Edit: I responded to this comment after someone reported it, and hadn’t seen Denise’s comment at the time. She sums up one of the points I try to make here better than I did.
Second edit: I think Habryka’s comment is a really good example of how to make a similar point to what Dale aimed for, with enough additional supporting evidence to abide by the Forum’s rules.
Having read Habryka’s comment and internalized how probable the risks of adoption can be, I appreciate Dale’s comment more in retrospect. While I still don’t like the way the argument for high abuse risk was presented, I could have done more to acknowledge that the spirit of the comment was “I’m taking a risk by writing a controversial comment because I see someone doing something I think is dangerous” — execution aside, this type of content is really valuable.
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Moderator here!
While this comment seems to be well-intentioned, it also takes the form of:
“I would like to help someone.”
“No, you shouldn’t do that. They might be a dangerous person who will hurt someone you love.”
This kind of argument demands better data than is present in this comment, which takes an (unlinked) statistic and extrapolates it to a fairly different scenario.
Please don’t use this kind of reasoning to make negative claims about entire groups of people (e.g. teenagers who are available for adoption).
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Taking the mod hat off in this section, which is just a comment from one user to another:
The reasoning “you may not be able to change their outcomes, ergo this isn’t worth doing” also seems a bit beside the point. Changing a person’s life doesn’t have to entail e.g. changing their educational attainment or future income. It can also just entail giving them a stable home and a family of people who care about them.
(I don’t have statistics on hand, but I think it’s very likely that adopted teenagers report higher life satisfaction than teenagers who don’t get adopted. I’ll gladly donate $50 to the charity of someone’s choice if they find solid data showing otherwise, since my first few minutes of research didn’t get me anywhere.)
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A version of this comment that would have been better: “Studies X and Y show that parents tend to regret adopting older children and/or that older children tend to report lower life satisfaction after being adopted. Consider that doing this might make you unhappy and not help the person you want to help.” Or even: “Studies X and Y show that the risk of violence in the home rises from A% to B% in families that adopt an older child.”
The current comment makes unkind assumptions about a group of people without accurate data to back them — so despite the good intentions, it falls afoul of our rules.
Thanks for the feedback. While you are a moderator and can of course moderate as you wish, I must admit I found it confusing. I tried looking through the rules to find anything related to this:
The current comment makes unkind assumptions about a group of people without accurate data to back them — so despite the good intentions, it falls afoul of our rules.
The closest I could find was this section:
Unnecessary rudeness or offensiveness
But this is of course quite different. My comment’s tone was not particularly rude (e.g. no swearing, personal attacks), and nor was the content ‘unnecessary’ - or at least no more so than many other comments on the forum. In a situation whether there is a logical reason why a course of action is bad, but no hard empirical data, what alternative is there but to share our best attempt at reasoning?
Furthermore, I am not sure it is true that I made unkind assumptions; I assume you are refering to this section, but it is clearly an inference, not an assumption, that older adopted children present an elevated risk, and one that is couched in measured language like ‘consider’ and ‘might’:
Finally, it is a well established fact that one of the biggest threats to children comes from their mothers getting new boyfriends who are not genetically related to the child; this results in a something like a 10x increase in child abuse risk vs traditional families. I have never seen similar statistics around older adopted children but I would consider whether they might present a similar risk to your son given the 12 year age gap.
Indeed, arguably my comment was actually encouraged by the rules:
Polish: We’d rather see an idea presented imperfectly than not see it at all.
Worse, I think your objection is an isolated demand for rigor. It is very common for people to express arguments in the absence of hard statistical data; such data-heavy comments are a minority of those on the forum. Even among top-level articles such sources are often omitted—for example this highly upvoted post from the frontpage contains almost no statistics at all, yet I don’t think this is a major problem.
So what is different here? My guess is the true crux of your objection is that my comment expresses a negative view of a group who it is not socially acceptable to criticize (you will note that Denise’s comment also implies negative things, about a different group, but she has received no pushback because her target is considered socially acceptable to criticize)
But I encourage you to reconsider this, because as Effective Altruists we need to ensure our beliefs are as accurate as possible. This is not a topic of idle speculation: my comment was written to be specifically action guiding, and the negative facts about adopted children, especially older adopted children, are a crucial component of any fair evaluation of the risks and benefits of this decision. We should not be straw rationalists who are unable to act in the absence of RCTs; we can and should use evidence from other domains to make logical inferences when we have to make decisions under uncertainty. If we punish such comments, while allowing relatively statistic-light ‘positive’ comments we create a persistent bias which will lead us to social desirability bias. It is well known that the EA movement has a bias against conservatives; we should not let this bias morph into a moderation policy.
