Another idea I had: add questions to the EA Survey to understand how people feel about the issues you are describing. This accomplishes a few things:
It allows us to track progress more effectively than observing our demographic breakdown. Measuring how people feel about EA movement culture gives us a shorter feedback loop, since changes in demographics lag behind culture changes. Furthermore, by attempting to measure the climate issue directly, we can zero in on factors under our control.
It helps fight selection effects that occur in online discussion of these issues. People on both sides can be reluctant to share their thoughts & ideas in a thread like this one. Online discussions in general can be wildly unrepresentative. I was surprised to learn about polls which found that most Native Americans aren’t offended by the use of “Redskins” as a team name (criticism of this poll), and that a majority of black people are against affirmative action. And among the “anti-SJW” crowd, there’s a perception that some folks are going to see racism/sexism in everything, and they will never be satisfied. So taking a representative poll of EAs, and perhaps comparing the results to some baseline, can help us come to agreement on the degree to which we have issues.
I like this idea. It will be skewed towards people who aren’t turned off by the culture, as those who are will have less interest in, and in some or many cases may not even be exposed to, the survey, but getting more systematic info on people’s feelings here would be very useful.
I mentioned my concern that pro-diversity efforts in EA might “spiral” towards a mob mentality. I think one way in which this might happen is if the people working towards diversity in EA recruit people from underrepresented groups that they know through other pro-diversity groups, which, as you mention, frequently suffer from a mob mentality. If the pool of underrepresented people we draw from is not selected this way (e.g. if the majority of black people who are joining EA are against affirmative action, as is true for the majority of the black population in general), then I’m less worried.
I think some of your suggestions are not entirely consistent. For example, you mention that EA should not “throw around the term “AI” with no qualification or explanation”. From my perspective, if I was hearing about EA for the first time and someone felt the need to explain what “AI” was an acronym for, I would feel condescended to. I imagine this effect might be especially acute if I was a member of a minority group (“How dumb do these people think I am?”) Similarly, you suggest that we cut our use of jargon. In practice, I think useful jargon is going to continue getting used no matter what. So the way this suggestion may be interpreted in practice is: Don’t use jargon around people who are members of underrepresented groups. I think people from underrepresented groups will soon figure out they are being condescended to. I think a better idea is to remember that we were once ignorant about jargon ourselves, and make an effort to explain jargon to newbies. Hopefully they feel like members of the ingroup after they’ve mastered the lingo.
Relatedly, there is a question which I think sometimes gets tied up with the diversity question, but perhaps should not get tied up, which is the question of whether EA should aim more to be a committed, elite core vs a broad church. My impression is lots of people privately favor the committed, elite core approach. I think we can have both diversity and a committed, elite core: consider institutions such as Harvard which are both elite and diverse. Furthermore, I think being more public about our elitism might actually help with diversity, because we’d be making our standards clearer and more transparent, and we could rely less heavily on subjective first impressions. (CC Askell on “buzz talk”.) To put it another way: although “diversity” and “inclusion” are often treated as synonyms, it’s actually possible to be both “diverse” and “exclusive” (and this seems likely ideal).
A benefit of diversity you didn’t mention: Insofar as the EA movement has world peace and global cooperation as part of our goals, it’s useful to have people from as many different groups as possible. This is also useful if we want to be able to speak authoritatively on topics like how AI should be used for the benefit of humanity and whatnot.
Unjustified hunch here, but I think maybe another failure mode that can come up when a movement tries to increase diversity is that people who are underrepresented start to receive more attention. Even if this attention is positive (e.g. “How can we cater to people like you better?”), I think this can result in an increased level of self-consciousness. (See my previous point about how people who look different may feel self-conscious by default even if they’re not discriminated against.) Further unjustified conjecture: the sort of black person who supports affirmative action tends to enjoy the power they get from this, whereas the sort of black person who doesn’t support affirmative action doesn’t like it, thereby enhancing the “spiral” effect.
Another possible failure mode: Diversity advocates see something they don’t like (e.g. a person suggesting that women do not contribute to society and are leeches if they don’t offer men sex), and they want to root the problem out. In order to rally support, they let everyone know about the problem (like you did in this post). But by letting everyone know about the problem, they’ve also made it in to a bigger problem: now every woman who reads this post knows that someone, at one point in an EA-related discussion somewhere, made this outrageous claim—which results in those women feeling less welcome and more on edge. The toxic echo of this person’s post continues to reverberate as it is held up as part of a broader trend within EA, even though their post itself was long ago deleted. (This could contribute to the “spiral” effect I described, if the women who stick around after hearing about posts like these are disproportionately those that enjoy engaging in flame wars with people who make outrageous statements.)
I mentioned the EA Survey. One thing you could do is look at existing EA survey data and try to understand whether our issues with underrepresentation seem to be getting better or worse over the years. My impression is that gender thing, at least, has gotten much better since EA was founded. In any case, if things are already on a good path, I’m more skeptical about major diversity initiatives—”if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
Incidentally, I realized some of the points I’m making here are redundant with this essay which was already posted. (But I highly recommend reading it anyway, because it has some great points I hadn’t thought of.)
