To copy comments I left previously about the entry abuse, which was deleted after the objections were not addressed and a poll overwhelmingly favored deletion:
I think it’s fine to have broad tags that encompass other, more specific tags. My concern about “abuse” isn’t merely that it is broad, but that it doesn’t seem to capture a “natural kind” of special interest to EA: compare with “global health and development”, which despite being broad, it singles out a particularly promising focus area (from a neartermist, human-centric perspective).
Things like “domestic violence”, “child abuse”, etc. are in principle appropriate candidates for a Wiki entry, I think, though whether they are in practice depends on whether these are topics that have attracted sufficient EA attention. There are all sorts of serious issues in the world that the Wiki doesn’t cover, because the EA community hasn’t devoted enough attention to them.
As for abuse within the EA community, perhaps this would warrant a “community health” entry (which we don’t have at the moment).
I think the same arguments roughly apply to physical abuse. A quick look at the list of suggested articles confirms my impression that there is no crisp, natural common denominator underlying this heterogeneous collection of posts. I continue to believe that it makes more sense to rely on multiple other entries, including other articles we could create such as community health (as proposed above), to collect this material.
Sorry about the downvotes. (My guess is that they were meant to signal disapproval of ‘abuse’ as an adequate subject for a Wiki entry rather than express a negative opinion about the article’s quality; FWIW, I didn’t downvote you.)
I guess I still feel that “physical abuse” is too vague. Do you have examples of physical abuse in mind that would be of special interest to EA not already covered elsewhere in the Wiki?
I also don’t think it’s an expression of the article’s quality, I think EAs (or at least it’s forum users) are uncomfortable with abuse. The likes/upvotes of posts and comments that mention it are often polarized and I think that acknowledging that abused happened in the EA-community probably (and understandably) made people defensive. I wasn’t trying to smear EA by including a Kathy Forth post, I was trying to be open and honest.
I think it’s fine to have broad tags that encompass other, more specific tags. My concern about “abuse” isn’t merely that it is broad, but that it doesn’t seem to capture a “natural kind” of special interest to EA: compare with “global health and development”, which despite being broad, it singles out a particularly promising focus area (from a neartermist, human-centric perspective).
Things like “domestic violence”, “child abuse”, etc. are in principle appropriate candidates for a Wiki entry, I think, though whether they are in practice depends on whether these are topics that have attracted sufficient EA attention. There are all sorts of serious issues in the world that the Wiki doesn’t cover, because the EA community hasn’t devoted enough attention to them.
As for abuse within the EA community, perhaps this would warrant a “community health” entry (which we don’t have at the moment). Would you be in favor of creating such an entry?
Don’t you think physical abuse captures a natural kind? If I start asking people on the street to picture physical abuse and picture global health and development, I think that basically everyone will have a clearer picture of what physical abuse entails than global health and development.
I have just proven myself to be bad at writing about sensitive topics, so you should probably ask someone who speaks English as a native language and who is more integrated in the wider EA-community (there are hardly any EA-organizations/projects where I live, so the small group I run is pretty isolated from the larger EA-community). Otherwise the Community experiences / Diversity and inclusion / Criticism of effective altruist organizations might be enough to cover it.
I saw that some tags now have banners (and icons). Since I made card images and banners for a bunch of sequences, shall I make some for the tags too? I can’t add them via the edit function, so if you want me to add them I would need some other mechanism.
I think the image option is available only for “core” tags (which have a white rather than a grey background), although I’m not entirely sure since this was done by the tech team. I believe all the core tags already have images associated with them, but if that isn’t the case, or if you think you can produce better images, it may be worth exploring this further. Would you mind messaging JP Addison, who is leading this? Thanks.
I created a poll to decide what to do about the ‘Abuse’ article and it looks like people are not in favor of keeping it. Just wanted to let you know that I’ll probably delete it if the vote doesn’t substantially change by the end of today.