Less importantly, I also think you may not have properly understood my argument, because you raise this as a challenge:
I think it’s very likely that adopted teenagers report higher life satisfaction than teenagers who don’t get adopted. I’ll gladly donate $50 to the charity of someone’s choice if they find solid data showing otherwise, since my first few minutes of research didn’t get me anywhere.
Yet better outcomes for adopted teenagers over non-adopted teenagers is actually a logical consequence of the considerations I mentioned, because never-adopted children will have even worse adverse selection problems than late-adopted children!
Upvoted. I felt this reply was engaging in good faith, and it’s given me a chance to add clarity about the Forum’s moderation policy.
I tried looking through the rules to find anything related to this: “The current comment makes unkind assumptions about a group of people without accurate data to back them — so despite the good intentions, it falls afoul of our rules.”
Thanks for asking the question — I should have linked to the exact section I was referencing, which was:
This criterion is based on Scott Alexander’s moderation policy, which I’ll quote here:
If you want to say something that might not be true – anything controversial, speculative, or highly opinionated – then you had better make sure it is both kind and necessary. Kind, in that you don’t rush to insult people who disagree with you. Necessary in that it’s on topic, and not only contributes something to the discussion but contributes more to the discussion than it’s likely to take away through starting a fight.
(Where he uses “necessary”, we use “relevant”.)
The version of “kind” I’m thinking of doesn’t just encompass “not insulting people”, but covers other everyday aspects of the word. The relevant one here is: “Don’t insinuate that a given member of a certain group is likely to be dangerous, to the point that you don’t recommend people interact closely with them.” See the following:
Finally, it is a well established fact that one of the biggest threats to children comes from their mothers getting new boyfriends who are not genetically related to the child; this results in a something like a 10x increase in child abuse risk vs traditional families. I have never seen similar statistics around older adopted children but I would consider whether they might present a similar risk to your son given the 12 year age gap.
If a comment speculates that a sizable group of people pose a serious hazard to the people they live with, I hold it to a higher standard, as I believe Scott would.
This comment is speculative, and I’d argue using the above standard that it isn’t kind. It’s certainly relevant, in that you are referring to a situation someone plans to seek out, but 1 out of 3 is still an occasion for a warning.
...one that is couched in measured language like ‘consider’ and ‘might’.
It’s better to use this kind of language than to not use it. But as a moderator, I’m wary of even measured language (in this context — no data, negative stereotyping) when someone uses a “measured” point in the service of a less measured conclusion: “I encourage you to strongly consider not adopting an older child” (emphasis mine).
The word “strongly”, to me, reads as “I believe the thing I’m about to argue for is true; even if I’m not trying to force you to agree with me, I really think you should.” If that wasn’t your intention, I’m sorry to have misconstrued what you meant to imply.
In a situation whether there is a logical reason why a course of action is bad, but no hard empirical data, what alternative is there but to share our best attempt at reasoning?
The alternatives I suggested involved finding data, which is a really good thing to do when you are speculating about the violent proclivities of a group of people.
Given the choice of “make an inference without empirical data that a group of people has violent proclivities” or “don’t make that inference”, I’d prefer people refrain from making such inferences. It’s very easy for online discussions to get tangled up in arguments about stereotyping; asking people to bring hard data if they want to get into those topics seems reasonable to me.
(For example, under the standard you seem to be suggesting, you could have gone on in your comment to speculate about the safest gender, race, national origin, and IQ of child to adopt. Even if these were all just “inferences”, I can’t imagine them improving the quality of discussion, because I’ve never seen the internet work that way.)
Polish: We’d rather see an idea presented imperfectly than not see it at all.
Rather than content, this line is meant to refer to a post’s formatting: an “unpolished” post, to my mind, is one that is messy and disorganized, rather than speculative.
That said, I can see why people might think it refers to speculation. I’ll consider edits I could make to clear this up, and to explain more about how we see the trade-off between “polish” (in the sense of accuracy/empiricism), kindness, and relevance.
