I don’t have strong views on this, but I’m curious why you think linking to instances of bad behavior is bad. All the reasons I can think of don’t seem to apply here—e.g. the link clearly isn’t an endorsement, and it’s not providing resources e.g. through increased ad revenues or increasing page rank.
By contrast, I found the link to the post useful because it’s evidence about community health and people’s reactions: the fact that someone wrote that post updated me toward being more worried (though I think I’m still much less worried than the OP, and for somewhat different reasons). And I don’t think I could have made the same update without skimming the actual post. I.e. simply reading a brief description like “someone made a post saying X in a way I think was bad” wouldn’t have been as epistemically useful.
I would guess this upside applies to most readers. So I’m wondering which countervailing downsides would recommend a policy of not linking to such posts.
I have two complaints: linking to a post which I think was made in bad faith in an attempt to harm EA, and seeming to endorse it by using it as an example of a perspective that some EAs have.
I think you shouldn’t update much on what EAs think based on that post, because I think it was probably written in an attempt to harm EA by starting flamewars.
EDIT: Also, I kind of think of that post as trying to start nasty rumors about someone; I think we should generally avoid signal boosting that type of thing.
Thanks for explaining. This all makes some sense to me, but I still favor linking on balance.
(I don’t think this depends on what the post tells us about “what EAs think”. Whether the author of the post is an EA accurately stating their views, or a non-EA trying to harm EA, or whatever—in any case the post seems relevant for assessing how worried we should be about the impacts of certain discussions / social dynamics / political climate on the EA community.)
I do agree that it seems bad to signal boost that post indiscriminately. E.g. I think it would be bad to share without context on Facebook. But in a discussion on how worried we should beabout certain social dynamics I think it’s sufficiently important to look at examples of these dynamics.
EDIT: I do agree that the OP could have done more to avoid any suggestion of endorsement. (I thought there was no implied endorsement anyway, but based on your stated reaction and on a closer second reading I think there is room to make this even clearer.) Or perhaps it would have been best to explicitly raise the issue of whether that post was written with the intent to cause harm, and what this might imply for how worried we should be. Still, linking in the right way seems clearly better to me than not linking at all.
I’m still pretty sceptical that the post in question was deliberately made with conscious intention to cause harm. In any case, I know of at least a couple of other EAs who have good-faith worries in that direction, so at worst it’s exacerbating a problem that was already there, not creating a new one.
(Also worth noting that at this point we’re probably Streisanding this dispute into irrelevance anyway.)
I don’t have strong views on this, but I’m curious why you think linking to instances of bad behavior is bad. All the reasons I can think of don’t seem to apply here—e.g. the link clearly isn’t an endorsement, and it’s not providing resources e.g. through increased ad revenues or increasing page rank.
By contrast, I found the link to the post useful because it’s evidence about community health and people’s reactions: the fact that someone wrote that post updated me toward being more worried (though I think I’m still much less worried than the OP, and for somewhat different reasons). And I don’t think I could have made the same update without skimming the actual post. I.e. simply reading a brief description like “someone made a post saying X in a way I think was bad” wouldn’t have been as epistemically useful.
I would guess this upside applies to most readers. So I’m wondering which countervailing downsides would recommend a policy of not linking to such posts.
I have two complaints: linking to a post which I think was made in bad faith in an attempt to harm EA, and seeming to endorse it by using it as an example of a perspective that some EAs have.
I think you shouldn’t update much on what EAs think based on that post, because I think it was probably written in an attempt to harm EA by starting flamewars.
EDIT: Also, I kind of think of that post as trying to start nasty rumors about someone; I think we should generally avoid signal boosting that type of thing.
Thanks for explaining. This all makes some sense to me, but I still favor linking on balance.
(I don’t think this depends on what the post tells us about “what EAs think”. Whether the author of the post is an EA accurately stating their views, or a non-EA trying to harm EA, or whatever—in any case the post seems relevant for assessing how worried we should be about the impacts of certain discussions / social dynamics / political climate on the EA community.)
I do agree that it seems bad to signal boost that post indiscriminately. E.g. I think it would be bad to share without context on Facebook. But in a discussion on how worried we should be about certain social dynamics I think it’s sufficiently important to look at examples of these dynamics.
EDIT: I do agree that the OP could have done more to avoid any suggestion of endorsement. (I thought there was no implied endorsement anyway, but based on your stated reaction and on a closer second reading I think there is room to make this even clearer.) Or perhaps it would have been best to explicitly raise the issue of whether that post was written with the intent to cause harm, and what this might imply for how worried we should be. Still, linking in the right way seems clearly better to me than not linking at all.
I’m still pretty sceptical that the post in question was deliberately made with conscious intention to cause harm. In any case, I know of at least a couple of other EAs who have good-faith worries in that direction, so at worst it’s exacerbating a problem that was already there, not creating a new one.
(Also worth noting that at this point we’re probably Streisanding this dispute into irrelevance anyway.)