Effective altruism is meant to be a social movement, not a university debate. And unlike in a university setting, there are zero requirements for someone to be accurate or to have relevant expertise before posting here.
It is common here for people with little expertise in a topic to do an arbitrary amount of online research and throw out their resulting opinions. This results in something like the post where someone cited “mankind quarterly” for their human genetics posts, without mentioning that it was a publication with a history of white supremacy, fraud and incompetence. That issue was caught, eventually, but I guarantee you the forum is riddled with similar problems that are not caught.
For a regular topic, these loose standards may be acceptable, as it makes it easier to throw out ideas and collaborate, and the air of loose discussion makes things fun. Someone may chime in with corrections, someone may not, ultimately it is not a big deal.
But when it comes to race science, the consequences of this sort of loose, non-quality controlled discussion is worse. As the OP mentioned, you drive away minorities, and make the forum an unpleasant place to be.
But it also might convince more people to be racist. At least one white supremacist has traced their radicalisation pipeline to go through lesswrong and Slatestarcodex. That was just one person out of forty, so perhaps it was a fluke, or perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps there are a few that didn’t go all the way to posting on white supremacist forums, but became just a little bit more dismissive of black people on job applications. I don’t know how high the cost is, but it exists.
The way I see it, the forum should either hold back any race science related post and ensure that every claim made within it is thoroughly fact checked by relevant independent experts, or it should just ban the things. I prefer the latter, so we don’t waste anybody’s time.
In fairness, expertise is not required in all university settings. Student groups invite non-experts political figures to speak, famous politicians give speeches at graduation ceremonies etc. I am generally against universities banning student groups from having racist/offensive speakers, although I might allow exceptions in extreme cases.
Though I am nonetheless inclined to agree that the distinction between universities, which have as a central purpose free, objective, rational debate, and EA as a movement, which has a central purpose of carrying out a particular (already mildly controversial) ethical program, and which also, frankly, is in more danger of “be safe for witches, becomes 90% witch” than universities are, is important and means that EA should be less internally tolerant of speech expressing bad ideas.
You seem to be imagining the choice as being between “host bad discussions” or “do something about it via centralized hierarchical control”. But I’m trying to emphasize a third option: “do something about it via decentralized mechanisms.” (Posts with negative karma are basically invisible, after all.)
The downside of centralized responses is that it creates a precedent for people to use social/political pressure to try to impose their opinions on the whole community. Decentralization protects against that. (I don’t so strongly object to the mods just deciding, on their own, to ban certain topics. What especially troubles me is social/political pressure aimed towards this end.)
As I see it, the crucial question to ask is which mechanism is more reliable: top-down control in response to social/political pressure from vocal advocates, or decentralized community judgment via “secret ballot” karma voting. As I see it, the primary difference between the two is that the former is more “politicized” and subject to social desirability bias. (A secondary effect of politicization is to encourage factions to fight over control of this new power.) So I think the decentralized approach is much better.
Effective altruism is meant to be a social movement, not a university debate. And unlike in a university setting, there are zero requirements for someone to be accurate or to have relevant expertise before posting here.
It is common here for people with little expertise in a topic to do an arbitrary amount of online research and throw out their resulting opinions. This results in something like the post where someone cited “mankind quarterly” for their human genetics posts, without mentioning that it was a publication with a history of white supremacy, fraud and incompetence. That issue was caught, eventually, but I guarantee you the forum is riddled with similar problems that are not caught.
For a regular topic, these loose standards may be acceptable, as it makes it easier to throw out ideas and collaborate, and the air of loose discussion makes things fun. Someone may chime in with corrections, someone may not, ultimately it is not a big deal.
But when it comes to race science, the consequences of this sort of loose, non-quality controlled discussion is worse. As the OP mentioned, you drive away minorities, and make the forum an unpleasant place to be.
But it also might convince more people to be racist. At least one white supremacist has traced their radicalisation pipeline to go through lesswrong and Slatestarcodex. That was just one person out of forty, so perhaps it was a fluke, or perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps there are a few that didn’t go all the way to posting on white supremacist forums, but became just a little bit more dismissive of black people on job applications. I don’t know how high the cost is, but it exists.
The way I see it, the forum should either hold back any race science related post and ensure that every claim made within it is thoroughly fact checked by relevant independent experts, or it should just ban the things. I prefer the latter, so we don’t waste anybody’s time.
In fairness, expertise is not required in all university settings. Student groups invite non-experts political figures to speak, famous politicians give speeches at graduation ceremonies etc. I am generally against universities banning student groups from having racist/offensive speakers, although I might allow exceptions in extreme cases.
Though I am nonetheless inclined to agree that the distinction between universities, which have as a central purpose free, objective, rational debate, and EA as a movement, which has a central purpose of carrying out a particular (already mildly controversial) ethical program, and which also, frankly, is in more danger of “be safe for witches, becomes 90% witch” than universities are, is important and means that EA should be less internally tolerant of speech expressing bad ideas.
You seem to be imagining the choice as being between “host bad discussions” or “do something about it via centralized hierarchical control”. But I’m trying to emphasize a third option: “do something about it via decentralized mechanisms.” (Posts with negative karma are basically invisible, after all.)
The downside of centralized responses is that it creates a precedent for people to use social/political pressure to try to impose their opinions on the whole community. Decentralization protects against that. (I don’t so strongly object to the mods just deciding, on their own, to ban certain topics. What especially troubles me is social/political pressure aimed towards this end.)
As I see it, the crucial question to ask is which mechanism is more reliable: top-down control in response to social/political pressure from vocal advocates, or decentralized community judgment via “secret ballot” karma voting. As I see it, the primary difference between the two is that the former is more “politicized” and subject to social desirability bias. (A secondary effect of politicization is to encourage factions to fight over control of this new power.) So I think the decentralized approach is much better.