Worse, I think your objection is an isolated demand for rigor. It is very common for people to express arguments in the absence of hard statistical data; such data-heavy comments are a minority of those on the forum. Even among top-level articles such sources are often omitted—for example this highly upvoted post from the frontpage contains almost no statistics at all, yet I don’t think this is a major problem.
I’d gladly acknowledge my objection as an isolated demand for rigor. A comment policy of “unkind comments are held to a higher standard for accuracy” seems to require making isolated demands for rigor. (Of course, we could be more clear in our rules that we do hold such comments to a higher standard — again, I upvoted your reply because it’s given me some ideas for ways to improve that page.)
My guess is the true crux of your objection is that my comment expresses a negative view of a group who it is not socially acceptable to criticize (you will note that Denise’s comment also implies negative things, about a different group, but she has received no pushback because her target is considered socially acceptable to criticize).
If you ever see anyone on the Forum express negative views of a group without empirical data to back them up, please feel free to report their comment! I’d like to apply our standards fairly, even to criticism of groups that are “socially acceptable” targets in other places.
I don’t know which part of Denise’s comment you are referring to. My best guess is:
The foster system is often a pretty awful experience to children.
This doesn’t imply negative things about any particular people or group of people. It specifically refers to a “system”. Even if people who work in the foster system are generally kind and competent, the experience of growing up without a family in a family-centric culture, surrounded by a constantly shifting group of people, and feeling generally unwanted/out of place in society… well, it’s often going to be pretty awful.
(Similarly, saying “sewers are an unpleasant work environment” doesn’t read to me as a criticism of sewer designers; there are other, more obvious reasons that you’d prefer not to work in a sewer.)
My comment was written to be specifically action guiding, and the negative facts about adopted children, especially older adopted children, are a crucial component of any fair evaluation of the risks and benefits of this decision.
The part of your comment that led me to issue a warning was your speculation about the violent tendencies of older adopted children. I’ve made an edit to my warning to clarify that the rest of my comment was an objection/counterpoint from one user to another.
We should not be straw rationalists who are unable to act in the absence of RCTs; we can and should use evidence from other domains to make logical inferences when we have to make decisions under uncertainty.
I agree! But there are consequences to making certain logical inferences that I think are important to consider in the context of a public discussion forum (and in the context of any communication between imperfectly rational humans). We should not be straw rationalists who refuse to consider the social implications of communication.
A comment that refers to a negative stereotype about a group of people has fairly high downside risk. Not in isolation, of course (few people read most Forum comments), but in the sense that every instance of a thing permitted makes it more difficult to stop further instances of that thing. And when the thing is “speculation about the violent tendencies of different groups of people”, there’s a lot of risk to it becoming more common. (I would expect people who don’t like that kind of speculation to become less active, and people who enjoy it to become more active, with generally negative consequences.)
Of course, downside risk isn’t the only thing a comment can have. There are also potential benefits, which are usually going to be more important!
In this case, the potential benefit could actually be high — if the OP decides not to adopt because they anticipated helping the child become dramatically more wealthy or successful than they’d otherwise have been, and it turns out this (very likely) wouldn’t have happened and the OP would have been bitterly disappointed as a result (which in turn seems bad for their adopted child), you’ve helped them.
However, the part of the comment that I moderated doesn’t seem as beneficial, on net. I find the inference shaky (how violent are siblings, relative to parents? How common is violence toward siblings vs. stepsiblings?), and the magnitude of the risk highly unclear. And when net benefits are concerned, I don’t want to ignore that the choice of “adopt vs. not adopt” has a substantial impact on the welfare of the child who is or isn’t adopted. (Or at least I infer that it does; moderators also have to draw inferences sometimes.)
If we punish such comments, while allowing relatively statistic-light ‘positive’ comments we create a persistent bias which will lead us to social desirability bias. It is well known that the EA movement has a bias against conservatives; we should not let this bias morph into a moderation policy.
I agree that our current moderation policy seems likely to create some amount of social desirability bias, even if we aim to apply it fairly to “desirable” and “undesirable” topics.
However, there are other factors that influence a forum’s success aside from “are people sharing opinions with as little bias as possible?” (Though that’s an important factor, and I try not to get in the way of it unless I have a really good reason, as I think I do here.)
