Thanks for raising this, I think I wasn’t clear enough in the post cited.
To clarify—that line in the table is referring specifically to sharing research, not all kinds of participation in the community. I meant it about things like “should people still be able to post their research on the EA Forum, or receive a grant to do research, if they’ve treated other people badly?” I find that a genuinely hard question. I don’t want to ignore the past or enable more harm. But I also don’t want to suppress content that would be useful to other EAs (and to the world) because of the person who produced it.
I see that as a pretty different question from “Should they attend conferences?” and other things more relevant to their participation in the community side of EA.
1.) Clearly this is better than the alternative where the same considerations are applied to other ways of participating in the community.
2.) My issue isn’t particularly with the community health team, but with a general attitude that I’ve often encountered among EAs in more informal discussions. Sadly, informal discussions are hard to provide concrete evidence of, so I pointed to an example that I take to be less egregious, though I still think on the wrong side of things here. I am more concerned by the general attitude that is held by some EAs I’ve spoken to than two specific lines of a specific post.
3.) People are banned from the forum for being rude in relatively minor ways. And yet let’s imagine a hypothetical case where someone is accused of serious wrongdoing and further are specifically accused of carrying out some elements of wrongdoing via online social networks. It would seem weird to ban the first person for minor rudeness, but give the second person access to a platform that can allow them to build status and communicate with people via just the sort of medium that they allegedly used to carry out previous wrongdoing. Yet I think this is a plausible outcome of the current policies on when to ban people and how to react to interpersonal harm.
4.) I agree that it’s a different question; I still don’t think it’s a difficult one. For a start, I think it’s a little odd to conceive of this as “suppressing” content. People can still post content in lots of other places, and indeed other people can share it on the EA forum if they want to. Further, I don’t think you can separate out enabling harm from posting to the forum, given that forum posts can confer status to people and status can help people to commit harm. So I think that the current policy just does enable harm. I think enabling this harm is the wrong call.
5.) I also think we could run the consequentialist case here, pointing to the fact that other people might not contribute to EA because they find the EA attitude to these cases concerning and don’t feel safe or comfortable in the community.
All of that said, I think it’s important to say again, per point 1, that I do agree that the issue is much less concerning when it doesn’t involve real world contact between people, and that I appreciate you taking the time to reply.
Thanks for raising this, I think I wasn’t clear enough in the post cited.
To clarify—that line in the table is referring specifically to sharing research, not all kinds of participation in the community. I meant it about things like “should people still be able to post their research on the EA Forum, or receive a grant to do research, if they’ve treated other people badly?” I find that a genuinely hard question. I don’t want to ignore the past or enable more harm. But I also don’t want to suppress content that would be useful to other EAs (and to the world) because of the person who produced it.
I see that as a pretty different question from “Should they attend conferences?” and other things more relevant to their participation in the community side of EA.
A few brief comments.
1.) Clearly this is better than the alternative where the same considerations are applied to other ways of participating in the community.
2.) My issue isn’t particularly with the community health team, but with a general attitude that I’ve often encountered among EAs in more informal discussions. Sadly, informal discussions are hard to provide concrete evidence of, so I pointed to an example that I take to be less egregious, though I still think on the wrong side of things here. I am more concerned by the general attitude that is held by some EAs I’ve spoken to than two specific lines of a specific post.
3.) People are banned from the forum for being rude in relatively minor ways. And yet let’s imagine a hypothetical case where someone is accused of serious wrongdoing and further are specifically accused of carrying out some elements of wrongdoing via online social networks. It would seem weird to ban the first person for minor rudeness, but give the second person access to a platform that can allow them to build status and communicate with people via just the sort of medium that they allegedly used to carry out previous wrongdoing. Yet I think this is a plausible outcome of the current policies on when to ban people and how to react to interpersonal harm.
4.) I agree that it’s a different question; I still don’t think it’s a difficult one. For a start, I think it’s a little odd to conceive of this as “suppressing” content. People can still post content in lots of other places, and indeed other people can share it on the EA forum if they want to. Further, I don’t think you can separate out enabling harm from posting to the forum, given that forum posts can confer status to people and status can help people to commit harm. So I think that the current policy just does enable harm. I think enabling this harm is the wrong call.
5.) I also think we could run the consequentialist case here, pointing to the fact that other people might not contribute to EA because they find the EA attitude to these cases concerning and don’t feel safe or comfortable in the community.
All of that said, I think it’s important to say again, per point 1, that I do agree that the issue is much less concerning when it doesn’t involve real world contact between people, and that I appreciate you taking the time to reply.