Emile Torres (formerly Phil) just admitted on their Twitter that they were a co-author of a penultimate version of this paper. It is extremely deceptive not to disclose their contribution this in the paper or in the Forum post. At the point this paper was written, Torres had been banned from the EA Forum and multiple people in the community had accused Torres of harassing them. Do you think that that might have contributed to the (alleged) reception to your paper?
The post in which I speak about EAs being uncomfortable about us publishing the article only talks about interactions with people who did not have any information about initial drafting with Torres. At that stage, the paper was completely different and a paper between Kemp and I. None of the critiques about it or the conversations about it involved concerns about Torres, co-authoring with Torres or arguments by Torres, except in so far as they might have taken Torres an example of the closing doors that can follow a critique. The paper was in such a totally different state and it would have been misplaced to call it a collaboration with Torres.
There was a very early draft of Torres and Kemp which I was invited to look at (in December 2020) and collaborate on. While the arguments seemed promising to me, I thought it needed major re-writing of both tone and content. No one instructed me (maybe someone instructed Luke?) that one could not co-author with Torres. I also don’t recall that we were forced to take Torres off the collaboration (I’m not sure who know about the conversations about collaborations we had): we decided to part because we wanted to move the content and tone in a very different direction, because Torres had (to our surprise) unilaterally published major parts of the initial draft as a mini-book already and because we thought that this collaboration was going to be very difficult. I recall video calls in which we discussed the matter with Torres, decided to take out sections that were initially supplied by Torres and cite Torres’ mini-book whereever we deemed it necessary to refer to it. The degree to which the Democratising Risk paper is influenced by Torres is seen in our in-text citations: we don’t hide the fact that we find some of the arguments noteworthy! Torres agreed with those plans.
At the time it seemed to me that I and Torres were trying to achieve fundamentally different goals: I wanted to start a critical discussion within EA and Torres was ready by that stage to incoculate others against EA and longtermism. It was clear to me that the tone and style of argumentation of initial drafts had little chance of being taken seriously in EA. My own opinion is that many arguments made by Torres are not rigorous enough to sway me, but that they often contain an initial source of contention that is worth spending time developping further to see whether it has substance. Torres and I agree in so far as we surely both think there are several worthy critiques of EA and longtermism that should be considered, but I think we differ greatly in our credences in the plausibility of different critiques, how we wanted to treat and present critiques and who we wanted to discuss them with.
The emotional contexual embedding of an argument matters greatly to its perception. I thought EAs, like most people, were not protected from assessing arguments emotionally and while I don’t follow EA dramas closely (someone also kindly alerted me to this one unfolding), by early 2021 I had gotten the memo that Torres had become an emotional signal for EAs to discount much of what the name was attached to. At the time I thought it would not do the arguments justice to let them be discounted because of an associated name that many in EA seem to have an emotional reaction against and the question of reception did become one factor for why we thought it best not to consider the co-authorship with Torres. One can of course manage perception of a paper via co-authorship and we considered collaborating with respected EAs to give it more credibility but we decided both against name-dropping those people who invested via long conversations and commentary in the piece to boost it as much as we decided not to advertise that there are obvious overlaps with some of Torres’ critiques. There is nothing to hide in my view: one can read Torres’ work and Democratising Risk (and in fact many other peoples’ critiques) and see similarities—this should probably strengthen one’s belief that there’s something in that ballpark of arguments that many people feel we should take seriously?
Apart from the fact that it really is an entirely different paper (what you saw is version 26 or something and I think about 30 people have commented on it. I’m not sure it’s meaningful to speak about V1 and V20 as being the same paper. And what you see is all there is: all the citations of Torres are indeed pointing to writing by Torres, but they are easily found and you’ll see that it is not a disproportionate influence), we did indeed hope to avoid the exact scenario we find ourselves in now! The paper is at risk of being evaluated in light of any connection to Torres rather than on it’s own terms, and my trustworthiness in reporting on EAs treatment of critiques is being questioned because I cared about the presentation and reception of the arguments in this paper? A huge amount of work went into adjusting the tone of the paper to EAs (irrespective of Torres, this was a point of contention between Luke and I too), to ensure the arguments would get a fair hearing and we had to balance this against non-EA outsiders who thought we were not forceful enough.