I’d guess that most people in EA are more likely to participate in an atmosphere that leans positive and pleasant, and where certain types of comments (e.g. negative stereotypes about groups, harsh criticism) are held to unusually high standards of rigor. And I’d guess that a forum with more participation will be more impactful, because more people will share ideas, give feedback, and so on.
(I could write many, many more paragraphs about the considerations we’ve had to make around balancing user experience for people with different preferences while aiming at the most impactful overall product, but I’ve now spent more than an hour on this comment and have to finish up.)
These are the kinds of tradeoffs I have to consider as a moderator. I also have to consider the best way to apply policies established by the people who built the Forum and fund its continued development, even if my personal preferences are a bit different in some cases. I hope that even if we don’t see eye to eye on this particular post, you can see that I am at least aware of the concerns you raise.
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On the “bias against conservatives” point: I don’t understand how this relates to our conversation. If anything, I think of adoption as a “conservative” type of action, because I associate it with large families and religious beliefs.
There are other posts on the Forum that could be cited more easily for this concern — maybe you meant to refer to some of those?
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Now speaking as a commenter, rather than a moderator:
I do think your comment showed an absence of something else we encourage:
You set out to present the best case you could for the argument “don’t adopt”. You didn’t speculate on the benefit of being adopted to a child’s well-being, or how their family might benefit — instead, you focused on negative consequences. Given that really good outcomes are also possible, this focus stands out.
(To give another example: I can imagine someone posting about their plans to remarry, and someone else saying “you should strongly consider not remarrying, because stepparents are often violent towards their stepchildren”. This may be true, but there are many potential benefits to remarrying, and it seems like people should remarry at least sometimes — is someone who reads your comment likely to better understand whether they should remarry?)
This isn’t to say that every comment has to present all the pros and cons of a decision. I was just personally put off by that aspect.
Yet better outcomes for adopted teenagers over non-adopted teenagers is actually a logical consequence of the considerations I mentioned, because never-adopted children will have even worse adverse selection problems than late-adopted children!
Fair enough! This is a good and helpful critique.
I should have added more detail to that comment (about e.g. trying really hard to compare adopted vs. eligible-but-not-adopted children with similar characteristics, or children who were successfully adopted vs. children who would have been adopted but the paperwork fell through, etc., etc.) I meant to imply “find the most reliable version of this study”, but that definitely didn’t come through.
Back to being a moderator:
I really don’t want the Forum to be a place where people simply can’t share certain true (legal, safe) information. However, there are a lot of ways to share information, and I do want to encourage people to share it in certain ways I think are better for discussion.
Aside from the alternatives I proposed in the last comment (finding more data), here are some suggested formats that could have brought your comment more in line with how I’d like Forum discussion to go. These are meant to be “examples of comments with formats that seem good”, rather than “examples of exactly what you should have said” — you may well disagree with some of what I say here.
“From your quote X, I think you may be hoping to have outcome Y on an adopted child. I think that’s unlikely, because...”
“You ask whether it’s “worth it” to adopt an older child. While I understand the desire to help people whose welfare is especially neglected, I think there are some alternatives A and B you should consider, based on tradeoffs X and Y...”
“I think that bringing a happy new life into the world is actually a very good thing! Here are some thoughts on why it could lead to a better world, overall, than deciding to adopt...”
(I’ve replaced my fourth example with Habryka’s comment, which does a great job of providing extra supporting data for claims about the risk of violence.)
In particular, I think the last one of these takes risks seriously without assuming that adoption is never the right option.
You don’t have to write comments that look like any of these, of course — I’m just trying to show that there are ways to convey “negative” or “socially undesirable” opinions without presenting negative stereotypes of entire groups.
The version of “kind” I’m thinking of doesn’t just encompass “not insulting people”, but covers other everyday aspects of the word. The relevant one here is: “Don’t insinuate that a given member of a certain group is likely to be dangerous, to the point that you don’t recommend people interact closely with them.
This seems like quite a strange policy. You’re clearly diverging from Scott’s policy in a big way: he is talking about being nice to other commenters (form), but you have some major content-based assumptions baked in.
Indeed, your approach is in some cases the exact opposite of Scott’s approach!