But by letting everyone know about the problem, they’ve also made it in to a bigger problem: now every woman who reads this post knows that someone, at one point in an EA-related discussion somewhere, made this outrageous claim—which results in those women feeling less welcome and more on edge. The toxic echo of this person’s post continues to reverberate as it is held up as part of a broader trend within EA, even though their post itself was long ago deleted.
This can get very dangerous as it opens a door for trolls to negatively impact the community and potentially damage its reputation. Maybe these kinds of discussions need to be gated in some way, or be had offline or something.
Risk does come with greater publicity of such behavior, but that’s part of the point of making it more public (in addition to the information value for people who want to avoid or address it). This is the first I’ve ever publicly said something about these issues in EA, after three years of many private conversations that seem to have resulted in limited or no impact. Greater publicity means greater accountability and motivation for action, both for the people who behave poorly and the people who let them do so without consequence.
Since I’m already working on inclusionary practices myself, there’s not much else to do but private or public discussion.
The private discussions I have had explicitly around the issue have varied a lot in their content and purpose and can be characterized as any of the following or a combination thereof: Listening to people’s experiences; sharing my own; discussing solutions; actively (beyond just listening) supporting people who were treated poorly; sharing information and concern about the issue with people in a better or still good position to do something about it; trying to discuss why this or more specific issues of exclusion are a problem with people who prefer the status quo; or endeavoring to show people why something they did was a problem and what they should do differently.
Dealing with a bewilderingly amateur situation myself and working to privately help the people responsible to understand the problem and improve took a month out of my life, and with a really important counterfactual, and that’s strictly in time spent on the issue that I don’t think I would have had to lose in e.g. the animal advocacy community, and not accounting for the emotional toll. I have good reason for (cautious) optimism that that was fruitful but also a red flag restraining that optimism and regardless only time will tell.
Basically I’ve spent a huge amount of time on those private and often solution-oriented conversations and have been hanging over the precipice of burnout with the community since day 1 several years ago. (The broader community at least, not the animal advocacy sub/intersected-community. And disclaimer that there are great individuals throughout the broader community who are my friends and/or whose presence in the community I am so happy for, etc.) And I’m definitely not alone in that.
I can do more to have private conversations with people in better positions than myself to make change here (such as people who are looked up to in the community by the people whose behavior could be more inclusionary, or donors to EA orgs), and I might if this post and the discussion here doesn’t inspire other people to take more action on this issue, which is my hope.
Another idea I had: add questions to the EA Survey to understand how people feel about the issues you are describing. This accomplishes a few things:
It allows us to track progress more effectively than observing our demographic breakdown. Measuring how people feel about EA movement culture gives us a shorter feedback loop, since changes in demographics lag behind culture changes. Furthermore, by attempting to measure the climate issue directly, we can zero in on factors under our control.
It helps fight selection effects that occur in online discussion of these issues. People on both sides can be reluctant to share their thoughts & ideas in a thread like this one. Online discussions in general can be wildly unrepresentative. I was surprised to learn about polls which found that most Native Americans aren’t offended by the use of “Redskins” as a team name (criticism of this poll), and that a majority of black people are against affirmative action. And among the “anti-SJW” crowd, there’s a perception that some folks are going to see racism/sexism in everything, and they will never be satisfied. So taking a representative poll of EAs, and perhaps comparing the results to some baseline, can help us come to agreement on the degree to which we have issues.
I like this idea. It will be skewed towards people who aren’t turned off by the culture, as those who are will have less interest in, and in some or many cases may not even be exposed to, the survey, but getting more systematic info on people’s feelings here would be very useful.
Some more thoughts:
I mentioned my concern that pro-diversity efforts in EA might “spiral” towards a mob mentality. I think one way in which this might happen is if the people working towards diversity in EA recruit people from underrepresented groups that they know through other pro-diversity groups, which, as you mention, frequently suffer from a mob mentality. If the pool of underrepresented people we draw from is not selected this way (e.g. if the majority of black people who are joining EA are against affirmative action, as is true for the majority of the black population in general), then I’m less worried.
I think some of your suggestions are not entirely consistent. For example, you mention that EA should not “throw around the term “AI” with no qualification or explanation”. From my perspective, if I was hearing about EA for the first time and someone felt the need to explain what “AI” was an acronym for, I would feel condescended to. I imagine this effect might be especially acute if I was a member of a minority group (“How dumb do these people think I am?”) Similarly, you suggest that we cut our use of jargon. In practice, I think useful jargon is going to continue getting used no matter what. So the way this suggestion may be interpreted in practice is: Don’t use jargon around people who are members of underrepresented groups. I think people from underrepresented groups will soon figure out they are being condescended to. I think a better idea is to remember that we were once ignorant about jargon ourselves, and make an effort to explain jargon to newbies. Hopefully they feel like members of the ingroup after they’ve mastered the lingo.
