I’m not questioning this decision on a whole regarding Ivy’s comment, and accept that this is a sensitive thread so stricter norms will apply, but I think the original user’s name—“Eugenics-Adjacent”, should at least raise some eyebrows.
I find it unlikely that it would be a coincidence that they happened to choose a name which plays on the “I’m not an EA, I’m EA-adjacent” trope, and the “Eugenics” seems to relate to the Bostrom letter. Taken together, “Eugenics-Adjacent” seems easily interpretable as a shot at the entire EA movement for being exactly this.
The OP also posted the first comment on this thread iirc, and set the tone off by saying:
...stories like this are lost on the devoted EA crowd here. We’re likely to see another round of rationalizing, distancing, downvoting, and flooding the forum with posts to drown out the stories of power being abused
Which includes a direct accusation the EAs will ‘flood the forum’ with posts after controversial issues like this intentionally in order to bury this issue.
Tl;dr: Not commenting on the whole of Ivy’s comment being unkind/assuming bad faith, but I think one can also be sceptical of the original poster’s motives
I agree with @Lorenzo Buonanno that people in EA culture should think I addressed it pretty poorly. I think that myself now, and knew that it was far from ideal at the time.
My explanation here (not excuse) is that I don’t always have the energy to call things out in the best way. In those cases it’s often best to stay quiet but not always. In this case I honestly did not expect anyone would do the calling out instead? Yet I messed up egregiously. I just find it so incredibly draining to face the fact that people disrespect EA that much and that casually. It really breaks me tbh thinking it’s that far gone, unjustly I’d say, so I fight against that reality. Sometimes I do think “it is so pointless, we will never stem the flow of incorrect misleading criticism” even if I don’t really think that, I feel that. So anger is what helped me get over that feeling to write a clapback I thought was worth trying.
I wish I could trust that others would also call out bad behavior and make it clear that EAs deserve respect as much as anyone. But I think what I expect more from EAs is ignoring disrespect, explaining it, steelmanning it, or politely requesting for better (which like, we are talking about a proven-rude person here so they can just brush that right off their shoulders?).
I am very sorry for writing it as harshly worded as I did though. This was a particularly egregious fuckup of mine and I want to do better. FWIW I considered deleting the comment yesterday but kinda thought that would be epistemically dishonest or something, as I didn’t want to retract the whole thing, but again I didnt have the energy to fix it. Now I will try to fix it with liberal strikethroughs
I’m not questioning this decision on a whole regarding Ivy’s comment, and accept that this is a sensitive thread so stricter norms will apply, but I think the original user’s name—“Eugenics-Adjacent”, should at least raise some eyebrows.
I find it unlikely that it would be a coincidence that they happened to choose a name which plays on the “I’m not an EA, I’m EA-adjacent” trope, and the “Eugenics” seems to relate to the Bostrom letter. Taken together, “Eugenics-Adjacent” seems easily interpretable as a shot at the entire EA movement for being exactly this.
The OP also posted the first comment on this thread iirc, and set the tone off by saying:
Which includes a direct accusation the EAs will ‘flood the forum’ with posts after controversial issues like this intentionally in order to bury this issue.
Tl;dr: Not commenting on the whole of Ivy’s comment being unkind/assuming bad faith, but I think one can also be sceptical of the original poster’s motives
Thank you for noting this.
I agree with @Lorenzo Buonanno that people in EA culture should think I addressed it pretty poorly. I think that myself now, and knew that it was far from ideal at the time.
My explanation here (not excuse) is that I don’t always have the energy to call things out in the best way. In those cases it’s often best to stay quiet but not always. In this case I honestly did not expect anyone would do the calling out instead? Yet I messed up egregiously. I just find it so incredibly draining to face the fact that people disrespect EA that much and that casually. It really breaks me tbh thinking it’s that far gone, unjustly I’d say, so I fight against that reality. Sometimes I do think “it is so pointless, we will never stem the flow of incorrect misleading criticism” even if I don’t really think that, I feel that. So anger is what helped me get over that feeling to write a clapback I thought was worth trying.
I wish I could trust that others would also call out bad behavior and make it clear that EAs deserve respect as much as anyone. But I think what I expect more from EAs is ignoring disrespect, explaining it, steelmanning it, or politely requesting for better (which like, we are talking about a proven-rude person here so they can just brush that right off their shoulders?).
I am very sorry for writing it as harshly worded as I did though. This was a particularly egregious fuckup of mine and I want to do better. FWIW I considered deleting the comment yesterday but kinda thought that would be epistemically dishonest or something, as I didn’t want to retract the whole thing, but again I didnt have the energy to fix it. Now I will try to fix it with liberal
strikethroughs