EDIT: I realized that discussing this will not help me do more good or live a happier life so I’d rather not, but I’ll leave it up for the record. You are welcome to reply to it.
Something I don’t see discussed here is that there’s a difference between
a) not inviting a live speaker who has a history of being unpredictable and insensitive
compared to
b) refusing to engage with any of their ideas.
At this point, for my own mental health, I would not engage with Robin Hanson. If I knew he were going to be at an event and I’d have to interact with him, I wouldn’t go. But I still might read one of his books—they’ve been through an editing process so I trust them to be more sensitive and more useful.
I see a lot of people saying “no one involved with EA would really object to Robin Hanson at an event” but there are actually a lot of us. And you can insult me however you want to—you can say that this makes me small-minded or irrational—but that won’t make it an “effective” use of my time to hang around someone who’s consistently unkind.
I appreciate you writing this and leaving it up, I feel basically the same (including the edit, so I’m pretty unlikely to reply to further comments) but felt better having seen your post, and think that you writing it was, in fact, doing good in this case (at least in making me and probably others not feel further separated from the community).
a) Thinking that a speaker shouldn’t be allowed to speak at an event
b) Deciding not to attend an event with a confirmed speaker because you don’t like their ideas
For the first half of your comment I thought you fell into camp b) but not camp a). However your last paragraph seems to imply you fall into both camps.
Personally I would not want a person to speak at an EA event if I thought they were likely to cause reputational damage to EA. In this particular case I (tentatively) don’t think Hanson would have. Sure he’s said some questionable things, but he was being invited to talk about tort law and I fail to see how allowing that signals condoning his questionable ideas. Therefore I would probably have let him speak and anyone who didn’t want to hear him would obviously have been free to not attend.
It seems to me that people often imply that personally finding a speaker beyond the pale means that the speaker shouldn’t be allowed to speak to anyone. I’ve always found this slightly odd.
Personally, I feel the same. I can engage with Robin’s ideas online. I think he produces some interesting content. Also, some dumb content. I can choose to learn from either. I can notice if he ‘offends’ me and then decide I’m still interested in whether what he has to say might be useful somehow. …That doesn’t mean I have to invite the guy over to my house to talk with me about his ideas, because I realize that I wouldn’t enjoy being around him in person. I think this is more common than people realize among people who know Robin. If Munich wanted to read and discuss his stuff, but not invite him to ‘hang out,’ I get it.
Thank you for writing it and keeping this up. I think it’s really valuable that people share the discomfort they feel around the way some people discuss. I wonder if Kelsey Piper’s discussion of competing access needs and safe spaces captures the issue at hand.
Competing access needs is the idea that some people, in order to be able to participate in a community, need one thing, and other people need a conflicting thing (source)
For some people it is really valuable to have a space where one can discuss sensitive topics without caring about offense, where taking offense is discouraged because it would hinder progressing the arguments. Maybe even a space where one is encouraged to let one’s mind go to places that are uncomfortable, to develop one’s thinking around topics where social norms discourage you to go.
For others, a space like this would be distressing, depressing and demotivating. A space like this might offer a few insights, but they seem not worth the emotional costs and there seem to be many other topics to explore from an EA perspective, so why spend any time there.
I also hope that it is very easy for people to avoid spaces like this at EA conferences, e.g. to avoid a talk by Robin Hanson (though from the few talks of him that I saw I think his talks are much less “edgy” than the discussed blog posts). I wonder if it would be useful to tag sessions at an EA conference that would belong into the described space, or if people mostly correctly avoid sessions they would find discomforting already.
One idea in the direction of making discussion norms explicit that just came to my mind are Crocker’s rules.
By declaring commitment to Crocker’s rules, one authorizes other debaters to optimize their messages for information, even when this entails that emotional feelings will be disregarded. This means that you have accepted full responsibility for the operation of your own mind, so that if you’re offended, it’s your own fault.