Relatedly, there is a question which I think sometimes gets tied up with the diversity question, but perhaps should not get tied up, which is the question of whether EA should aim more to be a committed, elite core vs a broad church. My impression is lots of people privately favor the committed, elite core approach. I think we can have both diversity and a committed, elite core: consider institutions such as Harvard which are both elite and diverse. Furthermore, I think being more public about our elitism might actually help with diversity, because we’d be making our standards clearer and more transparent, and we could rely less heavily on subjective first impressions. (CC Askell on “buzz talk”.) To put it another way: although “diversity” and “inclusion” are often treated as synonyms, it’s actually possible to be both “diverse” and “exclusive” (and this seems likely ideal).
A benefit of diversity you didn’t mention: Insofar as the EA movement has world peace and global cooperation as part of our goals, it’s useful to have people from as many different groups as possible. This is also useful if we want to be able to speak authoritatively on topics like how AI should be used for the benefit of humanity and whatnot.
Unjustified hunch here, but I think maybe another failure mode that can come up when a movement tries to increase diversity is that people who are underrepresented start to receive more attention. Even if this attention is positive (e.g. “How can we cater to people like you better?”), I think this can result in an increased level of self-consciousness. (See my previous point about how people who look different may feel self-conscious by default even if they’re not discriminated against.) Further unjustified conjecture: the sort of black person who supports affirmative action tends to enjoy the power they get from this, whereas the sort of black person who doesn’t support affirmative action doesn’t like it, thereby enhancing the “spiral” effect.
Another possible failure mode: Diversity advocates see something they don’t like (e.g. a person suggesting that women do not contribute to society and are leeches if they don’t offer men sex), and they want to root the problem out. In order to rally support, they let everyone know about the problem (like you did in this post). But by letting everyone know about the problem, they’ve also made it in to a bigger problem: now every woman who reads this post knows that someone, at one point in an EA-related discussion somewhere, made this outrageous claim—which results in those women feeling less welcome and more on edge. The toxic echo of this person’s post continues to reverberate as it is held up as part of a broader trend within EA, even though their post itself was long ago deleted. (This could contribute to the “spiral” effect I described, if the women who stick around after hearing about posts like these are disproportionately those that enjoy engaging in flame wars with people who make outrageous statements.)
I mentioned the EA Survey. One thing you could do is look at existing EA survey data and try to understand whether our issues with underrepresentation seem to be getting better or worse over the years. My impression is that gender thing, at least, has gotten much better since EA was founded. In any case, if things are already on a good path, I’m more skeptical about major diversity initiatives—”if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
Incidentally, I realized some of the points I’m making here are redundant with this essay which was already posted. (But I highly recommend reading it anyway, because it has some great points I hadn’t thought of.)
This can get very dangerous as it opens a door for trolls to negatively impact the community and potentially damage its reputation. Maybe these kinds of discussions need to be gated in some way, or be had offline or something.
Risk does come with greater publicity of such behavior, but that’s part of the point of making it more public (in addition to the information value for people who want to avoid or address it). This is the first I’ve ever publicly said something about these issues in EA, after three years of many private conversations that seem to have resulted in limited or no impact. Greater publicity means greater accountability and motivation for action, both for the people who behave poorly and the people who let them do so without consequence.
Out of curiosity, have you tried anything besides private conversations?
Since I’m already working on inclusionary practices myself, there’s not much else to do but private or public discussion.
The private discussions I have had explicitly around the issue have varied a lot in their content and purpose and can be characterized as any of the following or a combination thereof: Listening to people’s experiences; sharing my own; discussing solutions; actively (beyond just listening) supporting people who were treated poorly; sharing information and concern about the issue with people in a better or still good position to do something about it; trying to discuss why this or more specific issues of exclusion are a problem with people who prefer the status quo; or endeavoring to show people why something they did was a problem and what they should do differently.
Dealing with a bewilderingly amateur situation myself and working to privately help the people responsible to understand the problem and improve took a month out of my life, and with a really important counterfactual, and that’s strictly in time spent on the issue that I don’t think I would have had to lose in e.g. the animal advocacy community, and not accounting for the emotional toll. I have good reason for (cautious) optimism that that was fruitful but also a red flag restraining that optimism and regardless only time will tell.
Basically I’ve spent a huge amount of time on those private and often solution-oriented conversations and have been hanging over the precipice of burnout with the community since day 1 several years ago. (The broader community at least, not the animal advocacy sub/intersected-community. And disclaimer that there are great individuals throughout the broader community who are my friends and/or whose presence in the community I am so happy for, etc.) And I’m definitely not alone in that.
I can do more to have private conversations with people in better positions than myself to make change here (such as people who are looked up to in the community by the people whose behavior could be more inclusionary, or donors to EA orgs), and I might if this post and the discussion here doesn’t inspire other people to take more action on this issue, which is my hope.