(I’m currently an intern for ACE, but speaking only for myself.)
First, I’d like to point out some related discussion here and here.
I think EA/EAA should have evidence-based conversations about how important social justice, inclusion, equity, diversity/representation, etc. are for EA/EAA, including whether they deserve much attention at all and whether some things might cause more harm than good (I do think there are at least some small and fairly uncontroversial useful steps organizations can make and have already made [1]), but the main EAA Facebook group does not seem like an appropriate place to have them, since it’s one of the first places people get exposed to EAA. I think the EA Forum is an appropriate place to have these conversations. Smaller FB groups that aren’t the first point of exposure for many to EA/EAA are probably okay, too.
Imagine being worried about an issue that personally affects you and/or the people close to you, and going to one of your first EA meetups, where your worries are debated and dismissed by many. It wouldn’t be surprising if many people in similar situations would not want to come back after that, or to find out that our community’s demographics are so skewed. This is not to say there aren’t other important—maybe more important—contributors to our skewed demographics, e.g. EA seems more appealing to atheists with quantitative backgrounds, and the demographics of people with such backgrounds are already skewed. One might also respond that we want to select against people who would be off-put by discussions of prioritization, since EA is about prioritization, but I think we should give people some slack for issues that affect them personally, and keep in mind their own perceptions of how bad it is for them.
(EDIT: I’ve made substantial edits to this paragraph after reading through the study more.) Furthermore, the event was not just about racism in society (or the US) as a whole, but also racism in the animal advocacy movement specifically. From this Faunalytics study of animal advocates in the US and Canada, this graph suggests female and non-binary animal advocates and animal advocates from minority groups are much more likely to report experiencing discrimination in their roles as animal advocates than male animal advocates and animal advocates not belonging to minority groups, and this graph shows 28.6% of the 14 advocates of colour (a small sample) having experienced discrimination or harassment on the basis of their race/colour/ethnicity specifically [2]. Common sense, this graph, this figure for paid advocates’ intentions to leave the movement and this figure for unpaid advocates’ suggest this is bad for retention and movement growth, although I don’t know what the actual rates of turnover and people completely leaving the movement are. Organizations previously recommended by ACE and granted to by Open Phil have had issues with harassment in general with multiple changes in leadership; see some discussion in the comments here about more recent issues.
So, the comments on that FB post weren’t just dismissing issues that affect people interested in animal advocacy as not worth prioritizing, they could be read (whether this was the intention or not) as dismissing issues that people of colour experience in and push them away from animal advocacy itself and a request to help address such issues.
e.g. better and better-enforced anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies, and posting job openings more widely or even also specifically to underrepresented communities to avoid taking applicants only from already badly unrepresentative networks.
There isn’t a comparison for white people on the basis of being white, although I’d guess it’s lower. There could also be survivorship bias, although the study did include some former advocates.
but the main EAA Facebook group does not seem like an appropriate place to have them, since it’s one of the first places people get exposed to EAA.
I might agree with you if doing this had no further consequences beyond what you’ve written, but… quoting an earlier comment of mine:
You know, this makes me think I know just how academia was taken over by cancel culture. They must have allowed “introductory spaces” like undergrad classes to become “safe spaces”, thinking they could continue serious open discussion in seminar rooms and journals, then those undergrads became graduate students and professors and demanded “safe spaces” everywhere they went. And how is anyone supposed to argue against “safety”, especially once its importance has been institutionalized (i.e., departments were built in part to enforce “safe spaces”, which can then easily extend their power beyond “introductory spaces”).
And suppose we did make introductory spaces “safe” for people who believe that certain types of speech are very harmful, but somehow managed to keep norms of open discussion in other more “advanced” spaces. How would those people feel when they find out that they can’t participate in the more advanced spaces without the risk of paying a high subjective cost (i.e., encountering speech that they find intolerable)? Won’t many of them think that the EA community has performed a bait-and-switch on them and potentially become hostile to EA? Have people who have proposed this type of solution actually thought things through?
I think it’s important to make EA as welcoming as possible to all people, but not by compromising in the direction of safetyism, as I don’t see any way that doesn’t end up causing more harm than good in the long run.
one of the ones I find most concerning are the University of California diversity statements
I’m not sure I understand what you mean here. Do you think other universities are not requiring diversity statements from job applicants, or that the University of California is especially “concerning” in how it uses them? If it’s the latter, what do you think the University of California is doing that others aren’t? If the former, see this article from two years ago, which states:
Many more institutions are asking her to submit a statement with her application about how her work would advance diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The requests have appeared on advertisements for jobs at all kinds of colleges, from the largest research institutions to small teaching-focused campuses
(And it seems a safe bet that the trend has continued. See this search result for a quick sense of what universities currently have formal rubrics for evaluating diversity statements. I also checked a random open position (for a chemistry professor) at a university that didn’t show up in these results and found that it also requires a diversity statement: “Applicants should state in their cover letter how their teaching, research, service and/or life experiences have prepared them to advance Dartmouth’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.”)
Another reason I think academia has been taken over by cancel culture is that I’ve read many news stories, blog posts, and the like about cancel culture in academia, and often scan their comment sections for contrary opinions, and have yet to see anyone chime to say that they’re an academic and cancel culture doesn’t exist at their institution (which I’d expect to see if it weren’t actually widespread), aside from some saying that it doesn’t exist as a way of defending it (i.e., that what’s happening is just people facing reasonable consequences for their speech acts and doesn’t count as cancel culture). I also tried to Google “cancel culture isn’t widespread in academia” in case someone wrote an article arguing that, but all the top relevant results are articles arguing that cancel culture is widespread in academia.
