Pretty much agree with you and shlevy here, except that the wasting hundreds of collective hours carefully checking that Gleb is acting in bad faith seems more like a waste to me.
If the EA community were primarily a community that functioned in person, it would be easier and more natural to deal with bad actors like Gleb; people could privately (in small conversations, then bigger ones, none of which involve Gleb) discuss and come to a consensus about his badness, that consensus could spread in other private smallish then bigger conversations none of which involve Gleb, and people could either ignore Gleb until he goes away, or just not invite him to stuff, or explicitly kick him out in some way.
But in a community that primarily functions online, where by default conversations are public and involve everyone, including Gleb, the above dynamic is a lot harder to sustain, and instead the default approach to ostracism is public ostracism, which people interested in charitable conversational norms understandably want to avoid. But just not having ostracism at all isn’t a workable alternative; sometimes bad actors creep into your community and you need an immune system capable of rejecting them. In many online communites this takes the form of a process for banning people; I don’t know how workable this would be for the EA community, since my impression is that it’s spread out across several platforms.
Seems worth establishing the fact that bad actors exist, will try to join our community, and engage in this pattern of almost plausibly deniable shamelessly bad behavior. I think EAs often have a mental block around admitting that in most of the world, lying is a cheap and effective strategy for personal gain; I think we make wrong judgments because we’re missing this key fact about how the world works. I think we should generalize from this incident, and having a clear record is helpful for doing so.
Yes! But… you said your opening line as though it disagreed somehow? I said:
it’s important to realise that there are communities out there for whom Gleb would’ve been outed in months rather than years, and without the time of many top researchers in the community wasted.
To re-iterate, it’s delightful to be part of a community that responds to this sort of situation by spending ~100s of hours (collectively) and ~100k words (I’m counting the original Facebook thread as well as the post here) analysing the situation and producing a considered, charitable yet damning report.
and while I think this behavior is in some sense admirable, I think it is on net not delightful, and the huge waste of time it represents is bad on net except to the extent that it leads to better community norms around policing bad actors.
Pretty much agree with you and shlevy here, except that the wasting hundreds of collective hours carefully checking that Gleb is acting in bad faith seems more like a waste to me.
If the EA community were primarily a community that functioned in person, it would be easier and more natural to deal with bad actors like Gleb; people could privately (in small conversations, then bigger ones, none of which involve Gleb) discuss and come to a consensus about his badness, that consensus could spread in other private smallish then bigger conversations none of which involve Gleb, and people could either ignore Gleb until he goes away, or just not invite him to stuff, or explicitly kick him out in some way.
But in a community that primarily functions online, where by default conversations are public and involve everyone, including Gleb, the above dynamic is a lot harder to sustain, and instead the default approach to ostracism is public ostracism, which people interested in charitable conversational norms understandably want to avoid. But just not having ostracism at all isn’t a workable alternative; sometimes bad actors creep into your community and you need an immune system capable of rejecting them. In many online communites this takes the form of a process for banning people; I don’t know how workable this would be for the EA community, since my impression is that it’s spread out across several platforms.
Seems worth establishing the fact that bad actors exist, will try to join our community, and engage in this pattern of almost plausibly deniable shamelessly bad behavior. I think EAs often have a mental block around admitting that in most of the world, lying is a cheap and effective strategy for personal gain; I think we make wrong judgments because we’re missing this key fact about how the world works. I think we should generalize from this incident, and having a clear record is helpful for doing so.
Yes! But… you said your opening line as though it disagreed somehow? I said:
I may be misinterpreting you here; you wrote
and while I think this behavior is in some sense admirable, I think it is on net not delightful, and the huge waste of time it represents is bad on net except to the extent that it leads to better community norms around policing bad actors.
Yup, we are in agreement.
(I was just noting how sweet it was that we do this much more kindly than most other communities. It’s totally not optimal though.)