I respect this for being a substantive critique and have upvoted, even though it does read as pretty harsh to me.
I do think the way this comment is written might make it hard to respond to. I wonder if it would be easier to discuss if either (a) you made this comment a separate post that you linked to (it’s already long enough, I reckon) or (b) you split it into 3-4 individual comments with one important question or critique in each, so that people can discuss each separately? My preference would be for (a) personally, especially if you have the time to flesh out your concerns for a less expert audience!
I was worried about the harshness aspect but to be frank there are only so many ways to say that someone in a position of power and influence has acted with negligence.
Perhaps these could also be useful things to do (thought given the afore-mentioned herd-downvoting I doubt that (a) would receive sufficient good-faith engagement to be worth writing.
(b) could be useful for facilitating small-scale discussion, but I haven’t seen any indication that there are people who want to or are trying to do that, e.g. with a comment saying ‘On point #4...’
In any case, I have seen far longer comments than mine and comments with more questions and less elaboration than Gideon’s get dozens of upvotes before.
These criticisms (and I’m discussing both your response and Karthik’s here, as well as a more general pattern) appear to only be brought up when the EA big boys are being criticised: I doubt if Gideon had asked five complimentary questions he would have received anything close to such a negative reaction.
This does remind me of a lot of the response to Democratising Risk: Carla and Luke were told that the paper was at once too broad and too narrow, too harsh and yet not direct enough: anything to dismiss critique while being able to rationalise it as a mere technical application of discursive norms.
I think some of the criticism of your paper with Kemp was due to it being co-authored with Phil Torres, who has harassed and defamed many people (including me) because he thinks they have frustrated his career aims
Accusing anonymous or pseudonymous Forum accounts of being someone in particular (or doxing anyone) goes against Forum norms. We have reached out to John Halstead to ask that he refrain from doing so and that he refrain from commenting more on these threads.
My comment above was vague. Just a note to clarify: by “on these threads” we meant threads involving A.C.Skraeling. In our message to John Halstead, we wrote: “refrain from commenting on the existing threads with A.C.Skraeling.”
I am not Cremer and it seems like an odd act of ego-defence to assume that there is only one person that could disagree with you.
I have no idea what you mean about Phil Torres: he clearly needs to take a chill pill but ‘harassment’ seems strong. Perhaps I’ve missed something. ‘Frustrated his career aims’?
In any case, Torres wasn’t a co-author of Democratising Risk, though I agree that he would probably agree with a lot of it.
Even if all of your implicit points were true, why on Earth would co-authorship with someone who had defamed you be grounds to offer reams of contradictory critiques to critical works while making none of the same critiques to comparable [EA Forum comments, but whatever] written pieces that do not substantially disagree with the canon.
I just assumed you were Cremer because you kept citing all of her work when it didn’t seem very relevant.
Perhaps the authors of the paper would like to share how much Torres contributed that paper and how that might have influenced the reception of the paper
I generally think it’d be good to have a higher evidential bar for making these kinds of accusations on the forum. Partly, I think the downside of making an off-base socket-puppeting accusation (unfair reputation damage, distraction from object-level discussion, additional feeling of adversarialism) just tends to be larger than the upside of making a correct one.
Fwiw, in this case, I do trust that A.C. Skraeling isn’t Zoe. One point on this: Since she has a track record of being willing to go on record with comparatively blunter criticisms, using her own name, I think it would be a confusing choice to create a new pseudonym to post that initial comment.
I strongly agree—if someone has a question or concern about someone else’s identity, I think they should either handle it privately or speak to the Forum team about their concerns.
I think to some degree this level of accusations is problematic and to some degree derails an important conversation. Given the role a report like this may play in EA in the future, ad hominem and false attacks on critiques seem somewhat problematic
jumping in here briefly because someone alerted me to this post mentioning my name: I did not comment, I was not even aware of your forum post John, (sorry I don’t tend to read the EA forum), don’t tend to advertise previous works of mine in other peoples comments sections and if I’d comment anywhere it would certainly be under my own name
That is a rather odd assumption to make given that two of the issues under discussion were X-risk methodology and EA discourse norms in response to criticism.
Also I think it’s worth noting that you have once again ignored most of the criticism presented and moved to the safer rhetorical ground of vague insinuations about people you don’t like.
I respect this for being a substantive critique and have upvoted, even though it does read as pretty harsh to me.
