EA than that not-really-EA event was in the first place. This isn’t the first time that has happened. I guess it’s better to know than not to know, but it’s really weird to need this outside trigger for it.
Good points! It seems good to take a break or at least move to the meta level.
I think one emotion that is probably quite common in discussions about what norms should be (at least in my own experience) is clinging. Quoting from Joe Carlsmith’s post on it:
Clinging, as I think about it, is a certain mental flavor or cluster of related flavors. It feels contracted, tight, clenched, and narrow. It has a kind of hardness, a “not OK-ness,” and a (sometimes subtle) kind of desperation. It sees scarcity. It grabs. It sees threat. It pushes away. It carries seeds of resentments and complaints. [...]
Often, in my experience, clinging seems to hijack attention and agency. It makes it harder to think, weigh considerations, and respond. You are more likely to flail, or stumble around, or to “find yourself” doing something rather than choosing to do it. And you’re more likely, as well, to become pre-occupied by certain decisions — especially if both options involve things you’re clinging in relation to — or events. Indeed, clinging sometimes seems like it treats certain outcomes as “infinitely bad,” or at least bad enough that avoiding them is something like a hard constraint. This can cause consequent problems with reasoning about what costs to pay to avoid what risks.
Clinging is also, centrally, unpleasant. But it’s a particular type of unpleasant, which feels more like it grabs and restricts and distorts who you are than e.g. a headache.
In the midst of feeling like a lot is at stake and one’s values are being threatened, we may often try to push the social pendulum in our desired direction as hard as possible. However, that will have an aggravating and polarizing effect on the debate because the other side will see your attitude and think, “this person is not making any concessions whatsoever, and it seems like even though the social pendulum is already favorable to them, they’ll keep pushing against us!”
So, to de-escalate these dynamics, it seems valuable to acknowledge the values that are at stake for both sides, even just to flag that you’re not in favor of pushing the pendulum as far as possible.
For instance, maybe this would already feel more relaxed if the side that is concerned about losing what’s valuable regarding “truth-seeking” can acknowledge that there is a bar also for them, that, if they thought they were dealing with people full of hate or people who advocate for views that predictably cause harm to others (while being aware of this but advocating for those views because of a lack of concern for the affected others), the “truth-seeking” proponents will indeed step in and not tolerate it. Likewise, the other side could maybe acknowledge that it’s bad when people get shunned just based on superficial associations/vibes (to give an example of something that I think is superficial: saying “sounds like they’re into eugenics” as though this should end the discussion, without pointing out any way in which what the person is discussing is hateful, lacks compassion, or is otherwise likely to cause harm). This is bad not just for well-intentioned individuals who might get unfairly ostracized, but also bad for discourse in general because people won’t speak their minds any longer.
I disagree with much of this, but I edited my very-downvoted comment to make clear that it wasn’t about the Manifest team, whom I know basically nothing about.
A meta- norm I’d like commentators[1] to have is to Be Kind, When Possible. Some subpoints that might be helpful for enacting what I believe to be the relevant norms:
Try to understand/genuinely grapple with the awareness that you are talking to/about actual humans on the other side, not convenient abstractions/ideological punching bags.
For example, most saliently to me, the Manifest organizers aren’t an amorphous blob of bureaucratic institutions.
They are ~3 specific people, all of whom are fairly young, new to organizing large events, and under a lot of stress as it is.
Rachel in particular played a (the?) central role in organizing, despite being 7(?) months pregnant. Organizing a new, major multiday event under such conditions is stressful enough as it is, and I’m sure the Manifest team in general, and Rachel in particular, was hoping they can relax a bit at the end.
It seems bad enough that a hit piece in the Guardian is written about them, but it’s worse when “their” community wants to pile on, etc.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t criticize people. Criticism can be extremely valuable! But there are constructive, human, ways to criticize, and then there are...other ways.
Try to make your critiques as minimally personal as possible. Engage with arguments, don’t attack individual people if at all possible.
For example, I really appreciate Isa’s comments. Judging by upvotes and karma, many other people did as well.
It’s reasonable if you disagree with her comments. But you can engage with them on the merits, rather than making comments personal, as some of the replies seem to.
Some of the replies implied that Isa said things they did not say. Some of the other replies implied that Isa’s critiques are borne out of projection or unnecessarily taking things personally
On the object-level, I read her comments and I think that reading is just wrong. On the meta-level, even if that reading is correct, this is the type of thing that you should handle delicately, not harshly try to package it in an attack to make it harder to argue against you.
Relatedly, try to have decent theory of mind.
People you argue with likely have different beliefs, values, and preferences from you. They are also likely to have different beliefs, values, or preferences than what a caricature of them will have, especially caricatures of the tier that you see in political cartoons, or on Twitter.
