I find it interesting that you thought “diversity” is a good shorthand for “social justice”, whereas other EAs naturally interpreted it as “intellectual diversity” or at least thought there’s significant ambiguity in that direction. Seems to say a lot about the current moment in EA...
I don’t think it says much about the current moment in EA. It says a few things about me:
That I generated the initial draft for this post in the middle of the night with no intention of publishing
That I decided to post it in a knowingly imperfect state rather than fiddling around with the language at the risk of never publishing, or publishing well after anyone stopped caring (hence the epistemic status)
That I spend too much time on Twitter, which has more discussion of demographic diversity than other kinds. Much of the English-speaking world also seems to be this way:
For example if there is a slippery slope towards full-scale cancel culture, then your only real choices are to slide to the bottom or avoid taking the first step onto the slope.
Is there such a slope? It seems to me as though cultures and institutions can swing back and forth on this point; Donald Trump’s electoral success is a notable example. Throughout American history, different views have been cancel-worthy; is the Overton Window really narrower now than it was in the 1950s? (I’d be happy to read any arguments for this being a uniquely bad time; I don’t think it’s impossible that a slippery slope does exist, or that this is as bad as cancel culture has been in the modern era.)
It scares me though that someone responsible for a large and prominent part of the EA community (i.e., the EA Forum) can talk about “getting the right balance” without even mentioning the obvious possibility of a slippery slope.
If you have any concerns about specific moderation decisions or other elements of the way the Forum is managed, please let me know! I’d like to think that we’ve hosted a variety of threads on related topics while managing to maintain a better combination of civility and free speech than almost any other online space, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t ways for us to improve.
As for not mentioning the possibility ; had I written for a few more hours, there might have been 50 or 60 bullet points in this piece, and I might have bounced between perspectives a dozen more times, with the phrase “slippery slope” appearing somewhere. As I said above, I chose a relatively arbitrary time to stop, share what I had with others, and then publish.
I’m open to the possibility that a slippery slope is almost universal when institutions and communities tackle these issues, but I also think that attention tends to be drawn to anecdotes that feed the “slippery slope” narrative, so I remain uncertain.
(For people curious about the topic, Ezra Klein’s podcast with Yascha Mounk includes an interesting argument that the Overton Window may have widened since 2000 or so.)
Whew! Because of the Atlantic article today, I am now getting another flood of missives from academics deeply afraid. Folks, I hear you but the volume outstrips my ability to write back. Please know I am reading all of them eventually, and they all make me think.
If you’re not sure whether EA can avoid sharing this fate, shouldn’t figuring that out be like your top priority right now as someone specializing in dealing with the EA culture and community, instead of one out of “50 or 60 bullet points”? (Unless you know that others are already working on the problem, and it sure doesn’t sound like it.)
Having read through them, I’m still not convinced that today’s conditions are worse than those of other eras. It is very easy to find horrible stories of bad epistemics now, but is that because there are more such stories per capita, or because more information is being shared per capita than ever before?
(I should say, before I continue, that many of these stories horrify me — for example, the Yale Halloween incident, which happened the year after I graduated. I’m fighting against my own inclination to assume that things are worse than ever.)
Take John McWhorter’s article. Had a professor in the 1950s written a similar piece, what fraction of the academic population (which is, I assume, much larger today than it was then) might have sent messages to them about e.g. being forced to hide their views on one of that era’s many taboo subjects? What would answers to the survey in the article have looked like?
Or take the “Postcard from Pre-Totalitarian America” you referenced. It’s a chilling anecdote… but also seems wildly exaggerated in many places. Do those young academics actually all believe that America is the most evil country, or that the hijab is liberating? Is he certain that none of his students are cynically repeating mantras the same way he did? Do other professors from a similar background also think the U.S. is worse than the USSR was? Because this is one letter from one person, it’s impossible to tell.
Of course, it could be that things really were better then, but the lack of data from that period bothers me, given the natural human inclination to assume that one’s own time period is worse than prior time periods in various ways. (You can see this on Left Twitter all the time when today’s economic conditions are weighed against those of earlier eras.)
But whether this is the worst time in general isn’t as relevant as:
If you’re not sure whether EA can avoid sharing this fate, shouldn’t figuring that out be like your top priority right now as someone specializing in dealing with the EA culture and community, instead of one out of “50 or 60 bullet points”?
Taking this question literally, there are a huge number of fates I’m not sure EA can avoid sharing, because nothing is certain. Among these fates, “devolving into cancel culture” seems less prominent than other failure conditions that I have also not made my top priority.
