I think the overall theme of your complaints is that I donât provide enough context for what Iâm talking about, which is fair if youâre reading the post without context, but a lot of posts on the EA Forum are âinside baseballâ that assume the reader has a lot of context. So, maybe this is an instance of context collapse, where something written with one audience in mind is interpreted differently because another audience with less context or a different context.
I donât think itâs wrong for you to have the issues youâre having. If I were in your shoes, I would probably have the same issues.
But I donât know how you could avoid these issues and still have âinside baseballâ discussion on the EA Forum. This is a reason the âcommunityâ tag exists on the forum. Itâs so people can separate posts that are interesting and accessible to a general audience from posts that only make sense if your head has already been immersed in the community stuff for a while.
The email was indeed racist, but Nick Bostrom said this in an email that was 26 years old, for which he apologised since (the apology itself may be discussed, but this is still important context missing).
I agree this is important context, but this is the sort of âinside baseballâ stuff where I generally assume the kind of people interested in reading EA Forum community posts are already well aware of what happened and now Iâm only providing more context because youâre directly asking me about it. Reflective Altruism is excellent because the author of that blog, David Thorstad, writes like encyclopedia articles of context for these sort of things. So, I just refer you to the relevant Reflective Altruism posts about the topics youâre interested in. (There is a post on the Bostrom email, for example.)
The comment literally states the opposite, and I did provide quotes.
The comment says that people are approximately equally valuable, not that they are equally valuable, and itâs hard to know what exactly this means to the author. But the context is CEA is saying that Black people are equally valuable and that commenter is saying he disagrees, feels bad about what the CEA is saying, and harshly criticizes the CEA for saying this. And, subsequently, the author has organized a conference that was friendly to people with extreme racist views such as white nationalism. The subsequent discussion of that conference did not allay the concerns of people who find that concerning.
What weâre talking about here is stuff like people defending slavery, defending colonialism, defending white nationalism, defending segregation, defending the Nazi regime in Germany, and so on. I am not exaggerating. This is literally the kind of things these people say. And the defenses about why people who say such things should be welcomed into the effective altruist community are not satisfactory.
For me, this is a case where, at multiple steps, I have left a more charitable interpretation open, but, at multiple turns, the subsequent evidence has pointed to the conclusion that Shakeel Hasim (the former Head of Communications at the CEA) came to, that this is just straight-up racism.
I refer you to the following Reflective Altruism posts: Human biodiversity (Part 2: Manifest), about the Manifest 2024 conference and the ensuing controversy around racism, and Human Biodiversity (Part 7: LessWrong). The post on LessWrong has survey data that supports Shakeel Hasimâs comment about racism in the rationalist community.
Iâd also appreciate some balance by highlighting all the positive elements EA brings to the table, such as literally saving the lives of thousands of Black people in Africa.
Iâve had an intense interest in and affinity for effective altruism since before it was called effective altruism. I think it must have been in 2008 when I joined a Facebook group called Giving What We Can created by the philosopher Toby Ord. As I recall, it had just a few hundred members, maybe around 200. The website for Giving What We Can was still under construction and I donât think the organization had been legally incorporated at that point. So, this has been a journey of 17 years for me, which is more than my entire adult life. Effective altruism has been an important part of my life story. Some of my best memories of my time at university was with my friends I made through my university effective altruism group. Thatâs a time in my life I will always treasure and bittersweetly reminisce on, sweetly because it was so beautiful, bitterly because itâs over.
If I thought there was nothing good about EA, I wouldnât be on the EA Forum, and I wouldnât be writing things about how to diagnose and fix EAâs problems. I would just disavow it and disassociate myself from it, as sadly many people have already done by now. I love the effective altruism I knew in the decade from 2008 to 2018, and it would be sad to me if thatâs no longer on the Earth. For instance, I do think saving the lives of people living in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is a worthy cause and a worthy achievement. This is precisely why I donât like EA both abandoning global poverty as a cause area and allowing the encroachment of the old colonialist, racist ideas that the people I admire in international development like the economist William Easterly (author of the book The White Manâs Burden and the old blog Aid Watch) warned us so insistently we needed to avoid in contemporary international aid work.
Can you imagine a worse corruption, a worse twisting of this than to allow talk about why Black people are more genetically suited to slavery than white people, or how Europe did Africa a favour by colonizing it, or how Western countries should embrace white nationalism? Thatâs fucking insanity. That is evil. If this is what effective altruism is becoming, then as much as I love what effective altruism once was, effective altruism should die. It has betrayed what it once was and, on the values of the old effective altruism, the right decision would be to oppose the new effective altruism. It really couldnât be more clear.
Thanks, I understand better the context and where youâre coming from. The stylĂŠ is easier for me to read and I appreciate that.
I wonât have much more time for this conversation, but just two points:
This is precisely why I donât like EA both abandoning global poverty as a cause area
Is this actually true? To me global poverty was still number one in terms of donations, Give well is doing great, and most of the charity entrepreneurship charities are on this topic.
Can you imagine a worse corruption, a worse twisting of this than to allow talk about why Black people are more genetically suited to slavery than white people, or how Europe did Africa a favour by colonizing it, or how Western countries should embrace white nationalism?
Oh, yes, that would be awful. But Iâd expect that virtually everybody in the EA forum would be against that.
And so far, in the examples youâve given, you donât show that even a sizeable minority of people would agree with these claims. For instance, for Manifold, you pointed to the fact that some EAs work with a forecasting organisation from the rationalist community who did a conference that invited many speakers to speak on forecasting and some of these speakers previously wrote some racist stuff on a topic unrelated to the conference (and even then that lead to quite a debate).
