I just upvoted this comment as I strongly agree with it, but also, it had −1 karma with 2 votes on it when I did so. I think it would be extremely helpful for folks who disagree with this, or otherwise want to downvote it, to talk about why they disagree or downvoted it.
I didn’t downvote it, though probably I should have. But it seems a stretch to say ‘one guy who works for a weird organization that is supposedly EA’ implies ‘congregation’. I think that would have to imply a large number of people. I would be very disappointed if I had a congregation of less than ten people.
JoshYou also ignores important hedging in the linked comment:
Bennett denies this connection; he says he was trying to make friends with these white nationalists in order to get information on them and white nationalism. I think it’s plausible that this is somewhat true.
So instead of saying
We’ve already seen white nationalists congregate in some EA-adjacent spaces.
It would be more fair to say
We’ve already seen one guy with some evidence he is a white nationalist (though he somewhat plausibly denies it) work for a weird organization that has some EA links.
Which is clearly much less worrying. There are lots of weird ideologies and a lot of weird people in California, who believe a lot of very incorrect things. I would be surprised if ‘white nationalists’ were really high up on the list of threats to EA, especially given how extremely left wing EA is and how low status they are. We probably have a lot more communists! Rather, I think the highlighting of ‘White Nationalists’ is being done for ideological reasons—i.e. to cast shade on more moderate right wing people by using a term that is practically a slur. I think the grandparent would not have made such a sloppy comment had it not been about the hated outgroup.
I also agree that it’s ridiculous when left-wingers smear everyone on the right as Nazis, white nationalists, whatever. I’m not talking about conservatives, or the “IDW”, or people who don’t like the BLM movement or think racism is no big deal. I’d be quite happy for more right-of-center folks to join EA. I do mean literal white nationalists (like on par with the views in Jonah Bennett’s leaked emails. I don’t think his defense is credible at all, by the way).
I don’t think it’s accurate to see white nationalists in online communities as just the right tail that develops organically from a wide distribution of political views. White nationalists are more organized than that and have their own social networks (precisely because they’re not just really conservative conservatives). Regular conservatives outnumber white nationalists by orders of magnitude in the general public, but I don’t think that implies that white nationalists will be virtually non-existent in a space just because the majority are left of center.
Describing members of Leverage as “white nationalists” strikes me as pretty extreme, to the level of dishonesty, and is not even backed up by the comment that was linked. I thought Buck’s initial comment was also pretty bad, and he did indeed correct his comment, which is a correction that I appreciate, and I feel like any comment that links to it should obviously also take into account the correction.
I have interfaced a lot with people at Leverage, and while I have many issues with the organization, saying that many white nationalists congregate there, and have congregated in the past, just strikes me as really unlikely.
Buck’s comment also says at the bottom:
Edited to add (Oct 08 2019): I wrote “which makes me think that it’s likely that Leverage at least for a while had a whole lot of really racist employees.” I think this was mistaken and I’m confused by why I wrote it. I endorse the claim “I think it’s plausible Leverage had like five really racist employees”. I feel pretty bad about this mistake and apologize to anyone harmed by it.
I also want us to separate “really racist” from “white nationalist” which are just really not the same term, and which appear to me to be conflated via the link above.
I also have other issues with the rest of the comment (namely being constantly worried about communists or nazis hiding everywhere, and generally bringing up nazi comparisons in these discussions, tends to reliably derail things and make it harder to discuss these things well, since there are few conversational moves as mindkilling as accusing the other side to be nazis or communists. It’s not that there are never nazis or communists, but if you want to have a good conversation, it’s better to avoid nazi or communist comparisons until you really have no other choice, or you can really really commit to handling the topic in an open-minded way.)
My description was based on Buck’s correction (I don’t have any first-hand knowledge). I think a few white nationalists congregated at Leverage, not that most Leverage employees are white nationalists, which I don’t believe. I don’t mean to imply anything stronger than what Buck claimed about Leverage.
I invoked white nationalists not as a hypothetical representative of ideologies I don’t like but quite deliberately, because they literally exist in substantial numbers in EA-adjacent online spaces and they could view EA as fertile ground if the EA community had different moderation and discursive norms. (Edited to avoid potential collateral reputational damage) I think the neo-reactionary community and their adjacency to rationalist networks are a clear example.
