Anon Rationalist—thanks for posting some excerpts from this Richard Hanania piece. I would encourage EAs to read the entire original piece for full context.
I’ll just add two comments for now:
First, Hanania is writing as a trollish edgelord. He uses crude, sweeping generalizations, deliberately provocative language, and emotionally inflammatory criticisms of wokeness. Brace yourselves for that. He’s not using the usual rhetorical style and rationalist epistemics of EA Forum posts. He’s writing to get your attention, and you probably won’t like at least half of what he says.
Second, despite all that, I agree with Hanania that wokeness is an existential threat to EA, to utilitarianism, and to rationalism, and we should take the threat more seriously.
I’ve noticed a tendency in EA to show exactly the kind of gutless, cringing, defensive deference to woke critiques of EA that Hanania talks about. Whenever a critic of EA (whether inside or outside the movement) uses woke argument styles, deploys woke terms, and invokes woke values (e.g. ‘diversity, equity, inclusion’), most EAs seem too frightened to challenge them, for fear of suffering the usual fate of the anti-woke: dogpiling, brigading, ostracism, and cancellation.
If we don’t develop robust defenses against wokeness, we will suffer the same fate as every other organization that values emotional victimization rhetoric over scope-sensitive rationality.
Anon Rationalist—thanks for posting some excerpts from this Richard Hanania piece. I would encourage EAs to read the entire original piece for full context.
I’ll just add two comments for now:
First, Hanania is writing as a trollish edgelord. He uses crude, sweeping generalizations, deliberately provocative language, and emotionally inflammatory criticisms of wokeness. Brace yourselves for that. He’s not using the usual rhetorical style and rationalist epistemics of EA Forum posts. He’s writing to get your attention, and you probably won’t like at least half of what he says.
Second, despite all that, I agree with Hanania that wokeness is an existential threat to EA, to utilitarianism, and to rationalism, and we should take the threat more seriously.
I’ve noticed a tendency in EA to show exactly the kind of gutless, cringing, defensive deference to woke critiques of EA that Hanania talks about. Whenever a critic of EA (whether inside or outside the movement) uses woke argument styles, deploys woke terms, and invokes woke values (e.g. ‘diversity, equity, inclusion’), most EAs seem too frightened to challenge them, for fear of suffering the usual fate of the anti-woke: dogpiling, brigading, ostracism, and cancellation.
If we don’t develop robust defenses against wokeness, we will suffer the same fate as every other organization that values emotional victimization rhetoric over scope-sensitive rationality.