Thanks again for contributing to the EA Wiki, and I hope this doesn’t dissuade you from contributing more in the future!
I don’t appreciate the sarcasm. Lots of tags have been deleted in the past. This was the first tag deleted after trying out a democratic process of decision-making, that doesn’t rely on my judgment alone.
The conversation had ended with my argument. No one had refuted it, no one provided a counterargument, no one left a request for the deletion of the tag. It’s also not democratic if some people get more votes than others. If there was any need for a poll at all, it would be about whether the name should be changed to “physical abuse”. Should I just upload the same article but under the name “physical abuse” (but this time without mentioning the EA-community and without adding a post by Kathy Forth)?
If you want to nominate an article, you can do so here.
EDIT: Pablo’s response is fair so I will upvote it, I didn’t think of it because most of it was already released and none contained personal info, but I should have asked. I do think the context is important since Pablo’s comment is misleading, the objections were addressed and the deletion process started without request. The fact that my tag proposal stood a day without getting downvoted, but did get a downvote immediately after this comment mentioned the EA-community and Kathy Forth again, is evidence that these factors were indeed what caused the downvote of the original tag. I do think some of the posts I linked in the proposal worked better than others, which is why I used the word ‘potentially’. Currently 48 tags have only 1 article and 55 tags only have 2 articles. I feared that if I only linked a few the tag would be dismissed with the response that the EA-community doesn’t engage with this topic (which is demonstrably not true). Feel free to not include the articles you think are irrelevant, but there are definitely more than two that remain.
While I’m happy for our exchange to be made public, I note that you didn’t ask for permission to post it. In general, I think you should get people’s consent before releasing a private communication (as I did before sharing our initial exchange).
I read this exchange a few times, but I’m still a novice to this exchange or the headspace of this argument, and my understanding is limited. I feel like that relatively few people will engage or give comment, so I am commenting.
My quick read is that Pablo has a substantive viewpoint, that “abuse” is vague. “Abuse” pretty much boils down to “malign behavior by human beings”, which is incredibly broad and hard to define.
Pablo talks about it here:
I think it’s fine to have broad tags that encompass other, more specific tags. My concern about “abuse” isn’t merely that it is broad, but that it doesn’t seem to capture a “natural kind” of special interest to EA: compare with “global health and development”, which despite being broad, it singles out a particularly promising focus area (from a neartermist, human-centric perspective).
Things like “domestic violence”, “child abuse”, etc. are in principle appropriate candidates for a Wiki entry, I think, though whether they are in practice depends on whether these are topics that have attracted sufficient EA attention. There are all sorts of serious issues in the world that the Wiki doesn’t cover, because the EA community hasn’t devoted enough attention to them.
As for abuse within the EA community, perhaps this would warrant a “community health” entry (which we don’t have at the moment). Would you be in favor of creating such an entry?
To sum up, the lack of clarity about what “abuse” means, and that it’s purportedly a general class of interventions to help the world, yet somehow also going to absorb community health (which would just help EAs) or criticism of EA, seems dubious.
Your immediate comment to the above comment is friendly, but goes sort of off topic and is hard to follow or engage with. At some point, you throw in “criticism of EA” into this for unclear reasons, and then you post up this comment exchange, which to quick pattern matching, seems to look really unpromising.
In these arguments or situations, it’s really hard and unrewarding for “outsiders” to the argument to get into the headspace and gain understanding or be productive in these disputes.
The substance here is about a system of knowledge or a wiki, a vision or system for which the would-be “abuse” tags needs to slot in.
My ideology is that this benefits from a “single vision or owner” and Pablo’s role and views overall seem correct?
A physical abuse tag. I’ve already written something that could be used as the article:
The physical abuse tag covers posts that discuss the prevention of physical abuse as a cause area.
For posts about animal abuse see: Animal Welfare
For posts about the abuse of statistics see: Statistical methods
For posts about the effects of abuse see: Pain and suffering and Mental health
Further reading
Macpherson, Michael Colin (1985) The psychology of abuse, R & E Publishers.