Just to be clear, I don’t think even most neoreactionaries would classify as white nationalists? Though maybe now we are arguing over the definition of white nationalism, which is definitely a vague term and could be interpreted many ways. I was thinking about it from the perspective of racism, though I can imagine a much broader definition that includes something more like “advocating for nations based on values historically associated with whiteness”, which would obviously include neoreaction, but would also presumably be a much more tenable position in discourse. So for now I am going to assume you mean something much more straightforwardly based on racial superiority, which also appears to be the Wikipedia definition.
I’ve debated with a number of neoreactionaries, and I’ve never seen them bring up much stuff about racial superiority. Usually just arguing against democracy and in favor of centralized control and various arguments derived from that, though I also don’t have a ton of datapoints. There is definitely a focus on the superiority of western culture in their writing and rhetoric, much of which is flawed and I am deeply opposed to many of the things I’ve seen at least some neoreactionaries propose, but my sense is that I wouldn’t characterize the philosophy fundamentally as white nationalist in the racist sense of the term. Though of course the few neoreactionaries that I have debated are probably selected in various ways that reduces the likelihood of having extreme opinions on these dimensions (though they are also the ones that are most likely to engage with EA, so I do think the sample should carry substantial weight).
Of course, some neoreactionaries are also going to be white nationalists, and being a neoreactionary will probably correlate with white nationalism at least a bit, but my guess is that at least the people adjacent to EA and Rationality that I’ve seen engage with that philosophy haven’t been very focused on white nationalism, and I’ve frequently seen them actively argue against it.
I think that it seems like accusations of EA associations with white supremacy of various sorts come up enough to be pretty concerning.
I also think the claims would be equally concerning if JoshYou had said “white supremacists” or “really racist people” instead of “white nationalists” in the original post, so I feel uncertain that Buck stepping back the original post actually lessens the degree we ought to be concerned?
I also have other issues with the rest of the comment (namely being constantly worried about communists or nazis hiding everywhere, and generally bringing up nazi comparisons in these discussions, tends to reliably derail things and make it harder to discuss these things well, since there are few conversational moves as mindkilling as accusing the other side to be nazis or communists. It’s not that there are never nazis or communists, but if you want to have a good conversation, it’s better to avoid nazi or communist comparisons until you really have no other choice, or you can really really commit to handling the topic in an open-minded way.)
I didn’t really see the Nazi comparisons (I guess saying white nationalist is sort of one, but I personally associate white nationalism as a phrase much more with individuals in the US than Nazis, though that may be biased by being American).
I guess broadly a trend I feel like I’ve seen lately is occasionally people writing about witnessing racism in the EA community, and having what seem like really genuine concerns, and then those basically not being discussed (at least on the EA Forum) or being framed as shutting down conversation.
I just upvoted this comment as I strongly agree with it, but also, it had −1 karma with 2 votes on it when I did so. I think it would be extremely helpful for folks who disagree with this, or otherwise want to downvote it, to talk about why they disagree or downvoted it.
I didn’t downvote it, though probably I should have. But it seems a stretch to say ‘one guy who works for a weird organization that is supposedly EA’ implies ‘congregation’. I think that would have to imply a large number of people. I would be very disappointed if I had a congregation of less than ten people.
JoshYou also ignores important hedging in the linked comment:
So instead of saying
It would be more fair to say
Which is clearly much less worrying. There are lots of weird ideologies and a lot of weird people in California, who believe a lot of very incorrect things. I would be surprised if ‘white nationalists’ were really high up on the list of threats to EA, especially given how extremely left wing EA is and how low status they are. We probably have a lot more communists! Rather, I think the highlighting of ‘White Nationalists’ is being done for ideological reasons—i.e. to cast shade on more moderate right wing people by using a term that is practically a slur. I think the grandparent would not have made such a sloppy comment had it not been about the hated outgroup.
I also agree that it’s ridiculous when left-wingers smear everyone on the right as Nazis, white nationalists, whatever. I’m not talking about conservatives, or the “IDW”, or people who don’t like the BLM movement or think racism is no big deal. I’d be quite happy for more right-of-center folks to join EA. I do mean literal white nationalists (like on par with the views in Jonah Bennett’s leaked emails. I don’t think his defense is credible at all, by the way).
