Hi, I think on balance I appreciate this post. This is a hard thing for me to say, as the post has likely caused nontrivial costs to some people rather close to me, and has broken some norms that I view as both subtle and important. But on balance I think our movement will do better with more critical thinkers, and more people with critical pushback when there is apparent divergence between stated memes and revealed goals.
I think this is better both culturally, and also is directly necessary to combat actual harm if there is also actual large-scale wrongdoing that agreeable people have been acculturated to not point out. I think it will be bad for the composition and future of our movement if we push away young people who are idealistic and disagreeable, which I think is the default outcome if posts like this only receive critical pushback.
So thank you for this post. I hope you stay and continue being critical.
Yeah, I found this a tricky one. I am currently not planning to respond to this post because I think it caused overall a bit too much collateral damage (leaking documents, accusations against a student in our program, and outing former staff), and I don’t want to incentivize that. But I do like thoughtful critiques, and am in principle pretty interested in receiving and responding to them.
I find myself pretty confused here, and can easily imagine that I screwed up in this assessment. I think the two main things that I find confusing is a) what standards should I expect to have for critics who’re probably younger than 20[1], where I do in fact consider these norm violations to be quite bad if they came from people who are say older than 22, and b) how to relate to the very real possibility that I or people I know are doing bad things. Like humans have all sorts of biases to protect their in-group etc, and I can easily imagine both undercorrecting and overcorrecting here.
Which I’m not very calibrated about. You’re much more calibrated than I am here, though for this specific question there are obvious reasons I shouldn’t defer to you.
My general approach is to make sure to sufficiently disincentivize norm violations, but be very lenient with giving young people second/third/n-th chances, and not write them off just because they didn’t understand the norms or didn’t immediately follow them.
(Incidentally, we’ve recently been discussing how to get disagreeable people to apply and feel welcome and comfortable in the Atlas community, partly for the reasons you mentioned.)
Hi, I think on balance I appreciate this post. This is a hard thing for me to say, as the post has likely caused nontrivial costs to some people rather close to me, and has broken some norms that I view as both subtle and important. But on balance I think our movement will do better with more critical thinkers, and more people with critical pushback when there is apparent divergence between stated memes and revealed goals.
I think this is better both culturally, and also is directly necessary to combat actual harm if there is also actual large-scale wrongdoing that agreeable people have been acculturated to not point out. I think it will be bad for the composition and future of our movement if we push away young people who are idealistic and disagreeable, which I think is the default outcome if posts like this only receive critical pushback.
So thank you for this post. I hope you stay and continue being critical.
Yeah, I found this a tricky one. I am currently not planning to respond to this post because I think it caused overall a bit too much collateral damage (leaking documents, accusations against a student in our program, and outing former staff), and I don’t want to incentivize that. But I do like thoughtful critiques, and am in principle pretty interested in receiving and responding to them.
I find myself pretty confused here, and can easily imagine that I screwed up in this assessment. I think the two main things that I find confusing is a) what standards should I expect to have for critics who’re probably younger than 20[1], where I do in fact consider these norm violations to be quite bad if they came from people who are say older than 22, and b) how to relate to the very real possibility that I or people I know are doing bad things. Like humans have all sorts of biases to protect their in-group etc, and I can easily imagine both undercorrecting and overcorrecting here.
Which I’m not very calibrated about. You’re much more calibrated than I am here, though for this specific question there are obvious reasons I shouldn’t defer to you.
My general approach is to make sure to sufficiently disincentivize norm violations, but be very lenient with giving young people second/third/n-th chances, and not write them off just because they didn’t understand the norms or didn’t immediately follow them.
(Incidentally, we’ve recently been discussing how to get disagreeable people to apply and feel welcome and comfortable in the Atlas community, partly for the reasons you mentioned.)
I really like both of these comments for talking about their meta principles for assessing this kind of thing explicitly!