My sense is that before we putting even a little political capital into some kind of proposal like this, we need to determine if cancel culture is actually something worth worrying about to this extent.
Like, I 100% agree that in principle it’s objectionable to “cancel” someone, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is manifesting to a degree worth caring about, or that it ever will. My intuition is that many people say and do bad things all the time and only a very, very small number of them are canceled.
This doesn’t mean that it couldn’t become an issue, but I wonder how much of this is something that EA should keep talking about as a serious issue, or if it’s just a “Very Online” kind of thing. I often have heard otherwise brilliant people comparing cancel culture to, like, the cultural revolution under Mao, and needless to say, that’s a pretty big overreaction.
Also, my gut tells me that if cancel culture is becoming a thing, which perhaps it is, then nothing that anyone has proposed so far appears, on the face of it, to have done anything to curb the phenomena. And I have doubts that this proposal would either, for reasons people already have stated. If anything, at least in the United States, there is now a completely asinine culture war over cancellation, which then distracts from more important issues like foreign aid and refugee policy.
I guess maybe I think that EA doesn’t have the tools to “solve” or “fix” cancel culture, it’s probably out of our abilities, so maybe let’s focus on things we can have an impact on.
Yes. I didn’t even read the “we” in the initial post as referring to EA, because this doesn’t seem at all like something EA would be involved in, because the issue is small-scale (compared to “hundreds of thousands of people die each year” or “we are at risk of extinction”), and extremely non-neglected (huge amounts of funding and cultural capital on all “sides” of the issue). As you note, the current state of the issue seems to be “asinine and distracting”.
I read “we” as “people in the broader culture”, and the Forum as a place to ask a question about generic problem-solving (which is fine — over the years, people have asked questions about a variety of cause areas that aren’t connected to EA).
That’s a fair question. Culture is extremely important (e.g. certain cultural norms facilitate corruption and cronyism, which leads to slower annual increases in quality of life indices), but whether cancelling, specifically, is a big problem, I’m not sure.
Government demonstrably changes culture. At a minor level, drink-driving laws and advertising campaigns have changed something that was a cultural norm into a serious crime. At a broader level, you have things like communist governments making religion illegal and creating a culture where everyone snitches on everyone else to the police.
If we can influence government policy, which I think we can, we can influence culture. It’s probably much easier when most people aren’t questioning a norm (drink-driving, again, being a good example), but I think you’re right in this case: Since cancelling is fairly common to talk about, it’s probably much harder to change the general discourse (and the laws).
My sense is that before we putting even a little political capital into some kind of proposal like this, we need to determine if cancel culture is actually something worth worrying about to this extent.
Like, I 100% agree that in principle it’s objectionable to “cancel” someone, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is manifesting to a degree worth caring about, or that it ever will. My intuition is that many people say and do bad things all the time and only a very, very small number of them are canceled.
This doesn’t mean that it couldn’t become an issue, but I wonder how much of this is something that EA should keep talking about as a serious issue, or if it’s just a “Very Online” kind of thing. I often have heard otherwise brilliant people comparing cancel culture to, like, the cultural revolution under Mao, and needless to say, that’s a pretty big overreaction.
Also, my gut tells me that if cancel culture is becoming a thing, which perhaps it is, then nothing that anyone has proposed so far appears, on the face of it, to have done anything to curb the phenomena. And I have doubts that this proposal would either, for reasons people already have stated. If anything, at least in the United States, there is now a completely asinine culture war over cancellation, which then distracts from more important issues like foreign aid and refugee policy.
I guess maybe I think that EA doesn’t have the tools to “solve” or “fix” cancel culture, it’s probably out of our abilities, so maybe let’s focus on things we can have an impact on.
Yes. I didn’t even read the “we” in the initial post as referring to EA, because this doesn’t seem at all like something EA would be involved in, because the issue is small-scale (compared to “hundreds of thousands of people die each year” or “we are at risk of extinction”), and extremely non-neglected (huge amounts of funding and cultural capital on all “sides” of the issue). As you note, the current state of the issue seems to be “asinine and distracting”.
I read “we” as “people in the broader culture”, and the Forum as a place to ask a question about generic problem-solving (which is fine — over the years, people have asked questions about a variety of cause areas that aren’t connected to EA).
That’s a fair question. Culture is extremely important (e.g. certain cultural norms facilitate corruption and cronyism, which leads to slower annual increases in quality of life indices), but whether cancelling, specifically, is a big problem, I’m not sure.
Government demonstrably changes culture. At a minor level, drink-driving laws and advertising campaigns have changed something that was a cultural norm into a serious crime. At a broader level, you have things like communist governments making religion illegal and creating a culture where everyone snitches on everyone else to the police.
If we can influence government policy, which I think we can, we can influence culture. It’s probably much easier when most people aren’t questioning a norm (drink-driving, again, being a good example), but I think you’re right in this case: Since cancelling is fairly common to talk about, it’s probably much harder to change the general discourse (and the laws).