I don’t think armchair diagnosis of the alleged psychiatric disorders of EA critics (or much of anyone, for that matter) is an appropriate activity for the Forum.
Man, this sure is a dicy topic, but I do think it’s pretty likely that Torres has a personality disorder, and that modeling these kinds of things is often important.
A while ago we had a conversation on the forum on whether Elon Musk might be (at least somewhat) autistic. A number of people pushed back on this as ungrounded speculation and as irrelevant in a way that seemed highly confused to me, since like, being autistic has huge effects on how you make decisions and how you relate to the world, and Musk has been a relevant player in many EA-adjacent cause areas for quite a while.
I do think there is some trickiness in talking about this kind of stuff, but talking about someone’s internal mental makeup can often be really important. Indeed, lots of people were saying to me in-person that they were modeling SBF as a sociopath, and implying that they would not feel comfortable giving that description in public, since that’s rude. I think in this case that diagnosis sure would have been really helpful and I think our norms against bringing up this kind of stuff harmed us quite a bit.
To be clear I am not advocating for a culture of psychologizing everyone. I think that’s terrible, and a lot of the worse interactions I’ve had with people external to the community have been people who have tried to dismiss various risks from artificial intelligence through various psychologizing lenses like “these people are power-obsessed, which is why they think an AI will want to dominate everyone”, which… are really not helpful and seem just straightforwardly very wrong to me, while also being very hard to respond to.
I don’t currently have a great proposal for norms for discussing this kind of stuff, especially as an attack (I feel less bad about the Elon autism discussion, since like, Elon identifies at least partially as autistic and I don’t think he would see it as an insult). Seems hard. My current guess is that it must be OK to at some point, after engaging extensively with someone’s object-level arguments, to bring up more psychologizing explanations and intuitions, but that it currently should come pretty late, after the object-level has been responded to and relatively thoroughly explored. I think this is the case with Torres, but not the case with many other people.
Yeah, I don’t want to make a claim that reference to an individual’s mental condition would be categorically inappropriate. However, I think at a minimum there needs to be a reason for making the assertion that furthers an important interest, that the assertion is tailored to that interest, and that there isn’t a clear yet less inflammatory & invasive way to get the information across.
I think there are few cases in which this test would be met as applied to a critic. Saying that the critic has a long history of dishonest, volatile, paranoid, or whatever kind of behavior (and showing the receipts where appropriate) is more convincing to explaining why people shouldn’t engage than a thinly-supported armchair diagnosis.
While I don’t agree with everything in that quote, I do see some points of convergence—there is awareness of downsides, consideration of what is potentially to be gained from the discussion, a suggestion that this should not occur without significant object-level engagement first, and some sense of narrow tailoring (insofar as discussion of “psychologizing explanations and intuitions” is more narrowly tailored than trotting out a stigmatized DSM/ICD diagnosis).
This is quokka logic. With Torres in particular it’s an incredibly obvious motivation for why he does what he does. If this were more widely known, he would not get nearly the amount of press attention that he does. Instead people like this get to pose in the press as sane and sober critics because they can put together barely-coherent critiques and journalists don’t know the backstory. See https://markfuentes1.substack.com/p/emile-p-torress-history-of-dishonesty, which everyone should be signal boosting aggressively on a regular basis.
He is a biological male who displays the kind of sustained malignant aggression that is vastly more common from males than females. The male pronoun is both correct and usefully informative!
To be clear, I’m not commenting on the more complex questions discussed elsewhere in the thread, such as whether or when it’s appropriate to speculate about someone’s psychology. But I do want to flag that mental illness is often stigmatised and we should probably be especially sensitive and compassionate when discussing it.
As a reminder, the ban affects the user, not the account. During their ban period, the user will not be permitted to rejoin the Forum under another account name. If they return to the Forum, we’ll expect a higher standard of norm-following.
You can reach out to forum-moderation@effectivealtruism.org with any questions. You can appeal the decision here.
