If anyone who disagrees with me on the manifest stuff who considers themselves inside the EA movement, I’d like to have some discussions with a focus on consensus-building. ie we chat in DMs and the both report some statements we agreed on and some we specifically disagreed on.
The EA forum should not seek to have opinions on non-EA events. I don’t mean individual EAs shouldn’t have opinions, I mean that as a group we shouldn’t seek to judge individual event. I don’t think we’re very good at it.
I don’t like Hanania’s behaviour either and am a little wary of systems where norm breaking behaviour gives extra power, such as being endlessly edgy. But I will take those complaints to the manifold community internally.
EAGs are welcome to invite or disinvite whoever CEA likes. Maybe one day I’ll complain. But do I want EAGs to invite a load of manifest’s edgiest speakers? Not particularly.
It is fine for there to be spaces with discussion that I find ugly. If people want to go to these events, that’s up to them.
I dislike having unresolved conflicts which ossify into an inability to talk about things. Someone once told me that the couples who stay together are either great at settling disputes or almost never fight. We fight a bit and we aren’t great at settling it. I guess I’d like us to fight less (say we aren’t interested in conflicty posts) or to get better at making up (come to consensus afterwards, grow and change)
Only 1-6% of attendees at manifest had issues along eugenicsy lines in the feedback forms. I don’t think this is worth a huge change.
I would imagine it’s worth $10mns to avoid EA becoming a space full of people who fearmonger based on the races, genders or sexualities of others. I don’t think that’s very likely.
To me, current systems for taxing discussion of eugenics seem fine. There is the odd post that gets downvoted. If it were good and convincing it would be upvoted. so far it hasn’t been. seems fine. I am not scared of bad arguments [1]
Black people are probably not avoiding Manifest because of these speakers because that theory doesn’t seem to hold up for tech, rationalism[2], EA or several other communities.
I don’t know what people want when they point at “distancing EA from rationalism”
Manifest was fun for me, and it and several other events I went to in the bay felt like I let out a breath that I never knew I was holding. I am pretty careful what I say about you all sometimes and it’s tiring. I guess that’s true for some of you too. It was nice (and surprisingly un-edgy for me) to be in a space where I didn’t have to worry about offending people a lot. I enjoy having spaces where I feel safer.
There is a tradeoff between feeling safe and expression. I would have more time for some proposals if people acknowledged the costs they are putting on others. Even small costs, even costs I would willingly pay are still costs and to have that be unmentionable feels gaslighty.
There are some incentives in this community to be upset about things and to be blunt in response. Both of these things seem bad. I’d prefer incentives towards working together to figure out how the world is and impliment the most effective morally agreeable changes per unit resource. This requires some truthseeking, but probably not the maximal amount. and some kindness, but probably not the maximal amount.
LessWrong doesn’t have any significant discussion of eugenics either. As I (weakly) understand it they kicked many posters off who wanted to talk about such things.
Nathan, could you summarize/clarify for us readers what your views are? (or link to whatever comment or document has those views?) I suspect that I agree with you on a majority of aspects and disagree on a minority, but I’m not clear on what your views are.
I’d be interested to see some sort of informal and exploratory ‘working group’ on inclusion-type stuff within EA, and have a small group conversation once a month or so, but I’m not sure if there are many (any?) people other than me that would be interested in having discussions and trying to figure out some actions/solutions/improvements.[1]
^ We had something like this for talent pipelines and hiring (it was High Impact Talent Ecosystem, and it was somehow connected to or organized by SuccessIf, but I’m not clear and exactly what the relationship was), but after a few months the organizer stopped and I’m not clear on why. In fact, I’m vaguely considering picking up the baton and starting some kind of a monthly discussion group about talent pipelines, coaching/developing talent, etc.
One limitation here: you have a view about Manifest. Your interlocutor would have a different view. But how do we know if those views are actually representative of major groupings?
My hunch is that, if equipped with a mind probe, we would find at least two major axes with several meaningfully different viewpoints on each axis. Overall, I’d predict that I would find at least four sizable clusters, probably five to seven.
Beyond that, yes you are likely right, but I don’t know how to have that discussion better. I tried using polls and upvoted quotes as a springboard in this post (Truth-seeking vs Influence-seeking—a narrower discussion) but people didn’t really bite there.
Suggestions welcome.
It is kind of exhausting to keep trying to find ways to get better samples of the discourse, without a sense that people will eventually go “oh yeah this convinces me”. If I were more confident I would have more energy for it.
I don’t think those were most of the questions I was looking for, though. This isn’t a criticism: running the poll early risks missing important cruxes and fault lines that haven’t been found yet; running it late means that much of the discussion has already happened.