If you find yourself arguing with implausibly stereotyped caricatures, rather than real people, you should a) consider trying to flesh out enough details about the people you’re arguing with to be at all plausible and/or b) take a step back and rethink your life choices.
I know this is difficult for some people, but you should at least try.
Try not to be ideologically captured, or at least notice when you are and don’t take yourself too seriously.
One of my greater failures as a internet commentator/dispassionate observer is during the whole SSC/NYT thing, where I failed to notice myself becoming increasingly tribal/using arguments as soldiers, etc.
The level of outrage was made worse by just how petty the underlying disputes were.
I do not think I thought or acted honorably according to my own values, and I’d prefer to minimize such tribalism going forwards
If you notice yourself in the grips of white-hot, rage, consider logging off and then do something take a shower, watch Netflix, go back to work, touch grass, crochet, or something else that’s not as corrosive to either your own soul or that of the community.
One dynamic I haven’t seen other people mention so far is the prevalence of what my friend calls “Rationality Justice Warriors,” people who (at least online) seem to champion a fairly uncompromising and aggressive stance on defending and evoking the norms and cultures of the rationality community whenever it appears to be under attack.
This comes across as fairly childish and frankly irrational to me, and I suspect most people acting under such attitudes will not reflectively endorse them.
Of course their opponents hardly do better.
Model the effects of your sentences on other people.
I’m worried that many comments will predictably push away valuable contributors to the community, or be very costly in other ways (eg wasted time/emotions).
If you expect your sentences to predictably cause more heat than light, consider rephrasing what you said. Or perhaps, again, consider logging off.
This is not to say you can’t ever offer harsh criticism, or you need to always be nice. Being kind is not the same as being nice, and sometimes even true kindness have to be sacrificed for higher goals.
But you should be careful about what trades you make, and maybe don’t sell out your kindness for too cheap a price (like the short-lived approval of your not-very-kind peers, or the brief euphoria of righteous rage)
It might be the case that what “needs to be said” can’t be said nicely, or rephrasing things in a diplomatic way takes more skill with the language than you have, or more time than you can afford. Under those circumstances, it is usually (not always) better to leave such criticisms than to leave them unsaid.
But you ought to be consciously making those tradeoffs, not falling into them blindly.
Effects include epistemic effects. If you say technically true things that makes people dumber, or worse, obviously wrong and/or illogical arguments in pursuit of a “higher” purpose, you are at least a little bit responsible for poisoning the discourse, and you should again ask yourself whether it’s worth it.
Consider the virtue of silence[2]
We are all busy people, and some of us have very high opportunity costs.
There are times to speak up, and times to stay silent, and let us all pray for the wisdom to know the difference.
I’m far from flawless on these grounds, myself. But I try my best. Or at least, I mostly try to try.
This is a virtue I’m personally exceedingly bad at practicing.
Thanks Linch. I appreciate the chance to step back here. So I want to apologize to @Austin and @Rachel Weinberg and @Saul Munn if I stressed them out with my comments. (Tagging means they’ll see it, right?)
I want to be very clear that while I disagree with some of the choices made, I have absolutely no ill will towards them or any other Manifest organizer, I very much want Manifold and Manifest to succeed, and I very much respect their rights to have their conference the way they want. If I see any of them I will be very warm and friendly and there’s really no need from me to talk about this further if they don’t want to. I hope we can be friends and engage productively in other areas—even if I don’t attend Manifest or trade on Manifold, I’d be happy to interact with them in other ways that don’t involve Hanania.
While I dislike Hanania’s ideas greatly, and I still think inviting Hanania was a mistake, and I still will not attend events or participate in places where Hanania is given a platform… I don’t want to practice guilt by association for those who do not hold Hanania’s detestable ideas. Just because someone interacted with him does not make them also bad people. I apologize for not being clear about this from the beginning and I regret that I may have lead people to think otherwise.
There’s a lot of good stuff here, but I think there’s another side to “[c]onsider the virtue of silence.” There is the belief/norm, quite common in the broader world, that qui tacet consentire videtur (often translated to “silence means consent” but apparently more literally to ~ “he who is silent is taken to agree”). Whether or not one thinks that should be a norm, it is a matter of social reality at this point in time.
I wish we had a magic button we could press that would contain any effects from the Manifest organizers’ decisions to Manifest itself, preventing any reputational or other adverse effects from falling on anyone else. To me, it is the need to mitigate those third-party adverse effects that makes silence problematic here. After all, all of us have much better things to do with our lives than gripe about other people’s choices that don’t impose adverse effects onto other people (or other moral patients).