Consider a scenario where you are a native of a third world country, and a fellow EA is going to come visit. This person, while well intentioned, is generally quite naive, so you are keen to look out for their welfare. Alas! Shortly before they arrive, you find out they have booked accommodation in an extremely dangerous part of town, where murder, rape and kidnapping are common, and the police fear the gangs. Your country doesn’t have good statistics for this area (as no-one reports crimes to the police), so you can’t prove this to her, yet it is surely the kind thing to warn her of this, and encourage her to rent in a different part of the city. In doing so you are indeed insinuating that a certain group is likely to be dangerous, and encouraging ther hem to avoid contact—but this is the kind thing to do! Staying silent is the socially easy way out, but it does nothing to help your friend. Sacrificing your social standing and reputation to speak uncomfortable truths for the sake of a welfare of someone you have never met is surely the height of kindness.
A couple of times in your comment you discuss the danger of stereotypes. Unfortunately I think this shows a very prejudiced (if you will forgive the pun) view of stereotypes. Actually, research suggests that stereotypes are generally very accurate:
Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. Richard et al (2003) found that fewer than 5% of all effects in social psychology exceeded r’s of .50. In contrast, nearly all consensual stereotype accuracy correlations and about half of all personal stereotype accuracy correlations exceed .50.[1]
Finally, you suggested this:
For example, under the standard you seem to be suggesting, you could have gone on in your comment to speculate about the safest gender, race, national origin, and IQ of child to adopt. Even if these were all just “inferences”, I can’t imagine them improving the quality of discussion, because I’ve never seen the internet work that way.
Actually, this is a great point, and one that I think more supports my argument. One thing that it is very important for adoptive families in the US to be aware of are the issues around adopting Native American children. Because of special laws, you run the risk of the child being taken away from you long after you have taken them into your home, in a way that would not be legally possible for a non-native-american child. As a result of this I would indeed recommend parents take race into account when adopting inside the US, insomuchas they should be extra careful with native children. It is important to be able to discuss this; it’s a significant risk and one we shouldn’t cover up, even if some people might find the topic politically uncomfortable.
Edit: I responded to this comment after someone reported it, and hadn’t seen Denise’s comment at the time. She sums up one of the points I try to make here better than I did.
Second edit: I think Habryka’s comment is a really good example of how to make a similar point to what Dale aimed for, with enough additional supporting evidence to abide by the Forum’s rules.
Having read Habryka’s comment and internalized how probable the risks of adoption can be, I appreciate Dale’s comment more in retrospect. While I still don’t like the way the argument for high abuse risk was presented, I could have done more to acknowledge that the spirit of the comment was “I’m taking a risk by writing a controversial comment because I see someone doing something I think is dangerous” — execution aside, this type of content is really valuable.
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Moderator here!
While this comment seems to be well-intentioned, it also takes the form of:
“I would like to help someone.”
“No, you shouldn’t do that. They might be a dangerous person who will hurt someone you love.”
This kind of argument demands better data than is present in this comment, which takes an (unlinked) statistic and extrapolates it to a fairly different scenario.
Please don’t use this kind of reasoning to make negative claims about entire groups of people (e.g. teenagers who are available for adoption).
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Taking the mod hat off in this section, which is just a comment from one user to another:
The reasoning “you may not be able to change their outcomes, ergo this isn’t worth doing” also seems a bit beside the point. Changing a person’s life doesn’t have to entail e.g. changing their educational attainment or future income. It can also just entail giving them a stable home and a family of people who care about them.
(I don’t have statistics on hand, but I think it’s very likely that adopted teenagers report higher life satisfaction than teenagers who don’t get adopted. I’ll gladly donate $50 to the charity of someone’s choice if they find solid data showing otherwise, since my first few minutes of research didn’t get me anywhere.)
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A version of this comment that would have been better: “Studies X and Y show that parents tend to regret adopting older children and/or that older children tend to report lower life satisfaction after being adopted. Consider that doing this might make you unhappy and not help the person you want to help.” Or even: “Studies X and Y show that the risk of violence in the home rises from A% to B% in families that adopt an older child.”
The current comment makes unkind assumptions about a group of people without accurate data to back them — so despite the good intentions, it falls afoul of our rules.
