Note – I will make separate responses as my original comment was too long for the system to handle. This is part three of my comments.
Now that we got through the specifics, let me share my concerns with this document.
1) This document is a wonderful testimony to bikeshedding, motte-and-bailey, and confirmation bias.
It’s an example of bikeshedding because the much larger underlying concerns are quite different from the relatively trivial things brought up in this document: see link
Consider the disclosures. Heck, even one of the authors of this document who is a GiveWell employee has very recently engaged in doing the same kind of non-disclosure of her official employment despite GiveWell having a clear disclosures policy and being triply careful after having gotten in trouble for actual astroturfing before: see image So is one of the core issues throughout this whole thread, of InIn volunteer/contractors engaging with InIn content on Facebook through likes/shares. This is something that is widely done within the EA sphere. Why does the disclosures part of the document not list people’s actual motivations and beliefs that led them to write this document?
A) For example, let’s take the originator of the thread, Jeff Kaufman. He stated that his real concerns were not with the engagement by contractrors – the original topic of his post – but that his real concerns were about the nature of the content: see image
Now, I responded here: see image with Jeff not raising points in response. This is a classical motte-and-bailey situation – making a strong claim, and then backing away to a more narrow one after being called out on it: see link
This is similar to the concerns that Gregory Lewis raised in his comments in response to the post.
B) Let’s consider Oliver Habryka’s real concerns, about how I personally made the experience of nearly everyone in EA worse: see image Gregory Lewis says something similar but not quite as strong in his comments here
The experience of nearly everyone in EA being worse due to me is highly questionable, as a number of EAs have upvoted the following comments supportive of InIn/myself: see image or this comment: see image or this comment: see image
I find it hard to fathom how Oliver can say what he said, as all three comments and the upvotes happened before Oliver’s comment. This is a clear case of confirmation bias – twisting the evidence to make it agree with one’s pre-formed conclusion: see link To me Oliver right now is fundamentally discredited as either someone with integrity or as someone who has a good grasp of the mood and dynamics of EAs overall, despite being a central figure in the EA movement and a CEA staff member.
2) This document engages in unethical disclosures of my private messages with others.
When I corresponded with Michelle, I did so from a position as a member of GWWC and the head of another EA organization. Neither was I asked nor did I implicitly permit my personal email exchange to be disclosed publicly. In other words, it was done without my permission in an explicit attempt to damage InIn.
After this situation, both with Michelle and Oliver, how can anyone trust CEA and its arm GWWC right now to not use private emails against them when they might want in the future to damage them after any potential disagreements? And it’s not like I was accusing CEA/GWWC/Michelle of anything that they were trying to defend themselves with. This is a purely aggressive, not defensive, use of emails. It’s especially ironic in a document where I received criticism for sharing my impressions of a phone call, one that I later acknowledged was inappropriate to do but was done in the heat of the moment and in no way intended to damage the other person
Now, I do not know if Michelle herself provided the email, or if Oliver found it through his access to CEA email servers, or if it ended up in the document through other means. Regardless, it had to come from CEA staff. Why would CEA/GWWC permit its staff to use confidential access to information they have only as CEA staff to critize a nonprofit whose mission is at least somewhat competing, as Vipul Naiak pointed out: see image ? How is the CEA/GWWC going to be perceived as a result of this? What is the reputation cost there?
I bet some of you might be hating on me right now for pointing this out. Well, you’re welcome to commit the cognitive bias of shooting the messenger, but I am simply pointing out the reality of the situation. In fact, I am using only publicly available statements, and am not revealing in my comment any of the reputationally damaging information I have in personal communications, despite the fact that my own personal communications with CEA staff has been revealed publicly by CEA staff. I do not consider it ethical to share personal exchanges with others in a way that damages those people. I hope we as a movement can condemn this practice.
3) I am incredibly frustrated by all the time and resources – and therefore money, and therefore lives – this episode cost. And for what? For finding out about our volunteer/contractors doing social media engagement on their volunteer time? For finding out about my use of the term best-selling author, a standard practice even if I didn’t make the NYT best-seller list? I very much appreciate the information about Facebook boosting being problematic, and other things I pointed out as correct in my comments, but this could have been done in a way that didn’t drain so much money, time, lives, reputation, and other costs. This is a black mark in the history of the EA movement.
4) And talking about black marks, how many people were driven away from the EA movement because of this? I had many people approach me about how this caused them to be alienated from the EA movement. I asked one of them allowed me to share his comments and impressions publicly: see image
5) Building on the last point, this episode is a classic example of the “Founder effect” that plagues the EA movement: see link The authors and their supporters are trying to drive away people who share their goals and aspirations, but are somewhat different in their methods. The result of such activities is the evaporative cooling effect, where only those who hold the same methods being part of the movement. This results in the movement being increasingly limited to only a small demographic category. And it’s not like InIn is trying to bring people into the movement – we are trying to spread the ideas of effective giving in an effective manner. Such intolerance is deeply damaging to the movement as a whole.
6) The document and the episode as a whole reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature among the authors. What if I was a different person than I am? What if this drove me to break away from and criticize publicly the EA movement? Emotions have a funny way of reversing themselves sometimes when people feel rejected. Think of a bad breakup you might have had. How much damage do you think would be done in that case to the movement itself, considering the media sway that InIn has? We regularly appear on TV, radio, in prominent public venues. Why would the authors of this document risk such damage? Now, there’s certainly a part of me that wants to do it, but fortunately I am enough of an aspiring rationalist to recognize that this is an emotion that will pass, and am not overwhelmed with it. What if I was not?
To conclude:
I don’t expect that those who come from an established conclusion that “InIn is bad” or “Gleb is bad” or something in that style will update. Many have already committed themselves to this belief, and for the sake of consistency, they will hold that belief.
Just keep in mind the deep damage done by this episode, and consider focusing on how to strengthen others aligned with your goals, not bring them down and drive them away. When conflicts within the EA movement grow personal and irrational – “Gleb made the experience of almost all EAs significantly worse” – this tears apart the movement as a whole.
While still enthusiastic about the ideas of EA, and excited to work with many people in the movement, I am deeply disappointed in some EAs at the higher levels of the movement. For the sake of my own mental health, I have been taking a break from the EA Forum and to a large extent from the EA main FB as well. I will continue to be happy to work with those people who want to build up and create and actually do as much good as they can to spread effective giving ideas broadly. Contact me if interested by email, I anticipate I won’t be checking the Forum much: gleb (at) intentionalinsights (dot) org
Finally, let’s get on with it. Let’s orient toward leaving this in the past, learning from it, avoiding doing anything like this again, and trying to work together to do the most good that we can, even if we may disagree somewhat on the best ways of accomplishing these goals.
