Yeah one thing I failed to articulate is how not-deliberate most of this behavior is. There’s just a norm/trend of “be scared/cagey/distant” or “try [too] hard to manage perceptions about your relationship to EA” when you’re asked about EA in any quasi-public setting.
It’s genuinely hard for me understand what’s going on here. Like there are vastly worse ~student groups people have been a part of from their current professional outlook that don’t 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 wouldn’t call themselves EA including myself, pre 2020.
An implicit claim I’m making here is that “I don’t do labels” 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 “what’s your relationship to Nazism?” with “I don’t do labels.” People are rightly suspicious when people give that answer and there just doesn’t 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 doesn’t 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 don’t, 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 you’re noticing is people who haven’t been asked about their ‘EA’ status before, giving the answer they would have always given.
I think Godwinning the debate actually strengthens the case for “I don’t do labels” as a position. True, most people won’t hesitate to say that the label “Nazi” doesn’t apply to them, whether they say they don’t do labels or have social media profiles which read like a menu of ideologies.[1] On the other hand, many who wouldn’t 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 “antifascist”, with its connotations of ongoing participation in activism and/or membership of self-styled antifascist groups whose other positions they may not agree with.
Yeah one thing I failed to articulate is how not-deliberate most of this behavior is. There’s just a norm/trend of “be scared/cagey/distant” or “try [too] hard to manage perceptions about your relationship to EA” when you’re asked about EA in any quasi-public setting.
It’s genuinely hard for me understand what’s going on here. Like there are vastly worse ~student groups people have been a part of from their current professional outlook that don’t 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 wouldn’t call themselves EA including myself, pre 2020.
An implicit claim I’m making here is that “I don’t do labels” 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 “what’s your relationship to Nazism?” with “I don’t do labels.” People are rightly suspicious when people give that answer and there just doesn’t 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 doesn’t 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 don’t, 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 you’re noticing is people who haven’t been asked about their ‘EA’ status before, giving the answer they would have always given.
I think Godwinning the debate actually strengthens the case for “I don’t do labels” as a position. True, most people won’t hesitate to say that the label “Nazi” doesn’t apply to them, whether they say they don’t do labels or have social media profiles which read like a menu of ideologies.[1] On the other hand, many who wouldn’t 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 “antifascist”, with its connotations of ongoing participation in activism and/or 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 don’t think EA is as bad as Naziism, if that was ever in doubt ;-)