I find it notable that this announcement would be at −1 if not for my strong upvote. The suspended user doubled-down on misgendering Torres after being asked to correct it. Are people complaining about the strong norm against intentional misgendering, or is the downvoting reflective of some sort of belief in a “Torres exception” to that norm?
And I can’t believe it needs saying, but a “Torres exception” is not a good idea here. Even completely disregarding Torres’ own feelings there are a lot of people who are not Emile Torres which those lines of attack stigmatise.
Also when, the fundamental complaint about someone is that they repeatedly make uncharitable and probably false claims about people’s true motivations and engage in odd personal attacks on people they might legitimately be unimpressed by, adding a drive-by pop-diagnosis of a mental health condition and a nasty observation on their gender identity doesn’t strengthen that observation, it just sets off the irony meter...
It seems reasonably clear that there are certain psychiatric disorders such that people would be justified in refusing to engage with, or dismiss the claims of, those who suffer from them. I think the epistemically sound norm would be to ask those who argue that someone suffers from such a disorder to provide adequate evidence for the allegation.
The armchair diagnosis doesn’t add anything to the behavior offered in support of it. If someone has a history of deceptive behavior, extreme emotional instability, seemingly delusional behavior, whatever, then that is the potential reason to disengage. What’s the marginal benefit here to justify the various harms of armchair diagnosis?
That seems like a fully general counterargument against relying on medical diagnoses for anything. There are always facts that confirm a diagnosis, and then the diagnosis itself. Presumably, it is often helpful to argue that the facts confirm the diagnosis instead of simply listing the facts alone. I don’t see any principled reason for eschewing diagnoses when they are being used to support the conclusion that someone’s testimony or arguments should be distrusted.
“Ok this guy is actually right about Torres, but I still have to pontificate about the non-existent harms of armchair diagnosis rather than just admit it”
(what harms? This particular individual isn’t going to get any worse because I gave him an entirely accurate diagnosis, and while psychiatric diagnoses are invariably more fuzzy clusters than precise categories, there’s absolutely no reason not to engage in justified pattern-matching when you have sufficient evidence, which we really do in this case. No one goes around saying “Will MacAskill has a PhD and has written multiple well-received books”, we just say “Will MacAskill is a smart guy”, even though “smart” is also a pretty fuzzy category!)
Being smart isn’t stigmatized. Having borderline personality disorder definitely is.
There is a tendency in broader society to use armchair diagnosis to demean and belittle people with whom one disagrees. That increases stigma for people who do have mental health conditions.
A person’s medical conditions are private, so speculating as to what conditions they may have is ordinarily an invasion of that privacy.
There’s even a rule of medical ethics for psychiatrists that they—who are arguably qualified to be handing out armchair diagnoses—not to do so. While I don’t always agree with that rule where the opinion is offered to voters considering the mental health of a candidate for president (which was the original context), I think it quite sound here.
As potentially relevant here, the differential includes particularly bipolar spectrum disorders, but also major depression, schizophrenia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder.
If one of the ways a person is acting unusually is holding grudges against people they once thought highly of (or against movements they were formerly a part of), I’d also consider NPD and pathological narcissism for the differential diagnosis (the latter has a vulnerable subtype that has some overlap with BPD but is separate construct). I’m adding this to underscore your point that a specific diagnosis is difficult without a lot of context.
I also agree with not wanting to add to the stigma against people with personality disorders. A stigma means some commonly held association that is either wrong or unfairly negative. I think the risk with talking about diagnoses instead of specific symptoms is that this can unfairly harm the reputation of other people with the same diagnosis. BPD in particular has 9 symptom criteria, of which people have to only meet 5 in order to be diagnosed. So, you can have two people with BPD who share 1 symptom out of 9.
Another way in which talk about personality disorders can be stigmatizing is if the implication or connotation is something like “this person is irredeemable.” To avoid this connotation (if we were to armchair-diagnose people at all), I would add caveats like “untreated” or “and they seem to lack insight.” Treatment success for BPD without comorbid narcissism is actually high, and for NPD it’s more difficult but I wouldn’t completely give up hope.
