I don’t think explicit discussion of cascading risks would change the fundamental conclusions, and cascading risks are implicitly discussed at several points in the piece.
I have read the papers you mention. You will find (attempted) refutations of many of the points in those articles scattered across the report. In earlier drafts, I did have a direct response to those papers, but it is now all dealt with in different sections of the main report.
I don’t agree with the ‘everything is connected’ idea of society, such that society is incredibly sensitive to mild climatic changes. If that is what you mean by complex systems theory. And I defend that view at length in the report.
There are many many different ways of conceptually dividing up an analysis of climate risk. The direct/indirect way is conceptually exhaustive and so insofar as I have accurately covered the direct/indirect risks, I have accurately covered overall climate risk
True that I did ignore this, explicitly at least. I do not see how it would affect my conclusions. There is no indication from the climate literature that climate change would cause anything close to a boring apocalypse. Also, I think it is very obvious from study of sexy and unsexy risks that the sexy risks (bio, AI) are far far bigger than the unsexy risks.
I did engage a lot with that literature, I just don’t talk about it directly. One could also say that Beard et al and Kemp et al don’t engage with a lot of relevant literature, which I do discuss in my piece. eg Beard et al doesn’t engage with the literature suggesting that we are not going to run out of phosphorous and soil; Kemp et al doesn’t engage with the literature on assumptions about coal use in integrated assessment models.
(I have a few thoughts on this but it’s being marked as spam for some reason, possibly length. I’m going to post this as a short response and then edit in the content. Please let me know if you can see it.)
Hi John, thanks for the post!
I’ll leave an in-depth response to Gideon, but I have a few points that I think would be helpful to share. In short, your response worries me. I have tried to keep the prose below inoffensive in tone, but there is a trade-off between offensive directness and condescending obfuscation. I hope I have traced the line accurately.
You may not think significant discussion of cascading risks would change the fundamental conclusions of your report, but many researchers, often those with considerably more experience and expertise in climate risk (e.g. the IPCC), do: strongly so. Surely in a book-length report there is room for a few pages?
If you have refuted arguments, is it not academic best practice to cite the papers you respond to? In any case, if you know of and have read the papers, are we to understand that you believe many (if not most) peer-reviewed papers on Global Catastrophic and Existential climate risk are not worth mentioning anywhere in 437 pages of discussion?
This response causes me the most concern. That is simply not what complex systems theory is. Either you are aware that this characterisation is highly inaccurate and unfair, or you are not. If the former, I am disappointed by your (apparent) dismissiveness and willingness to mischaracterise. If the latter, I wonder how you could have done anything close to sufficient research into one of the foundational components of many studies of climate risks.
It is true that there are many conceptual frameworks for climate risk, and in a study of any topic you are generally expected to state, explain, and justify your conceptual framework. This is especially true when the framework you use (i.e. that of the Techno-Utopian Approach) has been strongly critiqued, for instance in Democratising Risk (Cremer and Kemp, 2021), another highly consequential paper you do not appear to have engaged with or cited. The dichotomy of ‘direct’ and indirect’ risks may be exhaustive, but this is not the only criterion for an adequate theoretical framework. To be somewhat, but logically coherently glib, we could make the same argument for categorising phenomena according to whether their names contained an odd or even number of letters.
I also disagree with this point, especially the final sentence, but there is little to engage with: simply assertions. Let us agree to disagree.
Beard et al. and Kemp et al. are each less than 5% of the length of your piece. Of course they cover less ground. There is a difference between a 10- or 20-page paper not mentioning every single caveat in every single work they cite, and one (1) failing to substantively engage with or even cite almost all GCR-specific climate research, (2) not explicitly stating nor justifying one’s methodology in the face of strong critique, and (3) disregarding (in complex systems studies) a massive component of studies of climate risk, wider GCR (e.g. Fisher and Sandberg 2022), and the studies of Earth-system dynamics in general without explanation or justification.
Do you expect to subject this work to peer-review, and if not, why?
The work was reviewed by experts, as I discuss in the other comment.
I do discuss tipping points at some length. I don’t see how the idea of cascading risks would change my substantive conclusions at all. If you want to argue that cascading risks would in fact affect my conclusions, I would be happy to have that debate.
In fairness to me, the Kemp et al paper was only published a couple of weeks ago, so I couldn’t include it in the report. I think much of that paper is incorrect, and the reasons for that are discussed at length in the report. The conclusions of the Beard et al and Richards et al paper are, in my view, refuted mostly in section 5 of my report. If you have a criticism of that section, which largely leans on the latest IPCC report, I would be happy to have that discussion
I have read the Richards et al complex systems paper. It contains the following diagram purporting to show how climate change could cause civilisational collapse
I am open to the possibility that my argument that climate change will not destroy the global food system is wrong. I am happy to discuss substantive criticisms of those arguments. I do not see one in the Richards paper, or in what you have said.