P. S. Based on past experience, I learned that back and forth online about this will not be productive, so I did not plan to engage with, and if someone wants to learn more about my perspective, they are welcome to contact me privately by my email.
2) This document engages in unethical disclosures of my private messages with others.
When I corresponded with Michelle, I did so from a position as a member of GWWC and the head of another EA organization. Neither was I asked nor did I implicitly permit my personal email exchange to be disclosed publicly. In other words, it was done without my permission in an explicit attempt to damage InIn.
Here is the entirety of section 1.2, which does not cite or quote any statement from Gleb’s email to Michelle, but rather cites Michelle regarding her own statements:
Gleb has taken the Giving What We Can pledge, and contributed an article on the Giving What We Can blog on December 23, 2015. He also mentioned and linked to GWWC in his articles elsewhere.
Michelle Hutchinson, Executive Director of Giving What We Can, wrote to Tsipursky in May 2016 asking him to cease “claiming to be supported by Giving What We Can.” However, the use of Giving What We Can’s name as an ‘active collaboration’ was not removed from Intentional Insights’ website, and remained in both of the above InIn documents as of August 19, 2016.
I had emailed GWWC after seeing it mentioned as a collaborator in InIn promotional documents, inquiring as to whether this had been with the knowledge or consent of GWWC. Michelle replied that it had not been, and explained that to the contrary she had previously made the request quoted. I then asked whether I could cite her, to which she replied affirmatively.
Now, I do not know if Michelle herself provided the email, or if Oliver found it through his access to CEA email servers, or if it ended up in the document through other means. Regardless, it had to come from CEA staff. Why would CEA/GWWC permit its staff to use confidential access to information they have only as CEA staff to critize a nonprofit whose mission is at least somewhat competing
GWWC allowed citation of its own statements regarding the use of its own name in promotional materials against its organizational objection, in response to my question.
Additionally, Gleb has done himself exactly what he’s accusing Michelle of doing! In a comment in the megathread from August he included a screenshot (archived copy) of an email I had sent him.
I have indeed shared private emails when I have been accused of something improperly, and doing so was the only way to address this accusation. I have similarly done so in my statement above with regard to Leah’s email allowing me to share her comment on how InIn helped ACE. I have never done so as an aggressive move to defame someone.
I am confused by how you believe that citing words from an email written by Michelle Hutchinson to me, without my consent to the email being cited, does not constitute disclosure of a private email exchange. The specific method by which this citation got out doesn’t matter—what matters is that it happened.
Gleb, there is a social norm that things one says in private email will not be publicized without consent. In the document quotes attributed to you from private messages are only included where you have been asked for consent, it has been given, and you have had opportunities to review prior to publication.
The same expectation does not apply to you vetoing Michelle’s statements about what she said (not what you said).
Carl, I guess we have a basic disagreement about the ethics of this. I think it is unethical to disclose any aspect of the exchange without the consent of the other person. You believe it is appropriate to disclose one’s own aspect of the exchange without the consent of the other person. We can let other people make up their minds about what they consider ethical.
Indeed. However, I will note that my understanding (based on experience, analogy to law, and some web searching) is that my view is standard, while yours is not.
No “exchange” has been disclosed. Michelle has disclosed her own words and that she said them to you. Are you claiming people can not report their own speech without the permission of their audience?
I am claiming that it is highly problematic ethically to disclose private email exchanges in order to damage other people, without an accusation against you that can be rectified only through disclosing these exchanges. I am comfortable standing by that statement.
Regarding Gleb’s point #1 I would like to agree in particular that harsh hyperbole like “Gleb made the experience of almost all EAs significantly worse” is objectionable, and Oliver should not have used it.
Also it’s worth signal-boosting and reiterating to all commenters on this thread that public criticism on the internet, particularly with many critics and one or a few people being criticized, is very stressful, and people should be mindful about that and empathize with Gleb’s difficult situation. I will also add that my belief is that Gleb is genuinely interested in doing good, and that one can keep this in mind even while addressing recurring problems. And further that people should separately address individual and organization specific issues from the general issue of popularization.
Regarding the point or lack thereof of the document, I agree that this exercise has been costly in several ways. I have been personally frustrated at spending so much time on it at the expense of valuable work, and dislike getting involved in such a controversy. I don’t think the document will instantly solve all problems with InIn and its relationship to EA. However, it documents a pattern of aggressive self-promotion and self-favoring errors, including on indicators used to appeal to and fundraise from the EA community, that is relevant to a number of EAs as individuals.
Jeff’s August post was triggered by discussions about InIn at EA Global, where InIn was fundraising, and much of the document (and in particular the parts I worked on most) addresses claims and connotations from documents making the case for EA impact of InIn. In particular, sections 1, 2.4.1, 3, 4.2, and 5 speak to the reliability of InIn claims of impact. Section 7 explicitly rejects previous false hypotheses considered as possibly relevant to that, and most of 4.1.2 is in the same vein.
“Regarding Gleb’s point #1 I would like to agree in particular that harsh hyperbole like “Gleb made the experience of almost all EAs significantly worse” is objectionable, and Oliver should not have used it.”
I agree, and am aware that I tend towards hyperbole in discourse in general. I apologize for that tendency, and am working on finding a communication style that successfully communicates all the aspects of a message that I want to convey, without distorting the accuracy of its denotative message. I am sorry for both the potentially false implications of using such hyperbole, as well as the negative contribution to the conversational climate.
Replacing the fairly vague, and somewhat hyperbolic “almost all” with a more precise “about 70-90%” seems like a strict improvement, and I think captures my view on this more correctly. I do think that something in the 70% − 90% space is accurate, and mostly leaves the core of the argument intact (though I do still think that using the kind of hyperbole I am prone to use creates an unnecessarily adverse conversational style, that I think generally isn’t very productive).
A) For example, let’s take the originator of the thread, Jeff Kaufman. He stated that his real concerns were not with the engagement by contractors – the original topic of his post – but that his real concerns were about the nature of the content: see image
I have more or less two kinds of concerns:
Gleb/InIn acting unethically, overstating impact, manufacturing the illusion of support
InIn content turning people off of EA and EA ideas by presenting them badly
While I think the second category is more serious, the first category is much easier to document and communicate. And, crucially, the concerns in the first category are bad enough that we can just focus there.
When I originally started writing this document I included quite a bit about my concerns in the second category, as you can see in this early draft. Carl and Gregory convinced me that we should instead focus just on the first category.
(Also, the section of conversation you cite doesn’t show that I didn’t care about the first category, just that I thought the second category was even more serious.)
Jeff, in your comments above, you say describe yourself as having two kinds of concerns, the ones about the content being more serious. However, in your comments here, you describe your “primary concern” as the nature of the content. I am now not sure about your actual position.
