Hi Holden, thanks for writing this up, but would it be possible for you to say something with a little bit more substance? At present it seems rather perfunctory and potentially a little insulting.
I’ve attempted to translate the comment above into a series of plain-English bottom-lines.
I apologise if the tone is a little forthright: a trade-off with clarity and intellectual honesty.
On anonymity
“Yeah I can see why there might seem to be a problem, and I promise that I am truly very sorry that you’re facing its consequences. In any case, I promise that everything is actually completely fine and you don’t need to worry! I acknowledge that (as you have already said) my promises don’t count for much here, but… trust me anyway! No, I will not take any notice of the specific issues you describe, nor the specific solutions that you propose.”
On conflicts of interest
“Here I will briefly describe some of the original causes of the problem. I personally think that it’s no big deal, and will not engage with any of the arguments or examples you provide. I promise we’re taking it really seriously, though.”
On focusing on a couple of existential risks (which is a gross simplification of the section I presume you’re responding to?)
“I personally think everything is fine, no I will not engage with any of the arguments or examples you provide.”
On being in line with the interests of billionaires
“I understand your concerns, but most of our tech billionaire donors changed their minds to fit the techno-political culture of Silicon Valley rather than starting off that way, and thus all incentive structures and cultural factors are completely irrelevant.”
On centralization of funding
“I perfunctorily agree that there is a problem, but I’m having trouble operationalizing the operational proposals you made. I will provide no specifics. I think membership-demarcation may be a problem, and will ignore your proposals for solving it.”
“By the way, would you mind doing even more unpaid work to flesh out specific mechanistic proposals, even though I, the person with the power to implement such proposals, just completely ignored them all in the sections I responded to?”
Despite my pre-existing intellectual respect for you, Holden, I really can’t escape reading this as a somewhat-more-socially-competent version of Buck’s response:
“We bosses know what we’re doing, you’re welcome to disagree if you want, but if you want to be listened to you need to do a bunch of unpaid work that we will probably completely ignore, and we most likely won’t listen to you at all anyway.”
This is what power does to your brain: you are only able to countenance posting empty EA-ified PR-speak like this because you are accountable only to a few personal friends that basically agree with you, and can thus get away with more or less ignoring external inputs.
For example, in American situation comedies of the 1950s, there was a constant staple: jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. The jokes (told, of course, by men) always represented women’s logic as fundamentally alien and incomprehensible. “You have to love them,” the message always seemed to run, “but who can really understand how these creatures think?” One never had the impression the women in question had any trouble understanding men. The reason is obvious. Women had no choice but to understand men. In America, the fifties were the heyday of a certain ideal of the one-income patriarchal family, and among the more affluent, the ideal was often achieved. Women with no access to their own income or resources obviously had no choice but to spend a great deal of time and energy understanding what their menfolk thought was going on.
This kind of rhetoric about the mysteries of womankind appears to be a perennial feature of such patriarchal arrangements. It is usually paired with a sense that, though illogical and inexplicable, women still have access to mysterious, almost mystical wisdom (“women’s intuition”) unavailable to men. And of course something like this happens in any relation of extreme inequality: peasants, for example, are always represented as being both oafishly simple, but somehow, also, mystically wise. Generations of women novelists—Virginia Woolf comes most immediately to mind (To the Lighthouse)—have documented the other side of such arrangements: the constant efforts women end up having to expend in managing, maintaining, and adjusting the egos of oblivious and self-important men, involving the continual work of imaginative identification, or interpretive labor. This work carries over on every level. Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women.
Overwhelmingly one-sided social arrangements breed stupidity: by being in a position where you’re powerful enough to ignore people with other points of view, you become extremely bad at understanding them.
Thus, the oblivious bosses (egged on by mixed teams of true sycophants and power/money-seeking yes-men) continue doing whatever they want to do, and an invisible army of exhausted, exasperated, and powerless subordinates scramble to semi-successfully translate the whims of the bosses into bureaucratic justifications for doing the things that actually need to be done.
The bosses can always cook up some justification for why them being in charge is always the best way forward, and either never hear critiques because critics fear for their careers or, as seen here, lazily dismiss them without consequence.
