I just want to highlight that I feel like part of this post is based on a false premise; you mention InIn was started in 2014. While that may be true, all of the incidents in EA (and Less Wrong) circles cited above date to November 2015 or later. Gleb’s very first submission in the EA forum is in October 2015. By saying ‘it took two years’ and then talking about ‘months rather than years’ you give the impression that Gleb could have been excluded sometime back in 2015 and would have been elsewhere, which I think is pretty misleading (though presumably unintentionally so).
The truth is that it took a little over 9 months from Gleb’s first post to Jeff’s major public criticism. 9 months and a decent amount of time is not trivial. But let’s not overstate the problem.
“There’s a second part however, which is that once a person has learned (from experience) that Gleb is acting in bad faith, the next time that person comes to the discussion, everybody else sees the standard signals of good-faith communication, and as such the person may be hesitant to treat Gleb as they would treat someone else who was clearly acting in bad faith. This is because they would be seen as unnecessarily harsh by people without the background experiences—as was seen multiple times in the original Facebook thread, when people (who did not have the past experience with Gleb) were confused by the harshness of the criticism, and criticised the tone of the conversation.”
I do strongly agree with this. I had some very frustrating conversations around that thread.
I just want to highlight that I feel like part of this post is based on a false premise; you mention InIn was started in 2014. While that may be true, all of the incidents in EA (and Less Wrong) circles cited above date to November 2015 or later. Gleb’s very first submission in the EA forum is in October 2015. By saying ‘it took two years’ and then talking about ‘months rather than years’ you give the impression that Gleb could have been excluded sometime back in 2015 and would have been elsewhere, which I think is pretty misleading (though presumably unintentionally so).
The truth is that it took a little over 9 months from Gleb’s first post to Jeff’s major public criticism. 9 months and a decent amount of time is not trivial. But let’s not overstate the problem.
“There’s a second part however, which is that once a person has learned (from experience) that Gleb is acting in bad faith, the next time that person comes to the discussion, everybody else sees the standard signals of good-faith communication, and as such the person may be hesitant to treat Gleb as they would treat someone else who was clearly acting in bad faith. This is because they would be seen as unnecessarily harsh by people without the background experiences—as was seen multiple times in the original Facebook thread, when people (who did not have the past experience with Gleb) were confused by the harshness of the criticism, and criticised the tone of the conversation.”
I do strongly agree with this. I had some very frustrating conversations around that thread.