Your critique here seems to me to miss the mark, as illustrated by your own example. If I am assessing biorisk and categorise viruses according to whether they have an odd or even number of letters, then so long as I got my risk assessment right for the odd and even numbered letter viruses, I would have actually evaluated biorisk. I don’t know whether I am taking a ‘techno-utopian approach’ but I thought the Cremer and Kemp paper was not very good and I am not alone in thinking that (it’s also not peer reviewed, if that is the criterion we are using). As I have said, I seldom depart from the IPCC in the report. If you think I do, which of my arguments do you think are wrong?
It’s a bit weird to argue that a 400+ page report is radically incomplete without making any arguments and then to criticise my response as just making assertions. Which of my substantive arguments do you disagree with and why?
It is true that those papers are short but they also do not engage with literature that is inconsistent with most of their main claims. They lean heavily on the idea of planetary boundaries, which is extremely controversial and I argue against at length in the report.
Given the review process was not like normal peer review, would it be possible to have a public copy of all the reviewers comments like we get with the IPCC. This seems like it may br important for epistemic transparency
Indeed, knowing what I know of some of the reviewers Halstead named I am very curious to see what the review process was, what their comments were, and whether they recommended publishing the report as-is.
I’ve always been quite confused about attitudes to scholarly rigour in this community: if the decisions we’re making are so important, shouldn’t we have really robust ways of making sure they’re right?
Leaving aside the discussions on the specific value and/or variable used to measure a specific boundary -which the authors themselves caveat that may be temporal until finding better ones-, isn’t most of the controversy due to critiques conflating planetary boundaries and tipping points?
META: This + additional comments below from Halstead are strongly suggestive of bad-faith engagement: lazy dismissal without substantive engagement, repeated strawman-ing, Never Play Defense-ing, and accusing his critics of secretly being sockpuppet accounts of known heretics so their views can be ignored.
On the basis of Brandolini’s Law I am going to try to keep my replies as short as I can. If they seem insubstantial, it is likely because I have already responded to the point under discussion elsewhere, or because they are responding to attempts to move the conversation away from the original points of criticism.
I have specific criticisms to make, and I would like to see them addressed rather than ignored, dismissed, or answered only on the condition that I make a whole new set of criticisms for Halstead to also not engage with.
I suggest the reader read Halstead’s response before going back to Gideon’s and my comments. It was useful for me.
Climatic tipping points, cascading risks, and systemic risk are different things and you (hopefully) know it.
If you have refuted arguments made by relevant papers, why didn’t you cite them?
I’m not sure I understand your argument here: you are not under any obligation to discuss opposing perspectives on climate risk because a different paper on climate risk did not explicitly refute an argument that you would go on to make in the future?
In any case, this is not at all what Gideon or I said Your lazy and factually inaccurate dismissal of complex systems theory remains lazy and factually inaccurate. I am not sure where this point about Richards et al. comes into it.
You would have evaluated biorisk if the only possible use of a methodology was making sure you had a comprehensive categorisation system, which (as I hope you know) is not at all true.
I don’t really see how I have not made any arguments here. I suppose I could ask someone if it’s possible to write ‘Please cite your sources.’ in first-order logic.
I would like to hear your justification for how Beard et al, Richards et al, and Kemp et al all lean heavily on the idea of planetary boundaries, and how, if this was true, it would be relevant.
However, I doubt this would go anywhere. I suspect this is simply yet another way of ignoring people who disagree with you without thinking too hard, and relying on the combination of your name-recognition and the average EA’s ignorance of climate change to buy you the ‘Seems like he knows what he’s talking about!’-ness you want.
However, I doubt this would go anywhere. I suspect this is simply yet another way of ignoring people who disagree with you without thinking too hard, and relying on the combination of your name-recognition and the average EA’s ignorance of climate change to buy you the ‘Seems like he knows what he’s talking about!’-ness you want
The moderation team feels that this is unnecessarily hostile and rude, and violates Forum norms. This is a warning; please do better in the future.
Writing this as a moderator, but only expressing my own view.
Accusing someone of acting in bad faith on a public forum can be very damaging to the person, and it’s very easy to be mistaken about such a characterization. Even if the person is acting in bad faith, it might escalate things and make it hard to deal with the underlying problem well.
Instead, it would be better to go through the moderation and community health channels, which you can do by flagging comments/posts or by contacting us directly.
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 meant ‘I’ll leave the in-depth response to Gideon’. What you say speaks for itself: if Halstead presented this at a climate science org these would be some of the first questions asked and I’m puzzled (+ a bit weirded out, to be frank) as to why they’re getting such a hostile response.