I’ve heard that some people are unhappy with those rules. Maybe because they seem to signal what Khorton alluded to: “Oh, of course I can accommodate your small-minded irrational sensitivities if you don’t want a message optimized for information”. I know that they are/were used in the LessWrong Community Weekends in Berlin, where you would where a “Crocker’s rules” sticker on your nametag.
EDIT: I realized that discussing this will not help me do more good or live a happier life so I’d rather not, but I’ll leave it up for the record. You are welcome to reply to it.
Something I don’t see discussed here is that there’s a difference between a) not inviting a live speaker who has a history of being unpredictable and insensitive compared to b) refusing to engage with any of their ideas.
At this point, for my own mental health, I would not engage with Robin Hanson. If I knew he were going to be at an event and I’d have to interact with him, I wouldn’t go. But I still might read one of his books—they’ve been through an editing process so I trust them to be more sensitive and more useful.
I see a lot of people saying “no one involved with EA would really object to Robin Hanson at an event” but there are actually a lot of us. And you can insult me however you want to—you can say that this makes me small-minded or irrational—but that won’t make it an “effective” use of my time to hang around someone who’s consistently unkind.
I appreciate you writing this and leaving it up, I feel basically the same (including the edit, so I’m pretty unlikely to reply to further comments) but felt better having seen your post, and think that you writing it was, in fact, doing good in this case (at least in making me and probably others not feel further separated from the community).
I think there’s another difference between:
a) Thinking that a speaker shouldn’t be allowed to speak at an event
b) Deciding not to attend an event with a confirmed speaker because you don’t like their ideas
For the first half of your comment I thought you fell into camp b) but not camp a). However your last paragraph seems to imply you fall into both camps.
Personally I would not want a person to speak at an EA event if I thought they were likely to cause reputational damage to EA. In this particular case I (tentatively) don’t think Hanson would have. Sure he’s said some questionable things, but he was being invited to talk about tort law and I fail to see how allowing that signals condoning his questionable ideas. Therefore I would probably have let him speak and anyone who didn’t want to hear him would obviously have been free to not attend.
It seems to me that people often imply that personally finding a speaker beyond the pale means that the speaker shouldn’t be allowed to speak to anyone. I’ve always found this slightly odd.
Personally, I feel the same. I can engage with Robin’s ideas online. I think he produces some interesting content. Also, some dumb content. I can choose to learn from either. I can notice if he ‘offends’ me and then decide I’m still interested in whether what he has to say might be useful somehow. …That doesn’t mean I have to invite the guy over to my house to talk with me about his ideas, because I realize that I wouldn’t enjoy being around him in person. I think this is more common than people realize among people who know Robin. If Munich wanted to read and discuss his stuff, but not invite him to ‘hang out,’ I get it.
Thank you for writing it and keeping this up. I think it’s really valuable that people share the discomfort they feel around the way some people discuss. I wonder if Kelsey Piper’s discussion of competing access needs and safe spaces captures the issue at hand.
For some people it is really valuable to have a space where one can discuss sensitive topics without caring about offense, where taking offense is discouraged because it would hinder progressing the arguments. Maybe even a space where one is encouraged to let one’s mind go to places that are uncomfortable, to develop one’s thinking around topics where social norms discourage you to go.
For others, a space like this would be distressing, depressing and demotivating. A space like this might offer a few insights, but they seem not worth the emotional costs and there seem to be many other topics to explore from an EA perspective, so why spend any time there.
I also hope that it is very easy for people to avoid spaces like this at EA conferences, e.g. to avoid a talk by Robin Hanson (though from the few talks of him that I saw I think his talks are much less “edgy” than the discussed blog posts). I wonder if it would be useful to tag sessions at an EA conference that would belong into the described space, or if people mostly correctly avoid sessions they would find discomforting already.
One idea in the direction of making discussion norms explicit that just came to my mind are Crocker’s rules.
I’ve heard that some people are unhappy with those rules. Maybe because they seem to signal what Khorton alluded to: “Oh, of course I can accommodate your small-minded irrational sensitivities if you don’t want a message optimized for information”. I know that they are/were used in the LessWrong Community Weekends in Berlin, where you would where a “Crocker’s rules” sticker on your nametag.