yet this post seems to be taking on a standard appropriate for an adversarial court of law.
Which is fine.
And this is a problem, because in addition to wasting people’s time it causes people less aware of these issues to take Gleb more seriously, encourages him to continue behaving as he has been, and I suspect in some cases inclines even the more knowledgeable people involved to trust Gleb too much in the future, despite whatever private opinions they may have of his reliability. At some point there needs to be a way for people to say “no, this is enough, we are done with you” in the face of bad behavior; in this case if that is happening at all it is being communicated behind-the-scenes or by people silently failing to engage. That makes it much harder for the community as a whole to respond appropriately.
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.
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.
The problem is that Gleb is manufacturing false affiliations in the eyes of outsiders, and outsiders who only briefly glance at lengthy, polite documents like this one are unlikely to realize that’s what’s happening.
Gleb did lots of things and the post describes them, so it’s about more than just manufacturing false affiliations.” The issue is not that the post is too long or contains too many details, that’s a silly thing to complain about. The issue is whether the post should be adversarial and whether it should manufacture a dominant point of view. The answer to that is No.
Witch hunting and attacks do nothing for anyone.
Which is fine.
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.
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.
The problem is that Gleb is manufacturing false affiliations in the eyes of outsiders, and outsiders who only briefly glance at lengthy, polite documents like this one are unlikely to realize that’s what’s happening.
Gleb did lots of things and the post describes them, so it’s about more than just manufacturing false affiliations.” The issue is not that the post is too long or contains too many details, that’s a silly thing to complain about. The issue is whether the post should be adversarial and whether it should manufacture a dominant point of view. The answer to that is No.