Thanks for the feedback. While you are a moderator and can of course moderate as you wish, I must admit I found it confusing. I tried looking through the rules to find anything related to this:
The closest I could find was this section:
But this is of course quite different. My comment’s tone was not particularly rude (e.g. no swearing, personal attacks), and nor was the content ‘unnecessary’ - or at least no more so than many other comments on the forum. In a situation whether there is a logical reason why a course of action is bad, but no hard empirical data, what alternative is there but to share our best attempt at reasoning?
Furthermore, I am not sure it is true that I made unkind assumptions; I assume you are refering to this section, but it is clearly an inference, not an assumption, that older adopted children present an elevated risk, and one that is couched in measured language like ‘consider’ and ‘might’:
Indeed, arguably my comment was actually encouraged by the rules:
Worse, I think your objection is an isolated demand for rigor. It is very common for people to express arguments in the absence of hard statistical data; such data-heavy comments are a minority of those on the forum. Even among top-level articles such sources are often omitted—for example this highly upvoted post from the frontpage contains almost no statistics at all, yet I don’t think this is a major problem.
So what is different here? My guess is the true crux of your objection is that my comment expresses a negative view of a group who it is not socially acceptable to criticize (you will note that Denise’s comment also implies negative things, about a different group, but she has received no pushback because her target is considered socially acceptable to criticize)
But I encourage you to reconsider this, because as Effective Altruists we need to ensure our beliefs are as accurate as possible. This is not a topic of idle speculation: my comment was written to be specifically action guiding, and the negative facts about adopted children, especially older adopted children, are a crucial component of any fair evaluation of the risks and benefits of this decision. We should not be straw rationalists who are unable to act in the absence of RCTs; we can and should use evidence from other domains to make logical inferences when we have to make decisions under uncertainty. If we punish such comments, while allowing relatively statistic-light ‘positive’ comments we create a persistent bias which will lead us to social desirability bias. It is well known that the EA movement has a bias against conservatives; we should not let this bias morph into a moderation policy.
Less importantly, I also think you may not have properly understood my argument, because you raise this as a challenge:
Yet better outcomes for adopted teenagers over non-adopted teenagers is actually a logical consequence of the considerations I mentioned, because never-adopted children will have even worse adverse selection problems than late-adopted children!
Upvoted. I felt this reply was engaging in good faith, and it’s given me a chance to add clarity about the Forum’s moderation policy.
Thanks for asking the question — I should have linked to the exact section I was referencing, which was:
This criterion is based on Scott Alexander’s moderation policy, which I’ll quote here:
(Where he uses “necessary”, we use “relevant”.)
The version of “kind” I’m thinking of doesn’t just encompass “not insulting people”, but covers other everyday aspects of the word. The relevant one here is: “Don’t insinuate that a given member of a certain group is likely to be dangerous, to the point that you don’t recommend people interact closely with them.” See the following:
If a comment speculates that a sizable group of people pose a serious hazard to the people they live with, I hold it to a higher standard, as I believe Scott would.
This comment is speculative, and I’d argue using the above standard that it isn’t kind. It’s certainly relevant, in that you are referring to a situation someone plans to seek out, but 1 out of 3 is still an occasion for a warning.
It’s better to use this kind of language than to not use it. But as a moderator, I’m wary of even measured language (in this context — no data, negative stereotyping) when someone uses a “measured” point in the service of a less measured conclusion: “I encourage you to strongly consider not adopting an older child” (emphasis mine).
The word “strongly”, to me, reads as “I believe the thing I’m about to argue for is true; even if I’m not trying to force you to agree with me, I really think you should.” If that wasn’t your intention, I’m sorry to have misconstrued what you meant to imply.
The alternatives I suggested involved finding data, which is a really good thing to do when you are speculating about the violent proclivities of a group of people.
Given the choice of “make an inference without empirical data that a group of people has violent proclivities” or “don’t make that inference”, I’d prefer people refrain from making such inferences. It’s very easy for online discussions to get tangled up in arguments about stereotyping; asking people to bring hard data if they want to get into those topics seems reasonable to me.
(For example, under the standard you seem to be suggesting, you could have gone on in your comment to speculate about the safest gender, race, national origin, and IQ of child to adopt. Even if these were all just “inferences”, I can’t imagine them improving the quality of discussion, because I’ve never seen the internet work that way.)
Rather than content, this line is meant to refer to a post’s formatting: an “unpolished” post, to my mind, is one that is messy and disorganized, rather than speculative.