So question 1: Were you revealing your true beliefs earlier or now?
I also want to point out what you said above
While I think the second category is more serious, the first category is much easier to document and communicate.
This to me seems a classical example of bikeshedding (not focusing on the “primary concern”) and motte-and-bailey (defending a much narrower but stronger position after making initially grand but indifensible claims).
So question 2: Do you agree or disagree that these are examples of bikeshedding and motte-and-bailey?
I hope Jeff will forgive me for answering this comment on his behalf, and Gleb will forgive me for ceasing to pretend he asking in good faith, rather than risible mudslinging in a misguided attempt at a damage limitation exercise (I particularly like the catty “Are you revealing your true beliefs earlier or now?”—setting an example for aspiring rationalists on how to garb their passive-aggressiveness with the appropriate verbiage).
Jeff notes here and in what you link there are two broad families concerns 1) your product is awful, and 2) your grasping duplicity in self-promotion, among the other problems illustrated above. He says that although [1] is actually the biggest problem, [2] is what he decided to focus on—he also notes in another comment he was happy to talk about [1], but was persuaded otherwise by Carl and I.
BTW, as both his comments agree on [1] being the big problem, there’s no inconsistency. I aver that even had Jeff been inconsistent, Gleb’s uncharitableness with ‘were you lying then or now?’ is a much meaner measure than Jeff would have dealt to him had the tables been turned—we’d have been keen to note the possibility of one sincerely changing ones mind, etc. etc.
Given your cargo-cult understanding of most concepts—or perhaps more likely your propensity to misuse them in some slanderous hail-mary when the facts plainly aren’t on your side—it is unsurprising you misuse both motte-and-bailey and bikeshedding.
It would only be motte-and-bailey if [1] was some logical extension of [2], and [2] was retreated to in the face of criticism. So: “Gleb lies about literally everything about InIn” would be a potential bailey, and “Gleb told some half-truths about topic X and nothing else” being a motte here (note we documented areas we were mistaken, making this accusation even less plausible).
Yet Jeff’s [1] is not some exaggeration of [2]: you could have rubbish content without being dodgy, or dodgy with great content. Further, Jeff is not ‘backing away’ from [1], but affirming it in addition, but suggesting that [2] is easier to make headway on and that the problems are more than ‘bad enough’ to explain why he has an extremely adverse view of InIn and you. He is correct: thanks in part to your endless self-promotion, I was acquianted enough with your content to appreciate it is rubbish for a while, yet I was unaware of all the other shady stuff you were up to—thanks to Jeff’s post, I found it out (and helped find some still further areas where you were up to no good), so I also now hold an extremely adverse view of InIn and yourself, as you kindly link above. I hope the post I contibuted to above can pay this valuable understanding forward to anyone else under the misapprehension that from your crooked timber anything straight can be made.
Bikeshedding applies to an organisation deciding to look at trivial issues because they are easy to work on. As someone who did a lot of the work in this document, it was neither easy to work on, and it definitely wasn’t trivial. It’s not trivial that for an ‘outreach org’ almost all of your social media engagement is illusory. It’s not trivial how you somehow manage to use 1000 hours a week and produce so little of value. It’s not trivial how you denied ever soliciting upvotes from the InIn group, got caught, then doubled down before making a tactical retreat. It’s not trivial how again and again you plant astroturf under the excuse it’s ‘their volunteer time’, doubly so given the murky relationship between your VAs paid work and their volunteering. It’s not trivial how many times you ‘update’ only to get caught red-handed doing something cosmetically different. It’s also not trivial you think this is trivial—and despite having weeks to see what we were writing, the best you can dredge up in response is some risible complaints against Michelle, Oliver, Jeff, CEA, etc. and flatly denying or ignoring the rest.
I am happy to discover current and prospective donors also don’t find it trivial, and I hope that this work has made InIn’s financial difficulty even less trivial than it was before.
you say describe yourself as having two kinds of concerns, the ones about the content being more serious. However, in your comments here, you describe your “primary concern” as the nature of the content
These are entirely compatible. I had and have multiple concerns, and described the one I was most worried about as my “primary concern”. There’s no contradiction here.
This to me seems a classical example of bikeshedding
In this case it’s more of a motte-and-motte, with the document authors agreeing to focus on motte-A because we didn’t have consensus that motte-B should be defended.
(I also appreciate Gregory’s response to your comment.)
I don’t have much interest in engaging much further in this discussion, since I think most things are covered by other people, and I’ve already spent far more time than I think is warranted on this issue.
I mostly wanted to quickly reply to this section of your comment, given that it directly addresses me:
“I find it hard to fathom how Oliver can say what he said, as all three comments and the upvotes happened before Oliver’s comment. This is a clear case of confirmation bias – twisting the evidence to make it agree with one’s pre-formed conclusion: see link To me Oliver right now is fundamentally discredited as either someone with integrity or as someone who has a good grasp of the mood and dynamics of EAs overall, despite being a central figure in the EA movement and a CEA staff member.”
I’ve responded to Carl Shulman’s comment below regarding my thoughts on the hyperbole used in the linked comment, which I do think muddled the message, and for which I do apologize.
I do also think that your strict dismissal here of my observation is worrying, and I think misses the point that I was trying to make with my comment. I do agree with Gregory’s top comment on this post, in that I think your engagement with Effective Altruism has had a large negative impact on the community, and I do also think that you worsened the experience of being a member of the EA community for at least 70% of its members, and more likely something like 80%. If you disagree, I am happy to send Facebook messages to a random sample of 10-20 people who were recently active on the EA Facebook group, and ask them whether they felt that the work of InIn had a negative impact on their experience as an EA, and bet with you on the outcome.
I think your judgement of me as someone “fundamentally discredited”, “without integrity” or as someone out of touch with the EA community would be misguided, and that the way you wrote it, feels like a fairly unjustified social attack to me.
I am happy to have a discussion about the content of my comment, i.e. the fraction of the community that was negatively influenced by InIn’s actions, though I think most of the evidence has already been brought up by others, or myself, on this, and the implication follows fairly naturally from you having made sure that every potential EA communication channel has featured one or multiple pieces written by InIn at some point, which I generally think worsen people’s experience of the intellectual discourse in the community.
I see the less hyperbolic claim (worsening rather than significant worsening of experience as an EA, 70% rather than almost) and still doubt it.
Online fora where InIn can post are only a subset of experience as an EA, it’s still a small minority of content on those forums, readers who find InIn content unwelcome can and do scroll past it, and some like it or parts thereof. I expect a large portion of people don’t know or care either way about InIn’s effect on their EA experience.
I would still be interested to see the results of such a mini-poll on attitudes toward InIn content from a random sample of some kind (posters/commenters vs group members is a significant distinction for that).