I don’t think it’s accurate to see white nationalists in online communities as just the right tail that develops organically from a wide distribution of political views. White nationalists are more organized than that and have their own social networks (precisely because they’re not just really conservative conservatives). Regular conservatives outnumber white nationalists by orders of magnitude in the general public, but I don’t think that implies that white nationalists will be virtually non-existent in a space just because the majority are left of center.
Describing members of Leverage as “white nationalists” strikes me as pretty extreme, to the level of dishonesty, and is not even backed up by the comment that was linked. I thought Buck’s initial comment was also pretty bad, and he did indeed correct his comment, which is a correction that I appreciate, and I feel like any comment that links to it should obviously also take into account the correction.
I have interfaced a lot with people at Leverage, and while I have many issues with the organization, saying that many white nationalists congregate there, and have congregated in the past, just strikes me as really unlikely.
Buck’s comment also says at the bottom:
I also want us to separate “really racist” from “white nationalist” which are just really not the same term, and which appear to me to be conflated via the link above.
I also have other issues with the rest of the comment (namely being constantly worried about communists or nazis hiding everywhere, and generally bringing up nazi comparisons in these discussions, tends to reliably derail things and make it harder to discuss these things well, since there are few conversational moves as mindkilling as accusing the other side to be nazis or communists. It’s not that there are never nazis or communists, but if you want to have a good conversation, it’s better to avoid nazi or communist comparisons until you really have no other choice, or you can really really commit to handling the topic in an open-minded way.)
My description was based on Buck’s correction (I don’t have any first-hand knowledge). I think a few white nationalists congregated at Leverage, not that most Leverage employees are white nationalists, which I don’t believe. I don’t mean to imply anything stronger than what Buck claimed about Leverage.
I invoked white nationalists not as a hypothetical representative of ideologies I don’t like but quite deliberately, because they literally exist in substantial numbers in EA-adjacent online spaces and they could view EA as fertile ground if the EA community had different moderation and discursive norms. (Edited to avoid potential collateral reputational damage) I think the neo-reactionary community and their adjacency to rationalist networks are a clear example.
Just to be clear, I don’t think even most neoreactionaries would classify as white nationalists? Though maybe now we are arguing over the definition of white nationalism, which is definitely a vague term and could be interpreted many ways. I was thinking about it from the perspective of racism, though I can imagine a much broader definition that includes something more like “advocating for nations based on values historically associated with whiteness”, which would obviously include neoreaction, but would also presumably be a much more tenable position in discourse. So for now I am going to assume you mean something much more straightforwardly based on racial superiority, which also appears to be the Wikipedia definition.
I’ve debated with a number of neoreactionaries, and I’ve never seen them bring up much stuff about racial superiority. Usually just arguing against democracy and in favor of centralized control and various arguments derived from that, though I also don’t have a ton of datapoints. There is definitely a focus on the superiority of western culture in their writing and rhetoric, much of which is flawed and I am deeply opposed to many of the things I’ve seen at least some neoreactionaries propose, but my sense is that I wouldn’t characterize the philosophy fundamentally as white nationalist in the racist sense of the term. Though of course the few neoreactionaries that I have debated are probably selected in various ways that reduces the likelihood of having extreme opinions on these dimensions (though they are also the ones that are most likely to engage with EA, so I do think the sample should carry substantial weight).
Of course, some neoreactionaries are also going to be white nationalists, and being a neoreactionary will probably correlate with white nationalism at least a bit, but my guess is that at least the people adjacent to EA and Rationality that I’ve seen engage with that philosophy haven’t been very focused on white nationalism, and I’ve frequently seen them actively argue against it.
Thanks for elaborating!
I think that it seems like accusations of EA associations with white supremacy of various sorts come up enough to be pretty concerning.
I also think the claims would be equally concerning if JoshYou had said “white supremacists” or “really racist people” instead of “white nationalists” in the original post, so I feel uncertain that Buck stepping back the original post actually lessens the degree we ought to be concerned?
I didn’t really see the Nazi comparisons (I guess saying white nationalist is sort of one, but I personally associate white nationalism as a phrase much more with individuals in the US than Nazis, though that may be biased by being American).
I guess broadly a trend I feel like I’ve seen lately is occasionally people writing about witnessing racism in the EA community, and having what seem like really genuine concerns, and then those basically not being discussed (at least on the EA Forum) or being framed as shutting down conversation.