That said, I can see why people might think it refers to speculation. I’ll consider edits I could make to clear this up, and to explain more about how we see the trade-off between “polish” (in the sense of accuracy/empiricism), kindness, and relevance.
I’d gladly acknowledge my objection as an isolated demand for rigor. A comment policy of “unkind comments are held to a higher standard for accuracy” seems to require making isolated demands for rigor. (Of course, we could be more clear in our rules that we do hold such comments to a higher standard — again, I upvoted your reply because it’s given me some ideas for ways to improve that page.)
If you ever see anyone on the Forum express negative views of a group without empirical data to back them up, please feel free to report their comment! I’d like to apply our standards fairly, even to criticism of groups that are “socially acceptable” targets in other places.
I don’t know which part of Denise’s comment you are referring to. My best guess is:
This doesn’t imply negative things about any particular people or group of people. It specifically refers to a “system”. Even if people who work in the foster system are generally kind and competent, the experience of growing up without a family in a family-centric culture, surrounded by a constantly shifting group of people, and feeling generally unwanted/out of place in society… well, it’s often going to be pretty awful.
(Similarly, saying “sewers are an unpleasant work environment” doesn’t read to me as a criticism of sewer designers; there are other, more obvious reasons that you’d prefer not to work in a sewer.)
The part of your comment that led me to issue a warning was your speculation about the violent tendencies of older adopted children. I’ve made an edit to my warning to clarify that the rest of my comment was an objection/counterpoint from one user to another.
I agree! But there are consequences to making certain logical inferences that I think are important to consider in the context of a public discussion forum (and in the context of any communication between imperfectly rational humans). We should not be straw rationalists who refuse to consider the social implications of communication.
A comment that refers to a negative stereotype about a group of people has fairly high downside risk. Not in isolation, of course (few people read most Forum comments), but in the sense that every instance of a thing permitted makes it more difficult to stop further instances of that thing. And when the thing is “speculation about the violent tendencies of different groups of people”, there’s a lot of risk to it becoming more common. (I would expect people who don’t like that kind of speculation to become less active, and people who enjoy it to become more active, with generally negative consequences.)
Of course, downside risk isn’t the only thing a comment can have. There are also potential benefits, which are usually going to be more important!
In this case, the potential benefit could actually be high — if the OP decides not to adopt because they anticipated helping the child become dramatically more wealthy or successful than they’d otherwise have been, and it turns out this (very likely) wouldn’t have happened and the OP would have been bitterly disappointed as a result (which in turn seems bad for their adopted child), you’ve helped them.
However, the part of the comment that I moderated doesn’t seem as beneficial, on net. I find the inference shaky (how violent are siblings, relative to parents? How common is violence toward siblings vs. stepsiblings?), and the magnitude of the risk highly unclear. And when net benefits are concerned, I don’t want to ignore that the choice of “adopt vs. not adopt” has a substantial impact on the welfare of the child who is or isn’t adopted. (Or at least I infer that it does; moderators also have to draw inferences sometimes.)
I agree that our current moderation policy seems likely to create some amount of social desirability bias, even if we aim to apply it fairly to “desirable” and “undesirable” topics.
However, there are other factors that influence a forum’s success aside from “are people sharing opinions with as little bias as possible?” (Though that’s an important factor, and I try not to get in the way of it unless I have a really good reason, as I think I do here.)
I’d guess that most people in EA are more likely to participate in an atmosphere that leans positive and pleasant, and where certain types of comments (e.g. negative stereotypes about groups, harsh criticism) are held to unusually high standards of rigor. And I’d guess that a forum with more participation will be more impactful, because more people will share ideas, give feedback, and so on.
(I could write many, many more paragraphs about the considerations we’ve had to make around balancing user experience for people with different preferences while aiming at the most impactful overall product, but I’ve now spent more than an hour on this comment and have to finish up.)
These are the kinds of tradeoffs I have to consider as a moderator. I also have to consider the best way to apply policies established by the people who built the Forum and fund its continued development, even if my personal preferences are a bit different in some cases. I hope that even if we don’t see eye to eye on this particular post, you can see that I am at least aware of the concerns you raise.
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On the “bias against conservatives” point: I don’t understand how this relates to our conversation. If anything, I think of adoption as a “conservative” type of action, because I associate it with large families and religious beliefs.
There are other posts on the Forum that could be cited more easily for this concern — maybe you meant to refer to some of those?