There are also tradeoffs with viewpoints.xyz being accessible (=better sampling) and the data being rich enough. Limitation to short answer stems with a binary response (plus an ambiguous “skip”) lends itself to identifying two major “camps” more easily that clusters within those camps. In general, expanding to five-point Likert scales would help, as would some sort of branching.
For example, I’d want to know—conditional on “Manifest did wrong here” / “the platforming was inappropriate”—what factors were more or less important to the respondent’s judgment. On a 1-5 scale, how important do you find [your view that the organizers did not distance themselves from the problematic viewpoints / the fit between the problematic viewpoints and a conference for the forecasting community / an absence of evidence that special guests with far-left or at least mainstream viewpoints on the topic were solicited / whatever]. And: how much would the following facts or considerations, if true, change your response to a hypothetical situation like the Manifest conference? Again, you can’t get how much on a binary response.
Maybe all that points out to polling being more of a post-dialogue event, and accepting that we would choose discussants based on past history & early reactions. For example, I would have moderately high confidence that user X would represent a stance close to a particular pole on most issues, while I would represent a stance that codes as “~ moderately progressive by EA Forum standards.”
I don’t think those were most of the questions I was looking for, though. This isn’t a criticism: running the poll early risks missing important cruxes and fault lines that haven’t been found yet; running it late means that much of the discussion has already happened.
Often it feels like I can never please people on this forum. I think the poll is significantly better than no poll.
I think the poll is significantly better than no poll.
Yeah, I agree with that! I don’t find it inconsistent with the idea that the reasonable trade-offs you made between various characteristics in the data-collection process make the data you got not a good match for the purposes I would like data for. They aregood data for people interested in the answer to certain other questions. No one can build a (practical) poll for all possible use cases, just as no one can build a (reasonably priced) car that is both very energy-efficient and has major towing/hauling chops.
As useful as viewpoints.xyz is, I will mention that for maybe 50% or 60% of the questions, my reaction was “it depends.” I suppose you can’t really get around that unless the person creating the questions spends much more time to carefully craft them (which sort of defeats the purpose of a quick-and-dirty poll), or unless you do interviews (which are of course much more costly). I do think there is value in the quick-and-dirty MVP version, but it’s usefullness has a pretty noticable upper bound.
If anyone who disagrees with me on the manifest stuff who considers themselves inside the EA movement, I’d like to have some discussions with a focus on consensus-building. ie we chat in DMs and the both report some statements we agreed on and some we specifically disagreed on.
Edited:
@Joseph Lemien asked for positions I hold:
The EA forum should not seek to have opinions on non-EA events. I don’t mean individual EAs shouldn’t have opinions, I mean that as a group we shouldn’t seek to judge individual event. I don’t think we’re very good at it.
I don’t like Hanania’s behaviour either and am a little wary of systems where norm breaking behaviour gives extra power, such as being endlessly edgy. But I will take those complaints to the manifold community internally.
EAGs are welcome to invite or disinvite whoever CEA likes. Maybe one day I’ll complain. But do I want EAGs to invite a load of manifest’s edgiest speakers? Not particularly.
It is fine for there to be spaces with discussion that I find ugly. If people want to go to these events, that’s up to them.
I dislike having unresolved conflicts which ossify into an inability to talk about things. Someone once told me that the couples who stay together are either great at settling disputes or almost never fight. We fight a bit and we aren’t great at settling it. I guess I’d like us to fight less (say we aren’t interested in conflicty posts) or to get better at making up (come to consensus afterwards, grow and change)
Only 1-6% of attendees at manifest had issues along eugenicsy lines in the feedback forms. I don’t think this is worth a huge change.
I would imagine it’s worth $10mns to avoid EA becoming a space full of people who fearmonger based on the races, genders or sexualities of others. I don’t think that’s very likely.
To me, current systems for taxing discussion of eugenics seem fine. There is the odd post that gets downvoted. If it were good and convincing it would be upvoted. so far it hasn’t been. seems fine. I am not scared of bad arguments [1]
Black people are probably not avoiding Manifest because of these speakers because that theory doesn’t seem to hold up for tech, rationalism[2], EA or several other communities.
I don’t know what people want when they point at “distancing EA from rationalism”
Manifest was fun for me, and it and several other events I went to in the bay felt like I let out a breath that I never knew I was holding. I am pretty careful what I say about you all sometimes and it’s tiring. I guess that’s true for some of you too. It was nice (and surprisingly un-edgy for me) to be in a space where I didn’t have to worry about offending people a lot. I enjoy having spaces where I feel safer.