I’ll be happy to take that bet. So if I understand correctly, we’d choose a random 10 people on the EA FB group—ones who are not FB friends with you or I to avoid potential personal factors getting into play—and then ask them if their experience of the EA community has been “significantly worsened” by InIn. If 8 or more say yes, you win. I suggest 1K to a charity of the choice of the winning party? We can let a third party send messages to prevent any framing effects.
Since the majority of the FB group is inactive, I propose that we limit ourselves to the 50 or 100 most recently active members on the FB group, which will give a more representative sample of people who are actually engaging with the community (and since I don’t want to get into debates of what precisely an EA is).
Given that I am friends with a large chunk of the core EA community, I don’t think it’s sensible to exclude my circle of friends, or your circle of friends for that matter.
Splitting this into two questions seems like a better idea. Here is a concrete proposal:
Do you identify as a member of the EA community? [Yes] [No]
Do you feel like the engagement of Gleb Tsipursky or Intentional Insights with the EA community has had a net negative impact on your experience as a member of the EA community? [Yes] [No]
I am happy to take a bet that chosen from the top 50 most recent posters on the FB group (at this current point in time), 7 out of 10 people who said yes to the first question, will say yes to the second. Or, since I would prefer a larger sample size, 14 out of 20 people.
(Since I think this is obviously a system of high noise, I only assign about 60% probability to winning this bet.)
I sadly don’t have $1000 left right now, but would be happy about a $50 bet.
The bet was resolved with 6 yes votes, and 4 no votes, which means a victory for Carl Shulman. I will be sending Carl $10, as per our initial agreement.
I should note that this provided the maximum possible evidence for Oliver’s hypothesis given that outcome, and that as a result I update in his direction (although less so because of the small sample).
(I haven’t run this by Carl yet, but this is my current plan for how to interpret the incoming data)
Since our response rates where somewhat lower than expected (mostly because we chose an account that was friends with only one person from our sample, and so messages probably ended up in people’s secondary Inbox), we decided to only send messages until we get 10 responses to (1), since we don’t want to spam a ton of people with a somewhat shady looking question (I think two people expressed concern about conducting a poll like this).
Since our stopping criteria is 10 people, we will also stop if we get more than 7 yes responses, or more than 3 no responses, before we reach 10 people.
I am unwilling to take “active members of the EA group” as representative of the EA community, since your actual claim was that I made the experience of the EA community significantly worse, and that includes all members, not simply activists. On average, only 1% of any internet community contribute, but the rest are still community members. Instead, I am fine taking the bet than Benito describes—who is clearly far from friendly to InIn.
I am even fine with going with your lower estimate of 14 out of 20.
I am fine including friends.
I am fine with the two questions, although I would insist the second question be “significantly worse” not simply “negative impact,” since that is the claim we are testing, and the same for “significant preference for Gleb or InIn to not have engaged.” Words matter.
I am fine with having a pledge of $1K to be contributed as either of us has the money to do so in the future. I presume you will eventually have $1K.
Actually, I’d suggest just taking a random sample from the FB group. My guess is that your positive connections should be taken into account in this bet Gleb—if you’ve personally had a significant positive impact on many people’s lives in the movement (and helped them be better effective altruists) then that’s something this is trying to measure.
Also, 10 seems like a small sample, 20 seems better.
Regarding positive connections, the claim made by Oliver is what we’re trying to measure—that I made “significantly worse” the experience of being a member of the EA community for “something like 80%” of the people there. I had not made any claims about my positive connections.
After some private conversation with Carl Shulman, who thinks that I am miscalibrated on this, and whose reasoning I trust quite a bit, I have updated away from me winning a bet with the words “significantly worse” and also think it’s probably unlikely I would win a bet with 8⁄10, instead of 7⁄10.
I have however taken on a bet with Carl with the exact wording I supplied below, i.e. with the words “net negative” and 7⁄10. Though given Carl’s track record of winning bets, I feel a feeling of doom about the outcome of that bet, and on some level expect to lose that bet as well.
At this point, my epistemic status on this is definitely more confused, and I assign significant probability to me overestimating the degree to which people will report that have InIn or Gleb had a negative impact on their experience (though I am even more confused whether I am just updating about people’s reports, or the actual effects on the EA community, both of which seem like plausible candidates to me).
FYI my initial reaction was that people in the community would feel very averse to being so boldly critical, and want to be charitable to InIn (as they’ve been doing for years).
Unfortunately, you and InIn have lost all credibility. There may be nuance to be had, there may be a few errors in the document, there may even be additional deeper reasons for why Carl Shulman, Jeff Kaufman, and the other excellent members of our community have spent so much of their time trying to explain their discomfort with you; however, when the core community has wasted this much time on you, and has shouted this strongly about their discomfort, I simply will not engage further. I’ll not be reading any comment or post by yourself in future, or continuing any conversation with you. This is where the line is drawn in the sand.
Based on past experience, I learned that back and forth online about this will not be productive, so I did not plan to engage with, and if someone wants to learn more about my perspective, they are welcome to contact me privately by my email.
I would like to strongly encourage you to keep posting in this thread, and I would like to encourage others to upvote your posts here to show that your continued participation in this discussion is valued. Having this dialog out in the open helps keep everyone on the same page.
EDIT: Rob has convinced me that my recommendation that people upvote Gleb’s responses was not a good idea. Instead, also per Rob’s suggestion, I’ve added links to Gleb’s three response comments at the end of the top-level post.
Upvoting can also be construed as community endorsement. (Gleb himself just cited “a number of EAs have upvoted the following comments supportive of InIn/myself...” as an important line of evidence in his denunciation of Oliver Habryka.)
I think people should upvote comments if they think they’re sufficiently good/helpful, and downvote comments if they think they’re sufficiently bad/unhelpful. Rather than trying to artificially inflate upvote totals (as Gleb also does when he says that downvotes = ‘I’ll repost this as a top-level thread’), just edit the OP to link directly to Gleb’s reply.
I mention this partly because the top-level comment here is seriously concerning. “InIn’s content is so low-quality that it’s doing more harm than good” and “InIn regularly engages in dishonest promotional techniques” are both really, really serious charges. Using the fact that people have made one serious substantive criticism to try to discredit any other serious substantive criticism they raise is really bad at the community-norms level. More generally, responding to fair, correct, relevant criticisms in large part by trying to discredit the critics is super bad form and shouldn’t be seen as normal or OK. Repeatedly accusing people raising (basically fair) concerns of ‘costing lives’ because they took the time to fix your mistakes for you is also super bad form and definitely shouldn’t be seen as normal or OK. I really don’t want casual readers to skim through the comments here, see a highly upvoted comment, and assume that the comment therefore reflects EA’s community standards / beliefs / etc.
