The Atheism Plus split was pretty bad. They were a group that wanted all atheists to also be involved in social justice. Naturally many weren’t happy with this takeover of the movement and pushed back. The Atheism Plus side argues that this was due to misogyny, ect, ignoring the fact that some people just wanted to be atheists and do atheist stuff and not get involved in politics. The end result was Atheism Plus was widely rejected, many social justice leaning atheists left the movement, Atheism widely defamed, remaining atheists not particularly open to social justice.
I don’t know very much about open source, but I’ve heard that there’s been some pretty vicious/brutal political fights over codes of conduct, ect.
The atheists even started to disinvite their intellectual founders, e.g. Richard Dawkins. Will EA eventually go down the same path—will they end up disinviting e.g. Bostrom for not being a sufficiently zealous social justice advocate?
All I’m saying is that there is a precedent here. If SJW-flavored EA ends up going down this path, please don’t say you were not warned.
People nominally within EA have already called for us to disavow or not affiliate with Peter Singer so this seems less hypothetical than one might think.
‘Yvain’ gives a good description of a process along along these lines within his comment here (which also contains lots of points which pre-emptively undermine claims within this post).
I entirely appreciate the concern of going too far. Let’s just be careful not to assume that risks only come with action—the opposite path is an awful one too, and with inaction we risk moving further down it.
The Atheism Plus split was pretty bad. They were a group that wanted all atheists to also be involved in social justice. Naturally many weren’t happy with this takeover of the movement and pushed back. The Atheism Plus side argues that this was due to misogyny, ect, ignoring the fact that some people just wanted to be atheists and do atheist stuff and not get involved in politics. The end result was Atheism Plus was widely rejected, many social justice leaning atheists left the movement, Atheism widely defamed, remaining atheists not particularly open to social justice.
I don’t know very much about open source, but I’ve heard that there’s been some pretty vicious/brutal political fights over codes of conduct, ect.
Came to say this as well.
See, for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/2ygiwh/so_why_did_atheism_plus_fail/
The atheists even started to disinvite their intellectual founders, e.g. Richard Dawkins. Will EA eventually go down the same path—will they end up disinviting e.g. Bostrom for not being a sufficiently zealous social justice advocate?
All I’m saying is that there is a precedent here. If SJW-flavored EA ends up going down this path, please don’t say you were not warned.
People nominally within EA have already called for us to disavow or not affiliate with Peter Singer so this seems less hypothetical than one might think.
‘Yvain’ gives a good description of a process along along these lines within his comment here (which also contains lots of points which pre-emptively undermine claims within this post).
I entirely appreciate the concern of going too far. Let’s just be careful not to assume that risks only come with action—the opposite path is an awful one too, and with inaction we risk moving further down it.