This is because my top priority at work is to write and edit things on behalf of other people. I sometimes think about EA cultural/community issues, but mostly because doing so might help me improve the projects I work on, as those are my primary responsibility. This Forum post happened in my free time and isn’t connected to my job, save for that my job led me to read that Twitter thread in the first place and has informed some of my beliefs.
(For what it’s worth, if I had to choose a top issue that might lead EA to “fail”, I’d cite “low or stagnant growth,” which is something I think about a lot, inside and outside of work.)
There are people whose job descriptions include “looking for threats to EA and trying to plan against them.” Some of them are working on problems like the ones that concern you. For example, many aspects of 80K’s anonymous interview series gets into questions about diversity and groupthink (among other relevant topics).
Of course, the interviews are scattered across many subjects, and many potentially great projects in this area haven’t been done. I’d be interested to see someone take on the “cancel culture” question in a more dedicated way, but I’d also like to see someone do this for movement growth, and that seems even more underworked to me.
I know some of the aforementioned people have read this discussion, and I may send it to others if I see additional movement in the “cancel culture” direction. (The EA Munich thing seems like one of a few isolated incidents, and I don’t see a cancel-y trend in EA right now.)
I think the biggest reason I’m worried is that seemingly every non-conservative intellectual or cultural center has fallen prey to cancel culture, e.g., academia, journalism, publishing, museums/arts, tech companies, local governments in left-leaning areas, etc. There are stories about it happening in a crochet group, and I’ve personally seen it in action in my local parent groups. Doesn’t that give you a high enough base rate that you should think “I better assume EA is in serious danger too, unless I can understand why it happened to those places, and why the same mechanisms/dynamics don’t apply to EA”?
Your reasoning (from another comment) is “I’ve seen various incidents that seem worrying, but they don’t seem to form a pattern.” Well if you only get seriously worried once there’s a clear pattern, that may well be too late to do anything about it! Remember that many of those intellectual/cultural centers were once filled with liberals who visibly supported free speech, free inquiry, etc., and many of them would have cared enough to try to do something about cancel culture once they saw a clear pattern of movement in that direction, but that must have been too late already.
For what it’s worth, if I had to choose a top issue that might lead EA to “fail”, I’d cite “low or stagnant growth,” which is something I think about a lot, inside and outside of work.
“Low or stagnant growth” is less worrying to me because that’s something you can always experiment or change course on, if you find yourself facing that problem. In other words you can keep trying until you get it right. With cancel culture though, if you don’t get it right the first time (i.e., you allow cancel culture to take over) then it seems very hard to recover.
I know some of the aforementioned people have read this discussion, and I may send it to others if I see additional movement in the “cancel culture” direction.
Thanks for this information. It does makes it more understandable why you’re personally not focusing on this problem. I still think it should be on or near the top of your mind too though, especially as you think about and discuss related issues like this particular cancellation of Robin Hanson.
I don’t think it says much about the current moment in EA. It says a few things about me:
That I generated the initial draft for this post in the middle of the night with no intention of publishing
That I decided to post it in a knowingly imperfect state rather than fiddling around with the language at the risk of never publishing, or publishing well after anyone stopped caring (hence the epistemic status)
That I spend too much time on Twitter, which has more discussion of demographic diversity than other kinds. Much of the English-speaking world also seems to be this way:
Is there such a slope? It seems to me as though cultures and institutions can swing back and forth on this point; Donald Trump’s electoral success is a notable example. Throughout American history, different views have been cancel-worthy; is the Overton Window really narrower now than it was in the 1950s? (I’d be happy to read any arguments for this being a uniquely bad time; I don’t think it’s impossible that a slippery slope does exist, or that this is as bad as cancel culture has been in the modern era.)
If you have any concerns about specific moderation decisions or other elements of the way the Forum is managed, please let me know! I’d like to think that we’ve hosted a variety of threads on related topics while managing to maintain a better combination of civility and free speech than almost any other online space, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t ways for us to improve.
As for not mentioning the possibility ; had I written for a few more hours, there might have been 50 or 60 bullet points in this piece, and I might have bounced between perspectives a dozen more times, with the phrase “slippery slope” appearing somewhere. As I said above, I chose a relatively arbitrary time to stop, share what I had with others, and then publish.
I’m open to the possibility that a slippery slope is almost universal when institutions and communities tackle these issues, but I also think that attention tends to be drawn to anecdotes that feed the “slippery slope” narrative, so I remain uncertain.
(For people curious about the topic, Ezra Klein’s podcast with Yascha Mounk includes an interesting argument that the Overton Window may have widened since 2000 or so.)
There were extensive discussions around this at https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/PjfsbKrK5MnJDDoFr/have-epistemic-conditions-always-been-this-bad, including one about the 1950s. (Note that those discussions were from before the recent cluster of even more extreme cancellations like David Shor and the utility worker who supposedly made a white power sign.)