“a number of EAs have upvoted the following comments supportive of InIn/myself...”
This is especially rich given the accusations (which have been proved to my satisfaction) of astroturfing. At a minimum it’s another example of behaving very responsively towards criticism in the moment but making no changes to core beliefs.
Note – I will make separate responses as my original comment was too long for the system to handle. This is part three of my comments.
Now that we got through the specifics, let me share my concerns with this document.
1) This document is a wonderful testimony to bikeshedding, motte-and-bailey, and confirmation bias.
It’s an example of bikeshedding because the much larger underlying concerns are quite different from the relatively trivial things brought up in this document: see link
Consider the disclosures. Heck, even one of the authors of this document who is a GiveWell employee has very recently engaged in doing the same kind of non-disclosure of her official employment despite GiveWell having a clear disclosures policy and being triply careful after having gotten in trouble for actual astroturfing before: see image So is one of the core issues throughout this whole thread, of InIn volunteer/contractors engaging with InIn content on Facebook through likes/shares. This is something that is widely done within the EA sphere. Why does the disclosures part of the document not list people’s actual motivations and beliefs that led them to write this document?
A) For example, let’s take the originator of the thread, Jeff Kaufman. He stated that his real concerns were not with the engagement by contractrors – the original topic of his post – but that his real concerns were about the nature of the content: see image
Now, I responded here: see image with Jeff not raising points in response. This is a classical motte-and-bailey situation – making a strong claim, and then backing away to a more narrow one after being called out on it: see link
This is similar to the concerns that Gregory Lewis raised in his comments in response to the post.
B) Let’s consider Oliver Habryka’s real concerns, about how I personally made the experience of nearly everyone in EA worse: see image Gregory Lewis says something similar but not quite as strong in his comments here
The experience of nearly everyone in EA being worse due to me is highly questionable, as a number of EAs have upvoted the following comments supportive of InIn/myself: see image or this comment: see image or this comment: see image
I find it hard to fathom how Oliver can say what he said, as all three comments and the upvotes happened before Oliver’s comment. This is a clear case of confirmation bias – twisting the evidence to make it agree with one’s pre-formed conclusion: see link To me Oliver right now is fundamentally discredited as either someone with integrity or as someone who has a good grasp of the mood and dynamics of EAs overall, despite being a central figure in the EA movement and a CEA staff member.
2) This document engages in unethical disclosures of my private messages with others.
When I corresponded with Michelle, I did so from a position as a member of GWWC and the head of another EA organization. Neither was I asked nor did I implicitly permit my personal email exchange to be disclosed publicly. In other words, it was done without my permission in an explicit attempt to damage InIn.
After this situation, both with Michelle and Oliver, how can anyone trust CEA and its arm GWWC right now to not use private emails against them when they might want in the future to damage them after any potential disagreements? And it’s not like I was accusing CEA/GWWC/Michelle of anything that they were trying to defend themselves with. This is a purely aggressive, not defensive, use of emails. It’s especially ironic in a document where I received criticism for sharing my impressions of a phone call, one that I later acknowledged was inappropriate to do but was done in the heat of the moment and in no way intended to damage the other person
Now, I do not know if Michelle herself provided the email, or if Oliver found it through his access to CEA email servers, or if it ended up in the document through other means. Regardless, it had to come from CEA staff. Why would CEA/GWWC permit its staff to use confidential access to information they have only as CEA staff to critize a nonprofit whose mission is at least somewhat competing, as Vipul Naiak pointed out: see image ? How is the CEA/GWWC going to be perceived as a result of this? What is the reputation cost there?
I bet some of you might be hating on me right now for pointing this out. Well, you’re welcome to commit the cognitive bias of shooting the messenger, but I am simply pointing out the reality of the situation. In fact, I am using only publicly available statements, and am not revealing in my comment any of the reputationally damaging information I have in personal communications, despite the fact that my own personal communications with CEA staff has been revealed publicly by CEA staff. I do not consider it ethical to share personal exchanges with others in a way that damages those people. I hope we as a movement can condemn this practice.
3) I am incredibly frustrated by all the time and resources – and therefore money, and therefore lives – this episode cost. And for what? For finding out about our volunteer/contractors doing social media engagement on their volunteer time? For finding out about my use of the term best-selling author, a standard practice even if I didn’t make the NYT best-seller list? I very much appreciate the information about Facebook boosting being problematic, and other things I pointed out as correct in my comments, but this could have been done in a way that didn’t drain so much money, time, lives, reputation, and other costs. This is a black mark in the history of the EA movement.
4) And talking about black marks, how many people were driven away from the EA movement because of this? I had many people approach me about how this caused them to be alienated from the EA movement. I asked one of them allowed me to share his comments and impressions publicly: see image
5) Building on the last point, this episode is a classic example of the “Founder effect” that plagues the EA movement: see link The authors and their supporters are trying to drive away people who share their goals and aspirations, but are somewhat different in their methods. The result of such activities is the evaporative cooling effect, where only those who hold the same methods being part of the movement. This results in the movement being increasingly limited to only a small demographic category. And it’s not like InIn is trying to bring people into the movement – we are trying to spread the ideas of effective giving in an effective manner. Such intolerance is deeply damaging to the movement as a whole.
6) The document and the episode as a whole reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature among the authors. What if I was a different person than I am? What if this drove me to break away from and criticize publicly the EA movement? Emotions have a funny way of reversing themselves sometimes when people feel rejected. Think of a bad breakup you might have had. How much damage do you think would be done in that case to the movement itself, considering the media sway that InIn has? We regularly appear on TV, radio, in prominent public venues. Why would the authors of this document risk such damage? Now, there’s certainly a part of me that wants to do it, but fortunately I am enough of an aspiring rationalist to recognize that this is an emotion that will pass, and am not overwhelmed with it. What if I was not?
To conclude:
I don’t expect that those who come from an established conclusion that “InIn is bad” or “Gleb is bad” or something in that style will update. Many have already committed themselves to this belief, and for the sake of consistency, they will hold that belief.
Just keep in mind the deep damage done by this episode, and consider focusing on how to strengthen others aligned with your goals, not bring them down and drive them away. When conflicts within the EA movement grow personal and irrational – “Gleb made the experience of almost all EAs significantly worse” – this tears apart the movement as a whole.
While still enthusiastic about the ideas of EA, and excited to work with many people in the movement, I am deeply disappointed in some EAs at the higher levels of the movement. For the sake of my own mental health, I have been taking a break from the EA Forum and to a large extent from the EA main FB as well. I will continue to be happy to work with those people who want to build up and create and actually do as much good as they can to spread effective giving ideas broadly. Contact me if interested by email, I anticipate I won’t be checking the Forum much: gleb (at) intentionalinsights (dot) org
Finally, let’s get on with it. Let’s orient toward leaving this in the past, learning from it, avoiding doing anything like this again, and trying to work together to do the most good that we can, even if we may disagree somewhat on the best ways of accomplishing these goals.