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Now speaking as a commenter, rather than a moderator:
I do think your comment showed an absence of something else we encourage:
You set out to present the best case you could for the argument “don’t adopt”. You didn’t speculate on the benefit of being adopted to a child’s well-being, or how their family might benefit — instead, you focused on negative consequences. Given that really good outcomes are also possible, this focus stands out.
(To give another example: I can imagine someone posting about their plans to remarry, and someone else saying “you should strongly consider not remarrying, because stepparents are often violent towards their stepchildren”. This may be true, but there are many potential benefits to remarrying, and it seems like people should remarry at least sometimes — is someone who reads your comment likely to better understand whether they should remarry?)
This isn’t to say that every comment has to present all the pros and cons of a decision. I was just personally put off by that aspect.
Fair enough! This is a good and helpful critique.
I should have added more detail to that comment (about e.g. trying really hard to compare adopted vs. eligible-but-not-adopted children with similar characteristics, or children who were successfully adopted vs. children who would have been adopted but the paperwork fell through, etc., etc.) I meant to imply “find the most reliable version of this study”, but that definitely didn’t come through.
Back to being a moderator:
I really don’t want the Forum to be a place where people simply can’t share certain true (legal, safe) information. However, there are a lot of ways to share information, and I do want to encourage people to share it in certain ways I think are better for discussion.
Aside from the alternatives I proposed in the last comment (finding more data), here are some suggested formats that could have brought your comment more in line with how I’d like Forum discussion to go. These are meant to be “examples of comments with formats that seem good”, rather than “examples of exactly what you should have said” — you may well disagree with some of what I say here.
“From your quote X, I think you may be hoping to have outcome Y on an adopted child. I think that’s unlikely, because...”
“You ask whether it’s “worth it” to adopt an older child. While I understand the desire to help people whose welfare is especially neglected, I think there are some alternatives A and B you should consider, based on tradeoffs X and Y...”
“I think that bringing a happy new life into the world is actually a very good thing! Here are some thoughts on why it could lead to a better world, overall, than deciding to adopt...”
(I’ve replaced my fourth example with Habryka’s comment, which does a great job of providing extra supporting data for claims about the risk of violence.)
In particular, I think the last one of these takes risks seriously without assuming that adoption is never the right option.
You don’t have to write comments that look like any of these, of course — I’m just trying to show that there are ways to convey “negative” or “socially undesirable” opinions without presenting negative stereotypes of entire groups.
This seems like quite a strange policy. You’re clearly diverging from Scott’s policy in a big way: he is talking about being nice to other commenters (form), but you have some major content-based assumptions baked in.
Indeed, your approach is in some cases the exact opposite of Scott’s approach!
Consider a scenario where you are a native of a third world country, and a fellow EA is going to come visit. This person, while well intentioned, is generally quite naive, so you are keen to look out for their welfare. Alas! Shortly before they arrive, you find out they have booked accommodation in an extremely dangerous part of town, where murder, rape and kidnapping are common, and the police fear the gangs. Your country doesn’t have good statistics for this area (as no-one reports crimes to the police), so you can’t prove this to her, yet it is surely the kind thing to warn her of this, and encourage her to rent in a different part of the city. In doing so you are indeed insinuating that a certain group is likely to be dangerous, and encouraging ther hem to avoid contact—but this is the kind thing to do! Staying silent is the socially easy way out, but it does nothing to help your friend. Sacrificing your social standing and reputation to speak uncomfortable truths for the sake of a welfare of someone you have never met is surely the height of kindness.
A couple of times in your comment you discuss the danger of stereotypes. Unfortunately I think this shows a very prejudiced (if you will forgive the pun) view of stereotypes. Actually, research suggests that stereotypes are generally very accurate:
Finally, you suggested this:
Actually, this is a great point, and one that I think more supports my argument. One thing that it is very important for adoptive families in the US to be aware of are the issues around adopting Native American children. Because of special laws, you run the risk of the child being taken away from you long after you have taken them into your home, in a way that would not be legally possible for a non-native-american child. As a result of this I would indeed recommend parents take race into account when adopting inside the US, insomuchas they should be extra careful with native children. It is important to be able to discuss this; it’s a significant risk and one we shouldn’t cover up, even if some people might find the topic politically uncomfortable.