Curious if you have any evidence to the contrary, or just thought that I was making too strong a claim without backing it up myself.
(I’m currently an intern for ACE, but speaking only for myself.)
First, I’d like to point out some related discussion here and here.
I think EA/EAA should have evidence-based conversations about how important social justice, inclusion, equity, diversity/representation, etc. are for EA/EAA, including whether they deserve much attention at all and whether some things might cause more harm than good (I do think there are at least some small and fairly uncontroversial useful steps organizations can make and have already made [1]), but the main EAA Facebook group does not seem like an appropriate place to have them, since it’s one of the first places people get exposed to EAA. I think the EA Forum is an appropriate place to have these conversations. Smaller FB groups that aren’t the first point of exposure for many to EA/EAA are probably okay, too.
Imagine being worried about an issue that personally affects you and/or the people close to you, and going to one of your first EA meetups, where your worries are debated and dismissed by many. It wouldn’t be surprising if many people in similar situations would not want to come back after that, or to find out that our community’s demographics are so skewed. This is not to say there aren’t other important—maybe more important—contributors to our skewed demographics, e.g. EA seems more appealing to atheists with quantitative backgrounds, and the demographics of people with such backgrounds are already skewed. One might also respond that we want to select against people who would be off-put by discussions of prioritization, since EA is about prioritization, but I think we should give people some slack for issues that affect them personally, and keep in mind their own perceptions of how bad it is for them.
(EDIT: I’ve made substantial edits to this paragraph after reading through the study more.) Furthermore, the event was not just about racism in society (or the US) as a whole, but also racism in the animal advocacy movement specifically. From this Faunalytics study of animal advocates in the US and Canada, this graph suggests female and non-binary animal advocates and animal advocates from minority groups are much more likely to report experiencing discrimination in their roles as animal advocates than male animal advocates and animal advocates not belonging to minority groups, and this graph shows 28.6% of the 14 advocates of colour (a small sample) having experienced discrimination or harassment on the basis of their race/colour/ethnicity specifically [2]. Common sense, this graph, this figure for paid advocates’ intentions to leave the movement and this figure for unpaid advocates’ suggest this is bad for retention and movement growth, although I don’t know what the actual rates of turnover and people completely leaving the movement are. Organizations previously recommended by ACE and granted to by Open Phil have had issues with harassment in general with multiple changes in leadership; see some discussion in the comments here about more recent issues.
So, the comments on that FB post weren’t just dismissing issues that affect people interested in animal advocacy as not worth prioritizing, they could be read (whether this was the intention or not) as dismissing issues that people of colour experience in and push them away from animal advocacy itself and a request to help address such issues.
e.g. better and better-enforced anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies, and posting job openings more widely or even also specifically to underrepresented communities to avoid taking applicants only from already badly unrepresentative networks.
There isn’t a comparison for white people on the basis of being white, although I’d guess it’s lower. There could also be survivorship bias, although the study did include some former advocates.
I might agree with you if doing this had no further consequences beyond what you’ve written, but… quoting an earlier comment of mine:
You know, this makes me think I know just how academia was taken over by cancel culture. They must have allowed “introductory spaces” like undergrad classes to become “safe spaces”, thinking they could continue serious open discussion in seminar rooms and journals, then those undergrads became graduate students and professors and demanded “safe spaces” everywhere they went. And how is anyone supposed to argue against “safety”, especially once its importance has been institutionalized (i.e., departments were built in part to enforce “safe spaces”, which can then easily extend their power beyond “introductory spaces”).
And suppose we did make introductory spaces “safe” for people who believe that certain types of speech are very harmful, but somehow managed to keep norms of open discussion in other more “advanced” spaces. How would those people feel when they find out that they can’t participate in the more advanced spaces without the risk of paying a high subjective cost (i.e., encountering speech that they find intolerable)? Won’t many of them think that the EA community has performed a bait-and-switch on them and potentially become hostile to EA? Have people who have proposed this type of solution actually thought things through?
I think it’s important to make EA as welcoming as possible to all people, but not by compromising in the direction of safetyism, as I don’t see any way that doesn’t end up causing more harm than good in the long run.
.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean here. Do you think other universities are not requiring diversity statements from job applicants, or that the University of California is especially “concerning” in how it uses them? If it’s the latter, what do you think the University of California is doing that others aren’t? If the former, see this article from two years ago, which states:
(And it seems a safe bet that the trend has continued. See this search result for a quick sense of what universities currently have formal rubrics for evaluating diversity statements. I also checked a random open position (for a chemistry professor) at a university that didn’t show up in these results and found that it also requires a diversity statement: “Applicants should state in their cover letter how their teaching, research, service and/or life experiences have prepared them to advance Dartmouth’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.”)
Another reason I think academia has been taken over by cancel culture is that I’ve read many news stories, blog posts, and the like about cancel culture in academia, and often scan their comment sections for contrary opinions, and have yet to see anyone chime to say that they’re an academic and cancel culture doesn’t exist at their institution (which I’d expect to see if it weren’t actually widespread), aside from some saying that it doesn’t exist as a way of defending it (i.e., that what’s happening is just people facing reasonable consequences for their speech acts and doesn’t count as cancel culture). I also tried to Google “cancel culture isn’t widespread in academia” in case someone wrote an article arguing that, but all the top relevant results are articles arguing that cancel culture is widespread in academia.
Curious if you have any evidence to the contrary, or just thought that I was making too strong a claim without backing it up myself.