P. S. Based on past experience, I learned that back and forth online about this will not be productive, so I did not plan to engage with, and if someone wants to learn more about my perspective, they are welcome to contact me privately by my email.
Regarding point #2, Gleb writes above:
Here is the entirety of section 1.2, which does not cite or quote any statement from Gleb’s email to Michelle, but rather cites Michelle regarding her own statements:
I had emailed GWWC after seeing it mentioned as a collaborator in InIn promotional documents, inquiring as to whether this had been with the knowledge or consent of GWWC. Michelle replied that it had not been, and explained that to the contrary she had previously made the request quoted. I then asked whether I could cite her, to which she replied affirmatively.
GWWC allowed citation of its own statements regarding the use of its own name in promotional materials against its organizational objection, in response to my question.
Additionally, Gleb has done himself exactly what he’s accusing Michelle of doing! In a comment in the megathread from August he included a screenshot (archived copy) of an email I had sent him.
I have indeed shared private emails when I have been accused of something improperly, and doing so was the only way to address this accusation. I have similarly done so in my statement above with regard to Leah’s email allowing me to share her comment on how InIn helped ACE. I have never done so as an aggressive move to defame someone.
I am confused by how you believe that citing words from an email written by Michelle Hutchinson to me, without my consent to the email being cited, does not constitute disclosure of a private email exchange. The specific method by which this citation got out doesn’t matter—what matters is that it happened.
Gleb, there is a social norm that things one says in private email will not be publicized without consent. In the document quotes attributed to you from private messages are only included where you have been asked for consent, it has been given, and you have had opportunities to review prior to publication.
The same expectation does not apply to you vetoing Michelle’s statements about what she said (not what you said).
Carl, I guess we have a basic disagreement about the ethics of this. I think it is unethical to disclose any aspect of the exchange without the consent of the other person. You believe it is appropriate to disclose one’s own aspect of the exchange without the consent of the other person. We can let other people make up their minds about what they consider ethical.
Indeed. However, I will note that my understanding (based on experience, analogy to law, and some web searching) is that my view is standard, while yours is not.
I’d be curious to learn more about the analogy to law, so that I can update. Perhaps you can post some links here for the basis of your perspective?
No “exchange” has been disclosed. Michelle has disclosed her own words and that she said them to you. Are you claiming people can not report their own speech without the permission of their audience?
I am claiming that it is highly problematic ethically to disclose private email exchanges in order to damage other people, without an accusation against you that can be rectified only through disclosing these exchanges. I am comfortable standing by that statement.
Regarding Gleb’s point #1 I would like to agree in particular that harsh hyperbole like “Gleb made the experience of almost all EAs significantly worse” is objectionable, and Oliver should not have used it.
Also it’s worth signal-boosting and reiterating to all commenters on this thread that public criticism on the internet, particularly with many critics and one or a few people being criticized, is very stressful, and people should be mindful about that and empathize with Gleb’s difficult situation. I will also add that my belief is that Gleb is genuinely interested in doing good, and that one can keep this in mind even while addressing recurring problems. And further that people should separately address individual and organization specific issues from the general issue of popularization.
Regarding the point or lack thereof of the document, I agree that this exercise has been costly in several ways. I have been personally frustrated at spending so much time on it at the expense of valuable work, and dislike getting involved in such a controversy. I don’t think the document will instantly solve all problems with InIn and its relationship to EA. However, it documents a pattern of aggressive self-promotion and self-favoring errors, including on indicators used to appeal to and fundraise from the EA community, that is relevant to a number of EAs as individuals.
Jeff’s August post was triggered by discussions about InIn at EA Global, where InIn was fundraising, and much of the document (and in particular the parts I worked on most) addresses claims and connotations from documents making the case for EA impact of InIn. In particular, sections 1, 2.4.1, 3, 4.2, and 5 speak to the reliability of InIn claims of impact. Section 7 explicitly rejects previous false hypotheses considered as possibly relevant to that, and most of 4.1.2 is in the same vein.
“Regarding Gleb’s point #1 I would like to agree in particular that harsh hyperbole like “Gleb made the experience of almost all EAs significantly worse” is objectionable, and Oliver should not have used it.”
I agree, and am aware that I tend towards hyperbole in discourse in general. I apologize for that tendency, and am working on finding a communication style that successfully communicates all the aspects of a message that I want to convey, without distorting the accuracy of its denotative message. I am sorry for both the potentially false implications of using such hyperbole, as well as the negative contribution to the conversational climate.
Replacing the fairly vague, and somewhat hyperbolic “almost all” with a more precise “about 70-90%” seems like a strict improvement, and I think captures my view on this more correctly. I do think that something in the 70% − 90% space is accurate, and mostly leaves the core of the argument intact (though I do still think that using the kind of hyperbole I am prone to use creates an unnecessarily adverse conversational style, that I think generally isn’t very productive).
I have more or less two kinds of concerns:
Gleb/InIn acting unethically, overstating impact, manufacturing the illusion of support
InIn content turning people off of EA and EA ideas by presenting them badly
While I think the second category is more serious, the first category is much easier to document and communicate. And, crucially, the concerns in the first category are bad enough that we can just focus there.
When I originally started writing this document I included quite a bit about my concerns in the second category, as you can see in this early draft. Carl and Gregory convinced me that we should instead focus just on the first category.
(Also, the section of conversation you cite doesn’t show that I didn’t care about the first category, just that I thought the second category was even more serious.)
Jeff, in your comments above, you say describe yourself as having two kinds of concerns, the ones about the content being more serious. However, in your comments here, you describe your “primary concern” as the nature of the content. I am now not sure about your actual position.
So question 1: Were you revealing your true beliefs earlier or now?
I also want to point out what you said above
This to me seems a classical example of bikeshedding (not focusing on the “primary concern”) and motte-and-bailey (defending a much narrower but stronger position after making initially grand but indifensible claims).
So question 2: Do you agree or disagree that these are examples of bikeshedding and motte-and-bailey?
I hope Jeff will forgive me for answering this comment on his behalf, and Gleb will forgive me for ceasing to pretend he asking in good faith, rather than risible mudslinging in a misguided attempt at a damage limitation exercise (I particularly like the catty “Are you revealing your true beliefs earlier or now?”—setting an example for aspiring rationalists on how to garb their passive-aggressiveness with the appropriate verbiage).
Jeff notes here and in what you link there are two broad families concerns 1) your product is awful, and 2) your grasping duplicity in self-promotion, among the other problems illustrated above. He says that although [1] is actually the biggest problem, [2] is what he decided to focus on—he also notes in another comment he was happy to talk about [1], but was persuaded otherwise by Carl and I.