Hello Gideon
I don’t think explicit discussion of cascading risks would change the fundamental conclusions, and cascading risks are implicitly discussed at several points in the piece.
I have read the papers you mention. You will find (attempted) refutations of many of the points in those articles scattered across the report. In earlier drafts, I did have a direct response to those papers, but it is now all dealt with in different sections of the main report.
I don’t agree with the ‘everything is connected’ idea of society, such that society is incredibly sensitive to mild climatic changes. If that is what you mean by complex systems theory. And I defend that view at length in the report.
There are many many different ways of conceptually dividing up an analysis of climate risk. The direct/indirect way is conceptually exhaustive and so insofar as I have accurately covered the direct/indirect risks, I have accurately covered overall climate risk
True that I did ignore this, explicitly at least. I do not see how it would affect my conclusions. There is no indication from the climate literature that climate change would cause anything close to a boring apocalypse. Also, I think it is very obvious from study of sexy and unsexy risks that the sexy risks (bio, AI) are far far bigger than the unsexy risks.
I did engage a lot with that literature, I just don’t talk about it directly. One could also say that Beard et al and Kemp et al don’t engage with a lot of relevant literature, which I do discuss in my piece. eg Beard et al doesn’t engage with the literature suggesting that we are not going to run out of phosphorous and soil; Kemp et al doesn’t engage with the literature on assumptions about coal use in integrated assessment models.
(I have a few thoughts on this but it’s being marked as spam for some reason, possibly length. I’m going to post this as a short response and then edit in the content. Please let me know if you can see it.)
Hi John, thanks for the post!
I’ll leave an in-depth response to Gideon, but I have a few points that I think would be helpful to share. In short, your response worries me. I have tried to keep the prose below inoffensive in tone, but there is a trade-off between offensive directness and condescending obfuscation. I hope I have traced the line accurately.
You may not think significant discussion of cascading risks would change the fundamental conclusions of your report, but many researchers, often those with considerably more experience and expertise in climate risk (e.g. the IPCC), do: strongly so. Surely in a book-length report there is room for a few pages?
If you have refuted arguments, is it not academic best practice to cite the papers you respond to? In any case, if you know of and have read the papers, are we to understand that you believe many (if not most) peer-reviewed papers on Global Catastrophic and Existential climate risk are not worth mentioning anywhere in 437 pages of discussion?
This response causes me the most concern. That is simply not what complex systems theory is. Either you are aware that this characterisation is highly inaccurate and unfair, or you are not. If the former, I am disappointed by your (apparent) dismissiveness and willingness to mischaracterise. If the latter, I wonder how you could have done anything close to sufficient research into one of the foundational components of many studies of climate risks.
It is true that there are many conceptual frameworks for climate risk, and in a study of any topic you are generally expected to state, explain, and justify your conceptual framework. This is especially true when the framework you use (i.e. that of the Techno-Utopian Approach) has been strongly critiqued, for instance in Democratising Risk (Cremer and Kemp, 2021), another highly consequential paper you do not appear to have engaged with or cited. The dichotomy of ‘direct’ and indirect’ risks may be exhaustive, but this is not the only criterion for an adequate theoretical framework. To be somewhat, but logically coherently glib, we could make the same argument for categorising phenomena according to whether their names contained an odd or even number of letters.
I also disagree with this point, especially the final sentence, but there is little to engage with: simply assertions. Let us agree to disagree.
Beard et al. and Kemp et al. are each less than 5% of the length of your piece. Of course they cover less ground. There is a difference between a 10- or 20-page paper not mentioning every single caveat in every single work they cite, and one (1) failing to substantively engage with or even cite almost all GCR-specific climate research, (2) not explicitly stating nor justifying one’s methodology in the face of strong critique, and (3) disregarding (in complex systems studies) a massive component of studies of climate risk, wider GCR (e.g. Fisher and Sandberg 2022), and the studies of Earth-system dynamics in general without explanation or justification.
Do you expect to subject this work to peer-review, and if not, why?
The work was reviewed by experts, as I discuss in the other comment.
I do discuss tipping points at some length. I don’t see how the idea of cascading risks would change my substantive conclusions at all. If you want to argue that cascading risks would in fact affect my conclusions, I would be happy to have that debate.
In fairness to me, the Kemp et al paper was only published a couple of weeks ago, so I couldn’t include it in the report. I think much of that paper is incorrect, and the reasons for that are discussed at length in the report. The conclusions of the Beard et al and Richards et al paper are, in my view, refuted mostly in section 5 of my report. If you have a criticism of that section, which largely leans on the latest IPCC report, I would be happy to have that discussion
I have read the Richards et al complex systems paper. It contains the following diagram purporting to show how climate change could cause civilisational collapse
I am open to the possibility that my argument that climate change will not destroy the global food system is wrong. I am happy to discuss substantive criticisms of those arguments. I do not see one in the Richards paper, or in what you have said.