ETA: See also this Atlantic article that just came out today, and John McWhorter’s tweet:
If you’re not sure whether EA can avoid sharing this fate, shouldn’t figuring that out be like your top priority right now as someone specializing in dealing with the EA culture and community, instead of one out of “50 or 60 bullet points”? (Unless you know that others are already working on the problem, and it sure doesn’t sound like it.)
Thanks for linking to those discussions.
Having read through them, I’m still not convinced that today’s conditions are worse than those of other eras. It is very easy to find horrible stories of bad epistemics now, but is that because there are more such stories per capita, or because more information is being shared per capita than ever before?
(I should say, before I continue, that many of these stories horrify me — for example, the Yale Halloween incident, which happened the year after I graduated. I’m fighting against my own inclination to assume that things are worse than ever.)
Take John McWhorter’s article. Had a professor in the 1950s written a similar piece, what fraction of the academic population (which is, I assume, much larger today than it was then) might have sent messages to them about e.g. being forced to hide their views on one of that era’s many taboo subjects? What would answers to the survey in the article have looked like?
Or take the “Postcard from Pre-Totalitarian America” you referenced. It’s a chilling anecdote… but also seems wildly exaggerated in many places. Do those young academics actually all believe that America is the most evil country, or that the hijab is liberating? Is he certain that none of his students are cynically repeating mantras the same way he did? Do other professors from a similar background also think the U.S. is worse than the USSR was? Because this is one letter from one person, it’s impossible to tell.
Of course, it could be that things really were better then, but the lack of data from that period bothers me, given the natural human inclination to assume that one’s own time period is worse than prior time periods in various ways. (You can see this on Left Twitter all the time when today’s economic conditions are weighed against those of earlier eras.)
But whether this is the worst time in general isn’t as relevant as:
Taking this question literally, there are a huge number of fates I’m not sure EA can avoid sharing, because nothing is certain. Among these fates, “devolving into cancel culture” seems less prominent than other failure conditions that I have also not made my top priority.
This is because my top priority at work is to write and edit things on behalf of other people. I sometimes think about EA cultural/community issues, but mostly because doing so might help me improve the projects I work on, as those are my primary responsibility. This Forum post happened in my free time and isn’t connected to my job, save for that my job led me to read that Twitter thread in the first place and has informed some of my beliefs.
(For what it’s worth, if I had to choose a top issue that might lead EA to “fail”, I’d cite “low or stagnant growth,” which is something I think about a lot, inside and outside of work.)
There are people whose job descriptions include “looking for threats to EA and trying to plan against them.” Some of them are working on problems like the ones that concern you. For example, many aspects of 80K’s anonymous interview series gets into questions about diversity and groupthink (among other relevant topics).
Of course, the interviews are scattered across many subjects, and many potentially great projects in this area haven’t been done. I’d be interested to see someone take on the “cancel culture” question in a more dedicated way, but I’d also like to see someone do this for movement growth, and that seems even more underworked to me.
I know some of the aforementioned people have read this discussion, and I may send it to others if I see additional movement in the “cancel culture” direction. (The EA Munich thing seems like one of a few isolated incidents, and I don’t see a cancel-y trend in EA right now.)
I think the biggest reason I’m worried is that seemingly every non-conservative intellectual or cultural center has fallen prey to cancel culture, e.g., academia, journalism, publishing, museums/arts, tech companies, local governments in left-leaning areas, etc. There are stories about it happening in a crochet group, and I’ve personally seen it in action in my local parent groups. Doesn’t that give you a high enough base rate that you should think “I better assume EA is in serious danger too, unless I can understand why it happened to those places, and why the same mechanisms/dynamics don’t apply to EA”?
Your reasoning (from another comment) is “I’ve seen various incidents that seem worrying, but they don’t seem to form a pattern.” Well if you only get seriously worried once there’s a clear pattern, that may well be too late to do anything about it! Remember that many of those intellectual/cultural centers were once filled with liberals who visibly supported free speech, free inquiry, etc., and many of them would have cared enough to try to do something about cancel culture once they saw a clear pattern of movement in that direction, but that must have been too late already.
“Low or stagnant growth” is less worrying to me because that’s something you can always experiment or change course on, if you find yourself facing that problem. In other words you can keep trying until you get it right. With cancel culture though, if you don’t get it right the first time (i.e., you allow cancel culture to take over) then it seems very hard to recover.
Thanks for this information. It does makes it more understandable why you’re personally not focusing on this problem. I still think it should be on or near the top of your mind too though, especially as you think about and discuss related issues like this particular cancellation of Robin Hanson.