BTW, as both his comments agree on [1] being the big problem, there’s no inconsistency. I aver that even had Jeff been inconsistent, Gleb’s uncharitableness with ‘were you lying then or now?’ is a much meaner measure than Jeff would have dealt to him had the tables been turned—we’d have been keen to note the possibility of one sincerely changing ones mind, etc. etc.
Given your cargo-cult understanding of most concepts—or perhaps more likely your propensity to misuse them in some slanderous hail-mary when the facts plainly aren’t on your side—it is unsurprising you misuse both motte-and-bailey and bikeshedding.
It would only be motte-and-bailey if [1] was some logical extension of [2], and [2] was retreated to in the face of criticism. So: “Gleb lies about literally everything about InIn” would be a potential bailey, and “Gleb told some half-truths about topic X and nothing else” being a motte here (note we documented areas we were mistaken, making this accusation even less plausible).
Yet Jeff’s [1] is not some exaggeration of [2]: you could have rubbish content without being dodgy, or dodgy with great content. Further, Jeff is not ‘backing away’ from [1], but affirming it in addition, but suggesting that [2] is easier to make headway on and that the problems are more than ‘bad enough’ to explain why he has an extremely adverse view of InIn and you. He is correct: thanks in part to your endless self-promotion, I was acquianted enough with your content to appreciate it is rubbish for a while, yet I was unaware of all the other shady stuff you were up to—thanks to Jeff’s post, I found it out (and helped find some still further areas where you were up to no good), so I also now hold an extremely adverse view of InIn and yourself, as you kindly link above. I hope the post I contibuted to above can pay this valuable understanding forward to anyone else under the misapprehension that from your crooked timber anything straight can be made.
Bikeshedding applies to an organisation deciding to look at trivial issues because they are easy to work on. As someone who did a lot of the work in this document, it was neither easy to work on, and it definitely wasn’t trivial. It’s not trivial that for an ‘outreach org’ almost all of your social media engagement is illusory. It’s not trivial how you somehow manage to use 1000 hours a week and produce so little of value. It’s not trivial how you denied ever soliciting upvotes from the InIn group, got caught, then doubled down before making a tactical retreat. It’s not trivial how again and again you plant astroturf under the excuse it’s ‘their volunteer time’, doubly so given the murky relationship between your VAs paid work and their volunteering. It’s not trivial how many times you ‘update’ only to get caught red-handed doing something cosmetically different. It’s also not trivial you think this is trivial—and despite having weeks to see what we were writing, the best you can dredge up in response is some risible complaints against Michelle, Oliver, Jeff, CEA, etc. and flatly denying or ignoring the rest.
I am happy to discover current and prospective donors also don’t find it trivial, and I hope that this work has made InIn’s financial difficulty even less trivial than it was before.
1) I would prefer to hear Jeff’s answer to my questions—he’s more than capable of speaking for himself.
2) I will not stoop to engaging with the level of discourse you present in this comment.
These are entirely compatible. I had and have multiple concerns, and described the one I was most worried about as my “primary concern”. There’s no contradiction here.
I think you’re confused about what bikeshedding means: http://bikeshed.org/
In this case it’s more of a motte-and-motte, with the document authors agreeing to focus on motte-A because we didn’t have consensus that motte-B should be defended.
(I also appreciate Gregory’s response to your comment.)
I don’t have much interest in engaging much further in this discussion, since I think most things are covered by other people, and I’ve already spent far more time than I think is warranted on this issue.
I mostly wanted to quickly reply to this section of your comment, given that it directly addresses me:
“I find it hard to fathom how Oliver can say what he said, as all three comments and the upvotes happened before Oliver’s comment. This is a clear case of confirmation bias – twisting the evidence to make it agree with one’s pre-formed conclusion: see link To me Oliver right now is fundamentally discredited as either someone with integrity or as someone who has a good grasp of the mood and dynamics of EAs overall, despite being a central figure in the EA movement and a CEA staff member.”
I’ve responded to Carl Shulman’s comment below regarding my thoughts on the hyperbole used in the linked comment, which I do think muddled the message, and for which I do apologize.
I do also think that your strict dismissal here of my observation is worrying, and I think misses the point that I was trying to make with my comment. I do agree with Gregory’s top comment on this post, in that I think your engagement with Effective Altruism has had a large negative impact on the community, and I do also think that you worsened the experience of being a member of the EA community for at least 70% of its members, and more likely something like 80%. If you disagree, I am happy to send Facebook messages to a random sample of 10-20 people who were recently active on the EA Facebook group, and ask them whether they felt that the work of InIn had a negative impact on their experience as an EA, and bet with you on the outcome.
I think your judgement of me as someone “fundamentally discredited”, “without integrity” or as someone out of touch with the EA community would be misguided, and that the way you wrote it, feels like a fairly unjustified social attack to me.
I am happy to have a discussion about the content of my comment, i.e. the fraction of the community that was negatively influenced by InIn’s actions, though I think most of the evidence has already been brought up by others, or myself, on this, and the implication follows fairly naturally from you having made sure that every potential EA communication channel has featured one or multiple pieces written by InIn at some point, which I generally think worsen people’s experience of the intellectual discourse in the community.
I see the less hyperbolic claim (worsening rather than significant worsening of experience as an EA, 70% rather than almost) and still doubt it.
Online fora where InIn can post are only a subset of experience as an EA, it’s still a small minority of content on those forums, readers who find InIn content unwelcome can and do scroll past it, and some like it or parts thereof. I expect a large portion of people don’t know or care either way about InIn’s effect on their EA experience.
I would still be interested to see the results of such a mini-poll on attitudes toward InIn content from a random sample of some kind (posters/commenters vs group members is a significant distinction for that).
I’ll be happy to take that bet. So if I understand correctly, we’d choose a random 10 people on the EA FB group—ones who are not FB friends with you or I to avoid potential personal factors getting into play—and then ask them if their experience of the EA community has been “significantly worsened” by InIn. If 8 or more say yes, you win. I suggest 1K to a charity of the choice of the winning party? We can let a third party send messages to prevent any framing effects.
Since the majority of the FB group is inactive, I propose that we limit ourselves to the 50 or 100 most recently active members on the FB group, which will give a more representative sample of people who are actually engaging with the community (and since I don’t want to get into debates of what precisely an EA is).
Given that I am friends with a large chunk of the core EA community, I don’t think it’s sensible to exclude my circle of friends, or your circle of friends for that matter.
