I donât think itâs absolutely clear from the one-sentence quote alone that Amanda was claiming personal lack of knowledge of EA (which would absolutely be deceptive if she was obviously), though I agree that is one reasonable reading. She has her GWWC membership fairly prominently displayed on her personal website, so if sheâs trying to hide being or having been EA, sheâs not doing so very strongly.
Yeah one thing I failed to articulate is how not-deliberate most of this behavior is. Thereâs just a norm/âtrend of âbe scared/âcagey/âdistantâ or âtry [too] hard to manage perceptions about your relationship to EAâ when youâre asked about EA in any quasi-public setting.
Itâs genuinely hard for me understand whatâs going on here. Like there are vastly worse ~student groups people have been a part of from their current professional outlook that donât induce this much panic. It seems like an EA cultural tick.
Part of it may be that before FTX there was already a strong norm for people to not identify as EA (EA as a question). And that has only got stronger since. At least in the UK a lot of people working in EA areas wouldnât call themselves EA including myself, pre 2020.
An implicit claim Iâm making here is that âI donât do labelsâ is kind of a bullshit non-response in a world where some labels are more or less descriptively useful and speakers have the freedom to qualify the extent to which the label applies.
Like I notice no one responds to the question âwhatâs your relationship to Nazism?â with âI donât do labels.â People are rightly suspicious when people give that answer and there just doesnât seem to be a need for it. You can just defer to the question asker a tiny bit and give an answer that reflects your knowledge of the label if nothing else.
I think EA and Nazism are quite different (in many ways). EA doesnât have a membership policy, and EA has a very wide range of philosophies, including opposing views, that people can believe in whilst still doing EA related work (positive vs negative utilitarianism, virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, some people care about animals some donât, a very large range of time discounts, etc).
As in the original article about EA as a question, it makes less sense philosophically and practically to have EA as an identity.
Maybe what youâre noticing is people who havenât been asked about their âEAâ status before, giving the answer they would have always given.
I think Godwinning the debate actually strengthens the case for âI donât do labelsâ as a position. True, most people wonât hesitate to say that the label âNaziâ doesnât apply to them, whether they say they donât do labels or have social media profiles which read like a menu of ideologies.[1] On the other hand, many who wouldnât hesitate to say that they think Nazis and fascists are horrible and agree should be voted against and maybe even fought against would hesitate to label themselves as âantifascistâ, with its connotations of ongoing participation in activism and/âor membership of self-styled antifascist groups whose other positions they may not agree with.
I donât think itâs absolutely clear from the one-sentence quote alone that Amanda was claiming personal lack of knowledge of EA (which would absolutely be deceptive if she was obviously), though I agree that is one reasonable reading. She has her GWWC membership fairly prominently displayed on her personal website, so if sheâs trying to hide being or having been EA, sheâs not doing so very strongly.
Yeah one thing I failed to articulate is how not-deliberate most of this behavior is. Thereâs just a norm/âtrend of âbe scared/âcagey/âdistantâ or âtry [too] hard to manage perceptions about your relationship to EAâ when youâre asked about EA in any quasi-public setting.
Itâs genuinely hard for me understand whatâs going on here. Like there are vastly worse ~student groups people have been a part of from their current professional outlook that donât induce this much panic. It seems like an EA cultural tick.
Part of it may be that before FTX there was already a strong norm for people to not identify as EA (EA as a question). And that has only got stronger since. At least in the UK a lot of people working in EA areas wouldnât call themselves EA including myself, pre 2020.
An implicit claim Iâm making here is that âI donât do labelsâ is kind of a bullshit non-response in a world where some labels are more or less descriptively useful and speakers have the freedom to qualify the extent to which the label applies.
Like I notice no one responds to the question âwhatâs your relationship to Nazism?â with âI donât do labels.â People are rightly suspicious when people give that answer and there just doesnât seem to be a need for it. You can just defer to the question asker a tiny bit and give an answer that reflects your knowledge of the label if nothing else.
I think EA and Nazism are quite different (in many ways). EA doesnât have a membership policy, and EA has a very wide range of philosophies, including opposing views, that people can believe in whilst still doing EA related work (positive vs negative utilitarianism, virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, some people care about animals some donât, a very large range of time discounts, etc).
As in the original article about EA as a question, it makes less sense philosophically and practically to have EA as an identity.
Maybe what youâre noticing is people who havenât been asked about their âEAâ status before, giving the answer they would have always given.
I think Godwinning the debate actually strengthens the case for âI donât do labelsâ as a position. True, most people wonât hesitate to say that the label âNaziâ doesnât apply to them, whether they say they donât do labels or have social media profiles which read like a menu of ideologies.[1] On the other hand, many who wouldnât hesitate to say that they think Nazis and fascists are horrible and agree should be voted against and maybe even fought against would hesitate to label themselves as âantifascistâ, with its connotations of ongoing participation in activism and/âor membership of self-styled antifascist groups whose other positions they may not agree with.
and from this, we can perhaps infer than figures at Anthropic donât think EA is as bad as Naziism, if that was ever in doubt ;-)