Speaking as someone with a little experience in similar organisations and movements to this one that slowly lost their principles as they calcified into self-serving bureaucracies:
We have warned A.C. Skraeling before about their behavior. “I will rephrase your statement as (insulting thing the person clearly didn’t say)” violates our norms. We are therefore issuing them a one-month ban.
Looping back some months later, FWIW while I disagree with most of the rest of the comment (and can see a case for a ban as a result of them), I quite appreciate the point about “interpretive labor”, and I’ve found it an interesting/useful conceptual handle in my toolkit since reading it.
(This is a high bar as most EA Forum comments do not update me nearly as much).
Hi Holden, thanks for writing this up, but would it be possible for you to say something with a little bit more substance? At present it seems rather perfunctory and potentially a little insulting.
I’ve attempted to translate the comment above into a series of plain-English bottom-lines.
I apologise if the tone is a little forthright: a trade-off with clarity and intellectual honesty.
On anonymity
“Yeah I can see why there might seem to be a problem, and I promise that I am truly very sorry that you’re facing its consequences. In any case, I promise that everything is actually completely fine and you don’t need to worry! I acknowledge that (as you have already said) my promises don’t count for much here, but… trust me anyway! No, I will not take any notice of the specific issues you describe, nor the specific solutions that you propose.”
On conflicts of interest
“Here I will briefly describe some of the original causes of the problem. I personally think that it’s no big deal, and will not engage with any of the arguments or examples you provide. I promise we’re taking it really seriously, though.”
On focusing on a couple of existential risks (which is a gross simplification of the section I presume you’re responding to?)
“I personally think everything is fine, no I will not engage with any of the arguments or examples you provide.”
On being in line with the interests of billionaires
“I understand your concerns, but most of our tech billionaire donors changed their minds to fit the techno-political culture of Silicon Valley rather than starting off that way, and thus all incentive structures and cultural factors are completely irrelevant.”
On centralization of funding
“I perfunctorily agree that there is a problem, but I’m having trouble operationalizing the operational proposals you made. I will provide no specifics. I think membership-demarcation may be a problem, and will ignore your proposals for solving it.”
“By the way, would you mind doing even more unpaid work to flesh out specific mechanistic proposals, even though I, the person with the power to implement such proposals, just completely ignored them all in the sections I responded to?”
Despite my pre-existing intellectual respect for you, Holden, I really can’t escape reading this as a somewhat-more-socially-competent version of Buck’s response:
“We bosses know what we’re doing, you’re welcome to disagree if you want, but if you want to be listened to you need to do a bunch of unpaid work that we will probably completely ignore, and we most likely won’t listen to you at all anyway.”
This is what power does to your brain: you are only able to countenance posting empty EA-ified PR-speak like this because you are accountable only to a few personal friends that basically agree with you, and can thus get away with more or less ignoring external inputs.
Writing like this really reminds me of the bit about Interpretive Labour in Dead Zones of the Imagination:
Overwhelmingly one-sided social arrangements breed stupidity: by being in a position where you’re powerful enough to ignore people with other points of view, you become extremely bad at understanding them.
Thus, the oblivious bosses (egged on by mixed teams of true sycophants and power/money-seeking yes-men) continue doing whatever they want to do, and an invisible army of exhausted, exasperated, and powerless subordinates scramble to semi-successfully translate the whims of the bosses into bureaucratic justifications for doing the things that actually need to be done.
The bosses can always cook up some justification for why them being in charge is always the best way forward, and either never hear critiques because critics fear for their careers or, as seen here, lazily dismiss them without consequence.
Speaking as someone with a little experience in similar organisations and movements to this one that slowly lost their principles as they calcified into self-serving bureaucracies:
This is what it looks like.
We have warned A.C. Skraeling before about their behavior. “I will rephrase your statement as (insulting thing the person clearly didn’t say)” violates our norms. We are therefore issuing them a one-month ban.
Looping back some months later, FWIW while I disagree with most of the rest of the comment (and can see a case for a ban as a result of them), I quite appreciate the point about “interpretive labor”, and I’ve found it an interesting/useful conceptual handle in my toolkit since reading it.
(This is a high bar as most EA Forum comments do not update me nearly as much).