Attacking people who are bad protects other people in the community from having their time wasted or being hurt in other ways by bad people. Try putting yourself in the shoes of the sort of people who engage in witch hunts because they’re genuinely afraid of witches, who if they existed would be capable of and willing to do great harm.
To be clear, it’s admirable to want to avoid witch hunts against people who aren’t witches and won’t actually harm anyone. But sometimes there really are witches, and hunting them is less bad than not.
People can look at clear and concise summaries like the one above and come to their own conclusion. They don’t need to be told what to believe and they don’t need to be led into a groupthink.
This approach doesn’t scale. Suppose the EA community eventually identifies 100 people at least as bad as Gleb in it, and so generates 100 separate posts like this (costing, what, 10k hours collectively?) that others have to read and come to their own conclusions about before they know who the bad actors in the EA community are. That’s a lot to ask of every person who wants to join the EA community, not to mention everyone who’s already in it, and the alternative is that newcomers don’t know who not to trust.
The simplest approach that scales (both with the size of the community and with the size of the pool of bad actors in it) is to kick out the worst actors so nobody has to spend any additional time and/or effort wondering / figuring out how bad they are.
Attacking people who are bad protects other people in the community from having their time wasted or being hurt in other ways by bad people.
Yes, but Gleb isn’t actively hurting anyone. You need an ironclad rationale before deciding to just build a wall in front of people who you think are unhelpful.
This approach doesn’t scale.
Even if you could really have 100 people starting their own organizations related to EA… it’s not relevant. Just because it won’t scale doesn’t mean it’s not the right approach with 1 person. We might think that the time and investment now is worthwhile, whereas if there were enough questionable characters that we didn’t have the time to do this with all of them, then (and only then) we’d be compelled to scale back.
Attacking people who are bad protects other people in the community from having their time wasted or being hurt in other ways by bad people. Try putting yourself in the shoes of the sort of people who engage in witch hunts because they’re genuinely afraid of witches, who if they existed would be capable of and willing to do great harm.
To be clear, it’s admirable to want to avoid witch hunts against people who aren’t witches and won’t actually harm anyone. But sometimes there really are witches, and hunting them is less bad than not.
This approach doesn’t scale. Suppose the EA community eventually identifies 100 people at least as bad as Gleb in it, and so generates 100 separate posts like this (costing, what, 10k hours collectively?) that others have to read and come to their own conclusions about before they know who the bad actors in the EA community are. That’s a lot to ask of every person who wants to join the EA community, not to mention everyone who’s already in it, and the alternative is that newcomers don’t know who not to trust.
The simplest approach that scales (both with the size of the community and with the size of the pool of bad actors in it) is to kick out the worst actors so nobody has to spend any additional time and/or effort wondering / figuring out how bad they are.
Yes, but Gleb isn’t actively hurting anyone. You need an ironclad rationale before deciding to just build a wall in front of people who you think are unhelpful.
Even if you could really have 100 people starting their own organizations related to EA… it’s not relevant. Just because it won’t scale doesn’t mean it’s not the right approach with 1 person. We might think that the time and investment now is worthwhile, whereas if there were enough questionable characters that we didn’t have the time to do this with all of them, then (and only then) we’d be compelled to scale back.