I do think the way this comment is written might make it hard to respond to. I wonder if it would be easier to discuss if either (a) you made this comment a separate post that you linked to (it’s already long enough, I reckon) or (b) you split it into 3-4 individual comments with one important question or critique in each, so that people can discuss each separately? My preference would be for (a) personally, especially if you have the time to flesh out your concerns for a less expert audience!
I was worried about the harshness aspect but to be frank there are only so many ways to say that someone in a position of power and influence has acted with negligence.
Perhaps these could also be useful things to do (thought given the afore-mentioned herd-downvoting I doubt that (a) would receive sufficient good-faith engagement to be worth writing.
(b) could be useful for facilitating small-scale discussion, but I haven’t seen any indication that there are people who want to or are trying to do that, e.g. with a comment saying ‘On point #4...’
In any case, I have seen far longer comments than mine and comments with more questions and less elaboration than Gideon’s get dozens of upvotes before.
These criticisms (and I’m discussing both your response and Karthik’s here, as well as a more general pattern) appear to only be brought up when the EA big boys are being criticised: I doubt if Gideon had asked five complimentary questions he would have received anything close to such a negative reaction.
This does remind me of a lot of the response to Democratising Risk: Carla and Luke were told that the paper was at once too broad and too narrow, too harsh and yet not direct enough: anything to dismiss critique while being able to rationalise it as a mere technical application of discursive norms.
It seems like my concern was unwarranted anyways as John already responded directly to each of your points!
Yes and no in my opinion haha but I see your point
I think some of the criticism of your paper with Kemp was due to it being co-authored with Phil Torres, who has harassed and defamed many people (including me) because he thinks they have frustrated his career aims
Accusing anonymous or pseudonymous Forum accounts of being someone in particular (or doxing anyone) goes against Forum norms. We have reached out to John Halstead to ask that he refrain from doing so and that he refrain from commenting more on these threads.
My comment above was vague. Just a note to clarify: by “on these threads” we meant threads involving A.C.Skraeling. In our message to John Halstead, we wrote: “refrain from commenting on the existing threads with A.C.Skraeling.”
What are you even talking about?
I am not Cremer and it seems like an odd act of ego-defence to assume that there is only one person that could disagree with you.
I have no idea what you mean about Phil Torres: he clearly needs to take a chill pill but ‘harassment’ seems strong. Perhaps I’ve missed something. ‘Frustrated his career aims’?
In any case, Torres wasn’t a co-author of Democratising Risk, though I agree that he would probably agree with a lot of it.
Even if all of your implicit points were true, why on Earth would co-authorship with someone who had defamed you be grounds to offer reams of contradictory critiques to critical works while making none of the same critiques to comparable [EA Forum comments, but whatever] written pieces that do not substantially disagree with the canon.
I just assumed you were Cremer because you kept citing all of her work when it didn’t seem very relevant.
Perhaps the authors of the paper would like to share how much Torres contributed that paper and how that might have influenced the reception of the paper
I generally think it’d be good to have a higher evidential bar for making these kinds of accusations on the forum. Partly, I think the downside of making an off-base socket-puppeting accusation (unfair reputation damage, distraction from object-level discussion, additional feeling of adversarialism) just tends to be larger than the upside of making a correct one.
Fwiw, in this case, I do trust that A.C. Skraeling isn’t Zoe. One point on this: Since she has a track record of being willing to go on record with comparatively blunter criticisms, using her own name, I think it would be a confusing choice to create a new pseudonym to post that initial comment.
I think this is fair. I shouldn’t have done it and am sorry for doing so
I strongly agree—if someone has a question or concern about someone else’s identity, I think they should either handle it privately or speak to the Forum team about their concerns.
I think to some degree this level of accusations is problematic and to some degree derails an important conversation. Given the role a report like this may play in EA in the future, ad hominem and false attacks on critiques seem somewhat problematic
jumping in here briefly because someone alerted me to this post mentioning my name: I did not comment, I was not even aware of your forum post John, (sorry I don’t tend to read the EA forum), don’t tend to advertise previous works of mine in other peoples comments sections and if I’d comment anywhere it would certainly be under my own name
That is a rather odd assumption to make given that two of the issues under discussion were X-risk methodology and EA discourse norms in response to criticism.
Also I think it’s worth noting that you have once again ignored most of the criticism presented and moved to the safer rhetorical ground of vague insinuations about people you don’t like.
‘Never Play Defense’, anyone?