McCluskey, Una; Hooper, Carol-Ann (2000) Psychodynamic Perspectives on Abuse: The Cost of Fear, Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Related entries
Pain and suffering | Mental health
Posts it could potentially apply to:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C5diBK7sJmoYWdrCs/is-preventing-child-abuse-a-plausible-cause-x
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/o4HX48yMGjCrcRqwC/what-helped-the-voiceless-historical-case-studies
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qv5dRAGkTjxs9vrv9/small-and-vulnerable
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pW7w5mcbKaWGi9vez/victim-coordination-website
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Xjo23zhn6CPoijLSo/a-love-letter-to-civilian-osint-and-possibilities-as-a-tool
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nqgE6cR72kyyfwZNL/making-discussions-in-ea-groups-inclusive
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hYh6jKBsKXH8mWwtc/a-contact-person-for-the-ea-community
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oXLoevuopqE3hdeis/link-cutting-through-spiritual-colonialism
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/j9toMRy2LAsHfwHN5/improving-local-governance-in-fragile-states-practical-1
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ME4zE34KBSYnt6hGp/new-cause-proposal-international-supply-chain-accountability
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bqvanr9qz6dg2f5Tw/why-is-the-amount-of-child-porn-growing
To copy comments I left previously about the entry abuse, which was deleted after the objections were not addressed and a poll overwhelmingly favored deletion:
I think the same arguments roughly apply to physical abuse. A quick look at the list of suggested articles confirms my impression that there is no crisp, natural common denominator underlying this heterogeneous collection of posts. I continue to believe that it makes more sense to rely on multiple other entries, including other articles we could create such as community health (as proposed above), to collect this material.
For context, here is the discussion:
EDIT: Pablo’s response is fair so I will upvote it, I didn’t think of it because most of it was already released and none contained personal info, but I should have asked. I do think the context is important since Pablo’s comment is misleading, the objections were addressed and the deletion process started without request. The fact that my tag proposal stood a day without getting downvoted, but did get a downvote immediately after this comment mentioned the EA-community and Kathy Forth again, is evidence that these factors were indeed what caused the downvote of the original tag. I do think some of the posts I linked in the proposal worked better than others, which is why I used the word ‘potentially’. Currently 48 tags have only 1 article and 55 tags only have 2 articles. I feared that if I only linked a few the tag would be dismissed with the response that the EA-community doesn’t engage with this topic (which is demonstrably not true). Feel free to not include the articles you think are irrelevant, but there are definitely more than two that remain.
While I’m happy for our exchange to be made public, I note that you didn’t ask for permission to post it. In general, I think you should get people’s consent before releasing a private communication (as I did before sharing our initial exchange).
I read this exchange a few times, but I’m still a novice to this exchange or the headspace of this argument, and my understanding is limited. I feel like that relatively few people will engage or give comment, so I am commenting.
My quick read is that Pablo has a substantive viewpoint, that “abuse” is vague. “Abuse” pretty much boils down to “malign behavior by human beings”, which is incredibly broad and hard to define.
Pablo talks about it here:
To sum up, the lack of clarity about what “abuse” means, and that it’s purportedly a general class of interventions to help the world, yet somehow also going to absorb community health (which would just help EAs) or criticism of EA, seems dubious.
Your immediate comment to the above comment is friendly, but goes sort of off topic and is hard to follow or engage with. At some point, you throw in “criticism of EA” into this for unclear reasons, and then you post up this comment exchange, which to quick pattern matching, seems to look really unpromising.
In these arguments or situations, it’s really hard and unrewarding for “outsiders” to the argument to get into the headspace and gain understanding or be productive in these disputes.
The substance here is about a system of knowledge or a wiki, a vision or system for which the would-be “abuse” tags needs to slot in.
My ideology is that this benefits from a “single vision or owner” and Pablo’s role and views overall seem correct?