even though the situation is moderately unfortunate for me personally.
I think a writeup about this is very interesting, even if short or at a much lower quality/epistemic certainty than many of your other comments.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly interesting here. The short compression of my views is that different people have competing access needs, and I don’t feel like I have a safe space outside of a very small subset of my friends to say something pretty simple and naively reasonable like
I view that my /your interaction with this system/person is parsimoniously explained by either racism or a conjunction of factors that include racism. I would like your help in verifying whether the evidence checks out, as I tend to get emotional about this kind of thing. I would also like to talk about mitigation strategies like how I can minimize this type of interaction in the future. No, I am not claiming that this system deserves to burn down/this person ought to be cancelled. Yes, I think the system/person is probably fine in the grand scheme of things.
without basically getting embroiled in a proxy culture war. I feel like many people (even ones I naively would have thought to be fairly reasonable) would rush to defend the system/person if they like the system/person against any charges of racism that doesn’t have enough evidence to be convicted in court. Or worse, immediately rush to “my defense” and get very indignant on my behalf without being very objective about the whole thing, even though given that I was the one who was emotional at the time, them being more emotional is less helpful (I say “worse” on epistemic grounds even though in the heat of the moment I often appreciate it).
For the sake of completion, I will note that AFAICT, none of these (coded racist) interactions have happened professionally in EA. There’s an important caveat that the statistical nature of discrimination makes it hard for me to be sure of course, but my experience with other systems is that it is often not all that subtle.
Thank you for writing this. There is a lot of personal insight and color to this answer, and I think this informed me and other readers.
I feel like it is appropriate to respond by sharing some personal experience, but I don’t really know what to immediately say. This is not because of political correctness/self-censoring but because there is a lot of personal depth involved and I’m worried I will not give an insightful and fully True answer (and I think there is low demand).
I don’t think there’s anything particularly interesting here. The short compression of my views is that different people have competing access needs, and I don’t feel like I have a safe space outside of a very small subset of my friends to say something pretty simple and naively reasonable like
without basically getting embroiled in a proxy culture war. I feel like many people (even ones I naively would have thought to be fairly reasonable) would rush to defend the system/person if they like the system/person against any charges of racism that doesn’t have enough evidence to be convicted in court. Or worse, immediately rush to “my defense” and get very indignant on my behalf without being very objective about the whole thing, even though given that I was the one who was emotional at the time, them being more emotional is less helpful (I say “worse” on epistemic grounds even though in the heat of the moment I often appreciate it).
For the sake of completion, I will note that AFAICT, none of these (coded racist) interactions have happened professionally in EA. There’s an important caveat that the statistical nature of discrimination makes it hard for me to be sure of course, but my experience with other systems is that it is often not all that subtle.
Thank you for writing this. There is a lot of personal insight and color to this answer, and I think this informed me and other readers.
I feel like it is appropriate to respond by sharing some personal experience, but I don’t really know what to immediately say. This is not because of political correctness/self-censoring but because there is a lot of personal depth involved and I’m worried I will not give an insightful and fully True answer (and I think there is low demand).