Fwiw I think that posts and comments on the EA Forum do a lot to create an association. If there wasn’t any coverage of Hanania attending Manifest on the forum, I think something like 10x+ fewer EAs would know about the Hanania stuff, and it would be less likely to be picked up by journalists (a bit less relevant as it was already covered by the Guardian). It seems like there’s a nearby world where less than 1% of weekly active forum users know that an EAish organisation at a commercial venue run by EAish people invited Hanania to attend an event—which I personally don’t think creates much association between EA and Hanania (unlike the current coverage).
Of course, some people here might think that EA should be grappling with racism outside of this incident, in which case opportunities like this are helpful for creating discourse. But insofar as people think that Manifest’s actions were ok-ish, it’s mostly sad that they are associated with EA and make EA look bad, meaning they personally don’t want to attend Manifest; I think debating the topic on the forum is pretty counterproductive. My impression is that the majority of people in the comments are in the latter camp.
If you think that it’s important that Manifest knows why you personally aren’t attending, emailing them seems like a very reasonable action to me (but of course, this doesn’t achieve the goal of letting people who don’t organise the event know why you aren’t attending).
My recollection is that the recent major scandals/controversies were kickstarted by outsiders as well: FTX, Bostrom, Time and other news articles, etc. I don’t think any of those needed help from the Forum for the relevant associations to form. The impetus for the Nonlinear situation was of inside origin, but (1) I don’t think many on the outside cared about it, and (2) the motivation to post seemed to be protecting community members from perceived harm, not reputational injury.
In any event, this option potentially works only for someone’s initial decision to post at all. Once something is posted, simply ignoring it looks like tacit consent to what Manifest did. Theoretically, everyone could simply respond with: “This isn’t an EA event, and scientific racism is not an EA cause area” and move on. The odds of that happening are . . . ~0. Once people (including any of the organizers) start defending the decision to invite on the Forum, or people start defending scientific racism itself, it is way too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Criticism is the only viable way to mitigate reputational damage at that point.
To clarify my own position, one can think Manifest’s actions were very much not okay and yet be responding with criticism only because of the negative effects on EA. Also, I would assert that the bad effects here are not limited to “mak[ing] EA look bad.”
There’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on in the world, and each of us have only a tiny amount of attention and bandwidth in relation to the scope of bad stuff in the world. If there’s no relationship to one of my communities, I don’t have a principled reason for caring more about what happens at Manifest than I do about what happens in the (random example) Oregon Pokemon Go community. I wouldn’t approve if they invited some of these speakers to their Pokemon Go event to speak, but I also wouldn’t devote the energy to criticizing.
I think sort of the opposite. Even though I commented elsewhere that I think there’s a strong racist/eugenicist element in EA, I think Manifest has little to do with EA and could probably be ignored here if it weren’t for the guardian article.
But the problem is that once it came to be discussed here, the discussion itself proved much more damning to EA than that not-really-EA event was in the first place. This isn’t the first time that has happened. I guess it’s better to know than not to know, but it’s really weird to need this outside trigger for it.
Good points! It seems good to take a break or at least move to the meta level.
I think one emotion that is probably quite common in discussions about what norms should be (at least in my own experience) is clinging. Quoting from Joe Carlsmith’s post on it:
In the midst of feeling like a lot is at stake and one’s values are being threatened, we may often try to push the social pendulum in our desired direction as hard as possible. However, that will have an aggravating and polarizing effect on the debate because the other side will see your attitude and think, “this person is not making any concessions whatsoever, and it seems like even though the social pendulum is already favorable to them, they’ll keep pushing against us!”
So, to de-escalate these dynamics, it seems valuable to acknowledge the values that are at stake for both sides, even just to flag that you’re not in favor of pushing the pendulum as far as possible.
For instance, maybe this would already feel more relaxed if the side that is concerned about losing what’s valuable regarding “truth-seeking” can acknowledge that there is a bar also for them, that, if they thought they were dealing with people full of hate or people who advocate for views that predictably cause harm to others (while being aware of this but advocating for those views because of a lack of concern for the affected others), the “truth-seeking” proponents will indeed step in and not tolerate it. Likewise, the other side could maybe acknowledge that it’s bad when people get shunned just based on superficial associations/vibes (to give an example of something that I think is superficial: saying “sounds like they’re into eugenics” as though this should end the discussion, without pointing out any way in which what the person is discussing is hateful, lacks compassion, or is otherwise likely to cause harm). This is bad not just for well-intentioned individuals who might get unfairly ostracized, but also bad for discourse in general because people won’t speak their minds any longer.
I disagree with much of this, but I edited my very-downvoted comment to make clear that it wasn’t about the Manifest team, whom I know basically nothing about.
(I didn’t think your comment was primarily referring to them fwiw)