My understanding might be inaccurate, of course, but thatâs such a long chain that I would consider this as quite far from a prevalent issue which currently has large negative consequences.
I think the overall theme of your complaints is that I donât provide enough context for what Iâm talking about, which is fair if youâre reading the post without context, but a lot of posts on the EA Forum are âinside baseballâ that assume the reader has a lot of context. So, maybe this is an instance of context collapse, where something written with one audience in mind is interpreted differently because another audience with less context or a different context.
I donât think itâs wrong for you to have the issues youâre having. If I were in your shoes, I would probably have the same issues.
But I donât know how you could avoid these issues and still have âinside baseballâ discussion on the EA Forum. This is a reason the âcommunityâ tag exists on the forum. Itâs so people can separate posts that are interesting and accessible to a general audience from posts that only make sense if your head has already been immersed in the community stuff for a while.
I agree this is important context, but this is the sort of âinside baseballâ stuff where I generally assume the kind of people interested in reading EA Forum community posts are already well aware of what happened and now Iâm only providing more context because youâre directly asking me about it. Reflective Altruism is excellent because the author of that blog, David Thorstad, writes like encyclopedia articles of context for these sort of things. So, I just refer you to the relevant Reflective Altruism posts about the topics youâre interested in. (There is a post on the Bostrom email, for example.)
The comment says that people are approximately equally valuable, not that they are equally valuable, and itâs hard to know what exactly this means to the author. But the context is CEA is saying that Black people are equally valuable and that commenter is saying he disagrees, feels bad about what the CEA is saying, and harshly criticizes the CEA for saying this. And, subsequently, the author has organized a conference that was friendly to people with extreme racist views such as white nationalism. The subsequent discussion of that conference did not allay the concerns of people who find that concerning.
What weâre talking about here is stuff like people defending slavery, defending colonialism, defending white nationalism, defending segregation, defending the Nazi regime in Germany, and so on. I am not exaggerating. This is literally the kind of things these people say. And the defenses about why people who say such things should be welcomed into the effective altruist community are not satisfactory.
For me, this is a case where, at multiple steps, I have left a more charitable interpretation open, but, at multiple turns, the subsequent evidence has pointed to the conclusion that Shakeel Hasim (the former Head of Communications at the CEA) came to, that this is just straight-up racism.
I refer you to the following Reflective Altruism posts: Human biodiversity (Part 2: Manifest), about the Manifest 2024 conference and the ensuing controversy around racism, and Human Biodiversity (Part 7: LessWrong). The post on LessWrong has survey data that supports Shakeel Hasimâs comment about racism in the rationalist community.
Iâve had an intense interest in and affinity for effective altruism since before it was called effective altruism. I think it must have been in 2008 when I joined a Facebook group called Giving What We Can created by the philosopher Toby Ord. As I recall, it had just a few hundred members, maybe around 200. The website for Giving What We Can was still under construction and I donât think the organization had been legally incorporated at that point. So, this has been a journey of 17 years for me, which is more than my entire adult life. Effective altruism has been an important part of my life story. Some of my best memories of my time at university was with my friends I made through my university effective altruism group. Thatâs a time in my life I will always treasure and bittersweetly reminisce on, sweetly because it was so beautiful, bitterly because itâs over.
If I thought there was nothing good about EA, I wouldnât be on the EA Forum, and I wouldnât be writing things about how to diagnose and fix EAâs problems. I would just disavow it and disassociate myself from it, as sadly many people have already done by now. I love the effective altruism I knew in the decade from 2008 to 2018, and it would be sad to me if thatâs no longer on the Earth. For instance, I do think saving the lives of people living in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is a worthy cause and a worthy achievement. This is precisely why I donât like EA both abandoning global poverty as a cause area and allowing the encroachment of the old colonialist, racist ideas that the people I admire in international development like the economist William Easterly (author of the book The White Manâs Burden and the old blog Aid Watch) warned us so insistently we needed to avoid in contemporary international aid work.
Can you imagine a worse corruption, a worse twisting of this than to allow talk about why Black people are more genetically suited to slavery than white people, or how Europe did Africa a favour by colonizing it, or how Western countries should embrace white nationalism? Thatâs fucking insanity. That is evil. If this is what effective altruism is becoming, then as much as I love what effective altruism once was, effective altruism should die. It has betrayed what it once was and, on the values of the old effective altruism, the right decision would be to oppose the new effective altruism. It really couldnât be more clear.
Thanks, I understand better the context and where youâre coming from. The stylĂŠ is easier for me to read and I appreciate that.
I wonât have much more time for this conversation, but just two points:
Is this actually true? To me global poverty was still number one in terms of donations, Give well is doing great, and most of the charity entrepreneurship charities are on this topic.
Oh, yes, that would be awful. But Iâd expect that virtually everybody in the EA forum would be against that.
And so far, in the examples youâve given, you donât show that even a sizeable minority of people would agree with these claims. For instance, for Manifold, you pointed to the fact that some EAs work with a forecasting organisation from the rationalist community who did a conference that invited many speakers to speak on forecasting and some of these speakers previously wrote some racist stuff on a topic unrelated to the conference (and even then that lead to quite a debate).
My understanding might be inaccurate, of course, but thatâs such a long chain that I would consider this as quite far from a prevalent issue which currently has large negative consequences.