Like others commenting, I’m not convinced that the anecdotes here point to blacklists. I will say, if organizations do have blacklists and put people on them for reasons like “they gave a talk I didn’t like”, that’s very bad, and I’m against it.
I do think adjectives like “weak epistemics”, “not truth-seeking”, and “not rational” are often completely contentless and are basically power moves. I basically think there are few contexts when it makes sense to apply these to other people in the community, and if you think there’s something flawed with the way that a person thinks, you should state it more precisely (e.g. “this person seems to make hyperbolic and false claims a lot”, or “they gave a talk and it seemed to be based on vague vibes rather than evidence”, or “they value other things much more highly than utility and I value utility extremely highly, so we don’t agree”.
Like others commenting, I’m not convinced that the anecdotes here point to blacklists. I will say, if organizations do have blacklists and put people on them for reasons like “they gave a talk I didn’t like”, that’s very bad, and I’m against it.
I do think adjectives like “weak epistemics”, “not truth-seeking”, and “not rational” are often completely contentless and are basically power moves. I basically think there are few contexts when it makes sense to apply these to other people in the community, and if you think there’s something flawed with the way that a person thinks, you should state it more precisely (e.g. “this person seems to make hyperbolic and false claims a lot”, or “they gave a talk and it seemed to be based on vague vibes rather than evidence”, or “they value other things much more highly than utility and I value utility extremely highly, so we don’t agree”.