There is a tradeoff between feeling safe and expression. I would have more time for some proposals if people acknowledged the costs they are putting on others. Even small costs, even costs I would willingly pay are still costs and to have that be unmentionable feels gaslighty.
There are some incentives in this community to be upset about things and to be blunt in response. Both of these things seem bad. I’d prefer incentives towards working together to figure out how the world is and impliment the most effective morally agreeable changes per unit resource. This requires some truthseeking, but probably not the maximal amount. and some kindness, but probably not the maximal amount.
Unless there was some kind of flooding of the forum to boost posts repeatedly.
LessWrong doesn’t have any significant discussion of eugenics either. As I (weakly) understand it they kicked many posters off who wanted to talk about such things.
Nathan, could you summarize/clarify for us readers what your views are? (or link to whatever comment or document has those views?) I suspect that I agree with you on a majority of aspects and disagree on a minority, but I’m not clear on what your views are.
I’d be interested to see some sort of informal and exploratory ‘working group’ on inclusion-type stuff within EA, and have a small group conversation once a month or so, but I’m not sure if there are many (any?) people other than me that would be interested in having discussions and trying to figure out some actions/solutions/improvements.[1]
^ We had something like this for talent pipelines and hiring (it was High Impact Talent Ecosystem, and it was somehow connected to or organized by SuccessIf, but I’m not clear and exactly what the relationship was), but after a few months the organizer stopped and I’m not clear on why. In fact, I’m vaguely considering picking up the baton and starting some kind of a monthly discussion group about talent pipelines, coaching/developing talent, etc.
Oooh that’s interesting. I’d be interested to hear what the conclusions are.
One limitation here: you have a view about Manifest. Your interlocutor would have a different view. But how do we know if those views are actually representative of major groupings?
My hunch is that, if equipped with a mind probe, we would find at least two major axes with several meaningfully different viewpoints on each axis. Overall, I’d predict that I would find at least four sizable clusters, probably five to seven.
So I ran a poll with 100 ish respondents and if you want to run the k-means analysis you can find those clusters yourself.
The anonymous data is downloadable here.
https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/ea-and-manifest/results
Beyond that, yes you are likely right, but I don’t know how to have that discussion better. I tried using polls and upvoted quotes as a springboard in this post (Truth-seeking vs Influence-seeking—a narrower discussion) but people didn’t really bite there.
Suggestions welcome.
It is kind of exhausting to keep trying to find ways to get better samples of the discourse, without a sense that people will eventually go “oh yeah this convinces me”. If I were more confident I would have more energy for it.
I don’t think those were most of the questions I was looking for, though. This isn’t a criticism: running the poll early risks missing important cruxes and fault lines that haven’t been found yet; running it late means that much of the discussion has already happened.
There are also tradeoffs with viewpoints.xyz being accessible (=better sampling) and the data being rich enough. Limitation to short answer stems with a binary response (plus an ambiguous “skip”) lends itself to identifying two major “camps” more easily that clusters within those camps. In general, expanding to five-point Likert scales would help, as would some sort of branching.
For example, I’d want to know—conditional on “Manifest did wrong here” / “the platforming was inappropriate”—what factors were more or less important to the respondent’s judgment. On a 1-5 scale, how important do you find [your view that the organizers did not distance themselves from the problematic viewpoints / the fit between the problematic viewpoints and a conference for the forecasting community / an absence of evidence that special guests with far-left or at least mainstream viewpoints on the topic were solicited / whatever]. And: how much would the following facts or considerations, if true, change your response to a hypothetical situation like the Manifest conference? Again, you can’t get how much on a binary response.
Maybe all that points out to polling being more of a post-dialogue event, and accepting that we would choose discussants based on past history & early reactions. For example, I would have moderately high confidence that user X would represent a stance close to a particular pole on most issues, while I would represent a stance that codes as “~ moderately progressive by EA Forum standards.”
Often it feels like I can never please people on this forum. I think the poll is significantly better than no poll.
Yeah, I agree with that! I don’t find it inconsistent with the idea that the reasonable trade-offs you made between various characteristics in the data-collection process make the data you got not a good match for the purposes I would like data for. They aregood data for people interested in the answer to certain other questions. No one can build a (practical) poll for all possible use cases, just as no one can build a (reasonably priced) car that is both very energy-efficient and has major towing/hauling chops.
As useful as viewpoints.xyz is, I will mention that for maybe 50% or 60% of the questions, my reaction was “it depends.” I suppose you can’t really get around that unless the person creating the questions spends much more time to carefully craft them (which sort of defeats the purpose of a quick-and-dirty poll), or unless you do interviews (which are of course much more costly). I do think there is value in the quick-and-dirty MVP version, but it’s usefullness has a pretty noticable upper bound.