I think the issue is that, from my standpoint, there is a combination of harsh language, many broad claims about EA and LessWrong, which are both very negative and vague, and a lack of specific evidence in the text.
I expect few people here to be swayed by this kind of communication, since you may simply be overreacting and having an extremely low threshold to use terms like âracismâ. Itâs the discourse I tend to see on Twitter.
As an example of what Iâd call an overreaction, when you say that someone did something âunbelievably foolish and unbelievably morally wrong,â I am thinking of very bad stuff, like doing fraud with charity money.
I am not thinking about a comment where someone said that âI value people approximately equally in impact estimatesâ (instead of âabsolutely equallyâ). The lack of evidence means I canât base myself on the commenterâs specific intentions.
There is a lot of context to fill people in on and Iâll leave that to the Reflective Altruism posts. I also added some footnotes that provide a bit more context. I wasnât even really thinking about explaining everything to people who donât already know the background.
I may be overreacting or you may be underreacting. Whoâs to say? The only way to find out is to read the Reflective Altruism posts I cited and get the background knowledge that my quick take presumes.
I agree that discourse on Twitter is unbelievably terrible, but one of the ways that I believe using Twitter harms your mind is you just hear the most terrible points and arguments all the time, so you come to discount things that sound facially similar in non-Twitter contexts. I advocate that people completely quit Twitter (and other microblogging platforms like Bluesky) because I think it gets people into the habit of thinking in tweets, and thinking in tweets is ridiculous. When Twitter started, it was delightfully inane. The idea of trying to say anything in such a short space was whimsical. That itâs been elevated to a platform for serious discourse is absurd.
Again, the key context for that comment is that an extremely racist email by the philosopher Nick Bostrom was published that used the N word and said Black people are stupid. The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) released a very short, very simple statement that said all people are equal, i.e., in this context, Black people are equal to everyone else.
The commenter responded harshly against CEAâs statement and argued a point of view that, in context, reads as the view that Black people have less moral value than white people. And since then that commenter was involved in a controversy around racism, i.e., the Manifest 2024 conference. If youâre unfamiliar can read about that conference on Reflective Altruism here.
In that post, thereâs a quote from Shakeel Hasim, who previously was the Head of Communications at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA):
By far the most dismaying part of my work at CEA was the increasing realisation that a big chunk of the rationalist community is just straight up racist. EA != rationalism, but I do think major EA orgs need to do a better job at cutting ties with them. Fixing the rationalism community seems beyond hope for me â prominent leaders are some of the worst offenders here, and itâs hard to see them going away. And the entire âtruth seekingâ approach is often a thinly veiled disguise for indulging in racism.
So, donât take my word for it.
The hazard of speaking too dispassionately or understating things is it gives people a misleading impression. Underreacting is dangerous, just as overreacting is. This is why the harsh language is necessary.
Yes, knowing the context is vital to understanding where the harsh language is coming from, but I wasnât really writing for people who donât have the context (or who wonât go and find out what it is). People who donât know the context can dismiss it, or they can become curious and want to find out more.
But colder, calmer, more understated language can also be easily dismissed, and is not guaranteed to elicit curiosity, either. And the danger there is that people tend to assume if youâre not speaking harshly and passionately, then what youâre talking about isnât a big deal. (Also, why should people not just say what they really mean?)
Thanks for the answer; it explains things better for me.
Iâll just point out that another element that bugged me about the post was the lack of balance. It felt that things were made with an attitude that tries to judge everything in a negative light, which doesnât make it trustworthy in my opinion.
Two examples:
The key context for that comment is that an extremely racist email by the philosopher Nick Bostrom was published that used the N word and said Black people are stupid
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).
The commenter responded harshly against CEAâs statement and argued a point of view that, in context, reads as the view that Black people have less moral value than white people.
The comment literally states the opposite, and I did provide quotes. It really feels like you are trying to interpret things uncharitably.
So far, I feel like the examples provided are mostly debatable. Iâd expect more convincing stuff before concluding there is a deep systemic issue to fix.
The CEAâs former head of communicationsâ quote is more relevant evidence, I must admit, though I donât know how widespread or accurate their perception is (it doesnât really match what Iâve seen).
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.
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 issue is that, from my standpoint, there is a combination of harsh language, many broad claims about EA and LessWrong, which are both very negative and vague, and a lack of specific evidence in the text.
I expect few people here to be swayed by this kind of communication, since you may simply be overreacting and having an extremely low threshold to use terms like âracismâ. Itâs the discourse I tend to see on Twitter.
As an example of what Iâd call an overreaction, when you say that someone did something âunbelievably foolish and unbelievably morally wrong,â I am thinking of very bad stuff, like doing fraud with charity money.
I am not thinking about a comment where someone said that âI value people approximately equally in impact estimatesâ (instead of âabsolutely equallyâ). The lack of evidence means I canât base myself on the commenterâs specific intentions.
There is a lot of context to fill people in on and Iâll leave that to the Reflective Altruism posts. I also added some footnotes that provide a bit more context. I wasnât even really thinking about explaining everything to people who donât already know the background.
I may be overreacting or you may be underreacting. Whoâs to say? The only way to find out is to read the Reflective Altruism posts I cited and get the background knowledge that my quick take presumes.
I agree that discourse on Twitter is unbelievably terrible, but one of the ways that I believe using Twitter harms your mind is you just hear the most terrible points and arguments all the time, so you come to discount things that sound facially similar in non-Twitter contexts. I advocate that people completely quit Twitter (and other microblogging platforms like Bluesky) because I think it gets people into the habit of thinking in tweets, and thinking in tweets is ridiculous. When Twitter started, it was delightfully inane. The idea of trying to say anything in such a short space was whimsical. That itâs been elevated to a platform for serious discourse is absurd.
Again, the key context for that comment is that an extremely racist email by the philosopher Nick Bostrom was published that used the N word and said Black people are stupid. The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) released a very short, very simple statement that said all people are equal, i.e., in this context, Black people are equal to everyone else.
The commenter responded harshly against CEAâs statement and argued a point of view that, in context, reads as the view that Black people have less moral value than white people. And since then that commenter was involved in a controversy around racism, i.e., the Manifest 2024 conference. If youâre unfamiliar can read about that conference on Reflective Altruism here.
In that post, thereâs a quote from Shakeel Hasim, who previously was the Head of Communications at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA):
So, donât take my word for it.
The hazard of speaking too dispassionately or understating things is it gives people a misleading impression. Underreacting is dangerous, just as overreacting is. This is why the harsh language is necessary.
Yes, knowing the context is vital to understanding where the harsh language is coming from, but I wasnât really writing for people who donât have the context (or who wonât go and find out what it is). People who donât know the context can dismiss it, or they can become curious and want to find out more.
But colder, calmer, more understated language can also be easily dismissed, and is not guaranteed to elicit curiosity, either. And the danger there is that people tend to assume if youâre not speaking harshly and passionately, then what youâre talking about isnât a big deal. (Also, why should people not just say what they really mean?)
Thanks for the answer; it explains things better for me.
Iâll just point out that another element that bugged me about the post was the lack of balance. It felt that things were made with an attitude that tries to judge everything in a negative light, which doesnât make it trustworthy in my opinion.
Two examples:
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).
The comment literally states the opposite, and I did provide quotes. It really feels like you are trying to interpret things uncharitably.
So far, I feel like the examples provided are mostly debatable. Iâd expect more convincing stuff before concluding there is a deep systemic issue to fix.
The CEAâs former head of communicationsâ quote is more relevant evidence, I must admit, though I donât know how widespread or accurate their perception is (it doesnât really match what Iâve seen).
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.
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.