Edit: Overall, I should say that I still agree with the comments that sometimes it can make sense to highlight that a person’s destructive behavior makes up a pattern and is more unusual than what you see in conflicts between people without personality disorders. However, I don’t know if it is ever necessary for forum users to make confident claims about what specific type of cluster b personality disorder (or other, related condition) someone may have. More generally, for the reasons I mentioned in the discussion around stigma, I would prefer if this subject was handled with more care than SuperDuperForecasting was giving it. I overall didn’t downvote their initial comment because I think something in the vicinity of what they said is an important hypothesis to put out there, but SuperDuperForecasting is IMO hurting their own cause/camp in the way they were talking about it.
I don’t think armchair diagnosis of the alleged psychiatric disorders of EA critics (or much of anyone, for that matter) is an appropriate activity for the Forum.
For what it’s worth, I endorse @Habryka’s old comment on this issue:
Yeah, I don’t want to make a claim that reference to an individual’s mental condition would be categorically inappropriate. However, I think at a minimum there needs to be a reason for making the assertion that furthers an important interest, that the assertion is tailored to that interest, and that there isn’t a clear yet less inflammatory & invasive way to get the information across.
I think there are few cases in which this test would be met as applied to a critic. Saying that the critic has a long history of dishonest, volatile, paranoid, or whatever kind of behavior (and showing the receipts where appropriate) is more convincing to explaining why people shouldn’t engage than a thinly-supported armchair diagnosis.
While I don’t agree with everything in that quote, I do see some points of convergence—there is awareness of downsides, consideration of what is potentially to be gained from the discussion, a suggestion that this should not occur without significant object-level engagement first, and some sense of narrow tailoring (insofar as discussion of “psychologizing explanations and intuitions” is more narrowly tailored than trotting out a stigmatized DSM/ICD diagnosis).
This is quokka logic. With Torres in particular it’s an incredibly obvious motivation for why he does what he does. If this were more widely known, he would not get nearly the amount of press attention that he does. Instead people like this get to pose in the press as sane and sober critics because they can put together barely-coherent critiques and journalists don’t know the backstory. See https://markfuentes1.substack.com/p/emile-p-torress-history-of-dishonesty, which everyone should be signal boosting aggressively on a regular basis.
As an aside, Torres uses they/them pronouns. Could you correct your comments?
He is a biological male who displays the kind of sustained malignant aggression that is vastly more common from males than females. The male pronoun is both correct and usefully informative!
We’re issuing SuperDuperForecasting a one-month ban for breaking strong Forum norms in several comments (1,2). Specifically:
Intentionally misgendering someone (see more about how a moderator thinks about this here).
Engaging in unnecessary rudeness and offensiveness.
To be clear, I’m not commenting on the more complex questions discussed elsewhere in the thread, such as whether or when it’s appropriate to speculate about someone’s psychology. But I do want to flag that mental illness is often stigmatised and we should probably be especially sensitive and compassionate when discussing it.
As a reminder, the ban affects the user, not the account. During their ban period, the user will not be permitted to rejoin the Forum under another account name. If they return to the Forum, we’ll expect a higher standard of norm-following.
You can reach out to forum-moderation@effectivealtruism.org with any questions. You can appeal the decision here.
I find it notable that this announcement would be at −1 if not for my strong upvote. The suspended user doubled-down on misgendering Torres after being asked to correct it. Are people complaining about the strong norm against intentional misgendering, or is the downvoting reflective of some sort of belief in a “Torres exception” to that norm?
And I can’t believe it needs saying, but a “Torres exception” is not a good idea here. Even completely disregarding Torres’ own feelings there are a lot of people who are not Emile Torres which those lines of attack stigmatise.
Also when, the fundamental complaint about someone is that they repeatedly make uncharitable and probably false claims about people’s true motivations and engage in odd personal attacks on people they might legitimately be unimpressed by, adding a drive-by pop-diagnosis of a mental health condition and a nasty observation on their gender identity doesn’t strengthen that observation, it just sets off the irony meter...