Your critique here seems to me to miss the mark, as illustrated by your own example. If I am assessing biorisk and categorise viruses according to whether they have an odd or even number of letters, then so long as I got my risk assessment right for the odd and even numbered letter viruses, I would have actually evaluated biorisk. I don’t know whether I am taking a ‘techno-utopian approach’ but I thought the Cremer and Kemp paper was not very good and I am not alone in thinking that (it’s also not peer reviewed, if that is the criterion we are using). As I have said, I seldom depart from the IPCC in the report. If you think I do, which of my arguments do you think are wrong?
It’s a bit weird to argue that a 400+ page report is radically incomplete without making any arguments and then to criticise my response as just making assertions. Which of my substantive arguments do you disagree with and why?
It is true that those papers are short but they also do not engage with literature that is inconsistent with most of their main claims. They lean heavily on the idea of planetary boundaries, which is extremely controversial and I argue against at length in the report.
Given the review process was not like normal peer review, would it be possible to have a public copy of all the reviewers comments like we get with the IPCC. This seems like it may br important for epistemic transparency
Indeed, knowing what I know of some of the reviewers Halstead named I am very curious to see what the review process was, what their comments were, and whether they recommended publishing the report as-is.
I’ve always been quite confused about attitudes to scholarly rigour in this community: if the decisions we’re making are so important, shouldn’t we have really robust ways of making sure they’re right?
About planetary boundaries:
Leaving aside the discussions on the specific value and/or variable used to measure a specific boundary -which the authors themselves caveat that may be temporal until finding better ones-, isn’t most of the controversy due to critiques conflating planetary boundaries and tipping points?
META: This + additional comments below from Halstead are strongly suggestive of bad-faith engagement: lazy dismissal without substantive engagement, repeated strawman-ing, Never Play Defense-ing, and accusing his critics of secretly being sockpuppet accounts of known heretics so their views can be ignored.
On the basis of Brandolini’s Law I am going to try to keep my replies as short as I can. If they seem insubstantial, it is likely because I have already responded to the point under discussion elsewhere, or because they are responding to attempts to move the conversation away from the original points of criticism.
I have specific criticisms to make, and I would like to see them addressed rather than ignored, dismissed, or answered only on the condition that I make a whole new set of criticisms for Halstead to also not engage with.
I suggest the reader read Halstead’s response before going back to Gideon’s and my comments. It was useful for me.
Climatic tipping points, cascading risks, and systemic risk are different things and you (hopefully) know it.
If you have refuted arguments made by relevant papers, why didn’t you cite them?
I’m not sure I understand your argument here: you are not under any obligation to discuss opposing perspectives on climate risk because a different paper on climate risk did not explicitly refute an argument that you would go on to make in the future?
In any case, this is not at all what Gideon or I said Your lazy and factually inaccurate dismissal of complex systems theory remains lazy and factually inaccurate. I am not sure where this point about Richards et al. comes into it.
You would have evaluated biorisk if the only possible use of a methodology was making sure you had a comprehensive categorisation system, which (as I hope you know) is not at all true.
I don’t really see how I have not made any arguments here. I suppose I could ask someone if it’s possible to write ‘Please cite your sources.’ in first-order logic.
I would like to hear your justification for how Beard et al, Richards et al, and Kemp et al all lean heavily on the idea of planetary boundaries, and how, if this was true, it would be relevant.
However, I doubt this would go anywhere. I suspect this is simply yet another way of ignoring people who disagree with you without thinking too hard, and relying on the combination of your name-recognition and the average EA’s ignorance of climate change to buy you the ‘Seems like he knows what he’s talking about!’-ness you want.
The moderation team feels that this is unnecessarily hostile and rude, and violates Forum norms. This is a warning; please do better in the future.
How would you prefer people to react when someone acts in bad faith?
What aspects of this comment fall outside those bounds?
Writing this as a moderator, but only expressing my own view.
Accusing someone of acting in bad faith on a public forum can be very damaging to the person, and it’s very easy to be mistaken about such a characterization. Even if the person is acting in bad faith, it might escalate things and make it hard to deal with the underlying problem well.
Instead, it would be better to go through the moderation and community health channels, which you can do by flagging comments/posts or by contacting us directly.
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?
I’m interested to see your in depth response to me
I meant ‘I’ll leave the in-depth response to Gideon’. What you say speaks for itself: if Halstead presented this at a climate science org these would be some of the first questions asked and I’m puzzled (+ a bit weirded out, to be frank) as to why they’re getting such a hostile response.
(Case in point for my comment about downvoting, community hierarchy, and groupthink, below)