Splitting this into two questions seems like a better idea. Here is a concrete proposal:
Do you identify as a member of the EA community? [Yes] [No]
Do you feel like the engagement of Gleb Tsipursky or Intentional Insights with the EA community has had a net negative impact on your experience as a member of the EA community? [Yes] [No]
I am happy to take a bet that chosen from the top 50 most recent posters on the FB group (at this current point in time), 7 out of 10 people who said yes to the first question, will say yes to the second. Or, since I would prefer a larger sample size, 14 out of 20 people.
(Since I think this is obviously a system of high noise, I only assign about 60% probability to winning this bet.)
I sadly don’t have $1000 left right now, but would be happy about a $50 bet.
[Posting to note I have agreed to bet against Oliver on his proposed terms above.]
Why do people keep betting against Carl Shulman???
No shame if you lose, so much glory if you win
I wasn’t super-confident, and so far it looks neck-and-neck (albeit on a smaller and noisier dataset than we had hoped for, 10 instead of 20).
Any outcome yet?
And the results are in!
The bet was resolved with 6 yes votes, and 4 no votes, which means a victory for Carl Shulman. I will be sending Carl $10, as per our initial agreement.
I should note that this provided the maximum possible evidence for Oliver’s hypothesis given that outcome, and that as a result I update in his direction (although less so because of the small sample).
We had 8⁄10 responses, and just sent out messages to another batch to get the last two responses. Should be resolved soon.
What will you do about people who don’t reply to your messages?
(I haven’t run this by Carl yet, but this is my current plan for how to interpret the incoming data)
Since our response rates where somewhat lower than expected (mostly because we chose an account that was friends with only one person from our sample, and so messages probably ended up in people’s secondary Inbox), we decided to only send messages until we get 10 responses to (1), since we don’t want to spam a ton of people with a somewhat shady looking question (I think two people expressed concern about conducting a poll like this).
Since our stopping criteria is 10 people, we will also stop if we get more than 7 yes responses, or more than 3 no responses, before we reach 10 people.
I agree to this.
I’m interpreting this as “go until you get 20 ‘yes’ responses to (1) and then compare their responses to (2)”.
I am unwilling to take “active members of the EA group” as representative of the EA community, since your actual claim was that I made the experience of the EA community significantly worse, and that includes all members, not simply activists. On average, only 1% of any internet community contribute, but the rest are still community members. Instead, I am fine taking the bet than Benito describes—who is clearly far from friendly to InIn.
I am even fine with going with your lower estimate of 14 out of 20.
I am fine including friends.
I am fine with the two questions, although I would insist the second question be “significantly worse” not simply “negative impact,” since that is the claim we are testing, and the same for “significant preference for Gleb or InIn to not have engaged.” Words matter.
I am fine with having a pledge of $1K to be contributed as either of us has the money to do so in the future. I presume you will eventually have $1K.
I read “active” to mean actually involved in things, whether socially, online, finding, or campaigning.
The word “activist” has a stronger connotation in spite of the same root.
Fair enough
Actually, I’d suggest just taking a random sample from the FB group. My guess is that your positive connections should be taken into account in this bet Gleb—if you’ve personally had a significant positive impact on many people’s lives in the movement (and helped them be better effective altruists) then that’s something this is trying to measure.
Also, 10 seems like a small sample, 20 seems better.
I’m fine taking a random sample of 20 people.
Regarding positive connections, the claim made by Oliver is what we’re trying to measure—that I made “significantly worse” the experience of being a member of the EA community for “something like 80%” of the people there. I had not made any claims about my positive connections.
After some private conversation with Carl Shulman, who thinks that I am miscalibrated on this, and whose reasoning I trust quite a bit, I have updated away from me winning a bet with the words “significantly worse” and also think it’s probably unlikely I would win a bet with 8⁄10, instead of 7⁄10.
I have however taken on a bet with Carl with the exact wording I supplied below, i.e. with the words “net negative” and 7⁄10. Though given Carl’s track record of winning bets, I feel a feeling of doom about the outcome of that bet, and on some level expect to lose that bet as well.
At this point, my epistemic status on this is definitely more confused, and I assign significant probability to me overestimating the degree to which people will report that have InIn or Gleb had a negative impact on their experience (though I am even more confused whether I am just updating about people’s reports, or the actual effects on the EA community, both of which seem like plausible candidates to me).
FYI my initial reaction was that people in the community would feel very averse to being so boldly critical, and want to be charitable to InIn (as they’ve been doing for years).
Unfortunately, you and InIn have lost all credibility. There may be nuance to be had, there may be a few errors in the document, there may even be additional deeper reasons for why Carl Shulman, Jeff Kaufman, and the other excellent members of our community have spent so much of their time trying to explain their discomfort with you; however, when the core community has wasted this much time on you, and has shouted this strongly about their discomfort, I simply will not engage further. I’ll not be reading any comment or post by yourself in future, or continuing any conversation with you. This is where the line is drawn in the sand.
I would like to strongly encourage you to keep posting in this thread, and
I would like to encourage others to upvote your posts here to show that your continued participation in this discussion is valued. Having this dialog out in the open helps keep everyone on the same page.EDIT: Rob has convinced me that my recommendation that people upvote Gleb’s responses was not a good idea. Instead, also per Rob’s suggestion, I’ve added links to Gleb’s three response comments at the end of the top-level post.
Upvoting can also be construed as community endorsement. (Gleb himself just cited “a number of EAs have upvoted the following comments supportive of InIn/myself...” as an important line of evidence in his denunciation of Oliver Habryka.)
I think people should upvote comments if they think they’re sufficiently good/helpful, and downvote comments if they think they’re sufficiently bad/unhelpful. Rather than trying to artificially inflate upvote totals (as Gleb also does when he says that downvotes = ‘I’ll repost this as a top-level thread’), just edit the OP to link directly to Gleb’s reply.
I mention this partly because the top-level comment here is seriously concerning. “InIn’s content is so low-quality that it’s doing more harm than good” and “InIn regularly engages in dishonest promotional techniques” are both really, really serious charges. Using the fact that people have made one serious substantive criticism to try to discredit any other serious substantive criticism they raise is really bad at the community-norms level. More generally, responding to fair, correct, relevant criticisms in large part by trying to discredit the critics is super bad form and shouldn’t be seen as normal or OK. Repeatedly accusing people raising (basically fair) concerns of ‘costing lives’ because they took the time to fix your mistakes for you is also super bad form and definitely shouldn’t be seen as normal or OK. I really don’t want casual readers to skim through the comments here, see a highly upvoted comment, and assume that the comment therefore reflects EA’s community standards / beliefs / etc.
“a number of EAs have upvoted the following comments supportive of InIn/myself...”
This is especially rich given the accusations (which have been proved to my satisfaction) of astroturfing. At a minimum it’s another example of behaving very responsively towards criticism in the moment but making no changes to core beliefs.
Good idea. Done, and edited my comment above.