It seems reasonably clear that there are certain psychiatric disorders such that people would be justified in refusing to engage with, or dismiss the claims of, those who suffer from them. I think the epistemically sound norm would be to ask those who argue that someone suffers from such a disorder to provide adequate evidence for the allegation.
The armchair diagnosis doesn’t add anything to the behavior offered in support of it. If someone has a history of deceptive behavior, extreme emotional instability, seemingly delusional behavior, whatever, then that is the potential reason to disengage. What’s the marginal benefit here to justify the various harms of armchair diagnosis?
That seems like a fully general counterargument against relying on medical diagnoses for anything. There are always facts that confirm a diagnosis, and then the diagnosis itself. Presumably, it is often helpful to argue that the facts confirm the diagnosis instead of simply listing the facts alone. I don’t see any principled reason for eschewing diagnoses when they are being used to support the conclusion that someone’s testimony or arguments should be distrusted.
“Ok this guy is actually right about Torres, but I still have to pontificate about the non-existent harms of armchair diagnosis rather than just admit it”
(what harms? This particular individual isn’t going to get any worse because I gave him an entirely accurate diagnosis, and while psychiatric diagnoses are invariably more fuzzy clusters than precise categories, there’s absolutely no reason not to engage in justified pattern-matching when you have sufficient evidence, which we really do in this case. No one goes around saying “Will MacAskill has a PhD and has written multiple well-received books”, we just say “Will MacAskill is a smart guy”, even though “smart” is also a pretty fuzzy category!)
Being smart isn’t stigmatized. Having borderline personality disorder definitely is.
There is a tendency in broader society to use armchair diagnosis to demean and belittle people with whom one disagrees. That increases stigma for people who do have mental health conditions.
A person’s medical conditions are private, so speculating as to what conditions they may have is ordinarily an invasion of that privacy.
I have no idea what your professional qualifications are, but differential diagnosis of mental disorders is actually not easy. As potentially relevant here, the differential includes particularly bipolar spectrum disorders, but also major depression, schizophrenia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder.
There’s even a rule of medical ethics for psychiatrists that they—who are arguably qualified to be handing out armchair diagnoses—not to do so. While I don’t always agree with that rule where the opinion is offered to voters considering the mental health of a candidate for president (which was the original context), I think it quite sound here.
If one of the ways a person is acting unusually is holding grudges against people they once thought highly of (or against movements they were formerly a part of), I’d also consider NPD and pathological narcissism for the differential diagnosis (the latter has a vulnerable subtype that has some overlap with BPD but is separate construct). I’m adding this to underscore your point that a specific diagnosis is difficult without a lot of context.
I also agree with not wanting to add to the stigma against people with personality disorders. A stigma means some commonly held association that is either wrong or unfairly negative. I think the risk with talking about diagnoses instead of specific symptoms is that this can unfairly harm the reputation of other people with the same diagnosis. BPD in particular has 9 symptom criteria, of which people have to only meet 5 in order to be diagnosed. So, you can have two people with BPD who share 1 symptom out of 9.
Another way in which talk about personality disorders can be stigmatizing is if the implication or connotation is something like “this person is irredeemable.” To avoid this connotation (if we were to armchair-diagnose people at all), I would add caveats like “untreated” or “and they seem to lack insight.” Treatment success for BPD without comorbid narcissism is actually high, and for NPD it’s more difficult but I wouldn’t completely give up hope.
Edit: Overall, I should say that I still agree with the comments that sometimes it can make sense to highlight that a person’s destructive behavior makes up a pattern and is more unusual than what you see in conflicts between people without personality disorders. However, I don’t know if it is ever necessary for forum users to make confident claims about what specific type of cluster b personality disorder (or other, related condition) someone may have. More generally, for the reasons I mentioned in the discussion around stigma, I would prefer if this subject was handled with more care than SuperDuperForecasting was giving it. I overall didn’t downvote their initial comment because I think something in the vicinity of what they said is an important hypothesis to put out there, but SuperDuperForecasting is IMO hurting their own cause/camp in the way they were talking about it.