I think we succeeded in this balance, since both sides still to tell us we didn’t do quite enough (the tone still seems harsh to EAs and too timid to outsiders) but both EAs and outsiders do engage with the paper and the arguments and I do think it is true that there is a greater awareness about (self-) censorship risk and critiques being valuable. Having published , EAs have so far been kind towards me. This is great! I do hope it’ll stay this way. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not sexy to be seen as the critic. It doesn’t feel great to be told a paper will damage an institution, to have others insinuate that I plug my own papers under pseudonyms in forum comments or that I had malicious intentions in being open about the experience, and it’s annoying to be placed into boxes with other authors who you might strongly disagree with. While I understand that those who don’t know me must take any piece of evidence they can get to evaluate the trustworthiness of my claims, I find it a little concerning that anyone should be willing to infer and evaluate character from minor interactions. Shouldn’t we rather say: given that we can’t fully verify her experience, can we think about why such an experience would be bad for the project of EA and what safeguards we have in place such that those experiences don’t happen? My hope was that I can serve as a positive example to others who feel the need to voice whatever opinion (“see it’s not so bad!”), so I thank anyone on here who is trying to ease the exhaust that inevitably comes with navigating criticism in a community. The experience so far has made me think that EAs care very much that all arguments (including those they disagree with) are heard. Even if you don’t think I’m trustworthy and earnest in my concerns, do please continue to keep the benefit of doubt in mind towards your perceived critics, I think we all agree they are valuable to have among us and if you care about EA, do keep the process of assessing trustworthiness amicable, if not for me then for future critics who do a better job than I.
Just a thought: if people on this forum don’t want accusations of supremacist ideological adherence to sprout up and maybe take root, then maybe be more conscientious about proactively not perpetuating supremacist behaviors. You are literally quoting a tweet here that contains a transgender pride flag and the this person’s full name. I find it hard to believe you have missed these things, yet you’ve inexplicably misgendered and misnamed this person.
Emile Torres (formerly Phil) just admitted on their Twitter that they were a co-author of a penultimate version of this paper. It is extremely deceptive not to disclose their contribution this in the paper or in the Forum post. At the point this paper was written, Torres had been banned from the EA Forum and multiple people in the community had accused Torres of harassing them. Do you think that that might have contributed to the (alleged) reception to your paper?
The post in which I speak about EAs being uncomfortable about us publishing the article only talks about interactions with people who did not have any information about initial drafting with Torres. At that stage, the paper was completely different and a paper between Kemp and I. None of the critiques about it or the conversations about it involved concerns about Torres, co-authoring with Torres or arguments by Torres, except in so far as they might have taken Torres an example of the closing doors that can follow a critique. The paper was in such a totally different state and it would have been misplaced to call it a collaboration with Torres.
There was a very early draft of Torres and Kemp which I was invited to look at (in December 2020) and collaborate on. While the arguments seemed promising to me, I thought it needed major re-writing of both tone and content. No one instructed me (maybe someone instructed Luke?) that one could not co-author with Torres. I also don’t recall that we were forced to take Torres off the collaboration (I’m not sure who know about the conversations about collaborations we had): we decided to part because we wanted to move the content and tone in a very different direction, because Torres had (to our surprise) unilaterally published major parts of the initial draft as a mini-book already and because we thought that this collaboration was going to be very difficult. I recall video calls in which we discussed the matter with Torres, decided to take out sections that were initially supplied by Torres and cite Torres’ mini-book whereever we deemed it necessary to refer to it. The degree to which the Democratising Risk paper is influenced by Torres is seen in our in-text citations: we don’t hide the fact that we find some of the arguments noteworthy! Torres agreed with those plans.
At the time it seemed to me that I and Torres were trying to achieve fundamentally different goals: I wanted to start a critical discussion within EA and Torres was ready by that stage to incoculate others against EA and longtermism. It was clear to me that the tone and style of argumentation of initial drafts had little chance of being taken seriously in EA. My own opinion is that many arguments made by Torres are not rigorous enough to sway me, but that they often contain an initial source of contention that is worth spending time developping further to see whether it has substance. Torres and I agree in so far as we surely both think there are several worthy critiques of EA and longtermism that should be considered, but I think we differ greatly in our credences in the plausibility of different critiques, how we wanted to treat and present critiques and who we wanted to discuss them with.
The emotional contexual embedding of an argument matters greatly to its perception. I thought EAs, like most people, were not protected from assessing arguments emotionally and while I don’t follow EA dramas closely (someone also kindly alerted me to this one unfolding), by early 2021 I had gotten the memo that Torres had become an emotional signal for EAs to discount much of what the name was attached to. At the time I thought it would not do the arguments justice to let them be discounted because of an associated name that many in EA seem to have an emotional reaction against and the question of reception did become one factor for why we thought it best not to consider the co-authorship with Torres. One can of course manage perception of a paper via co-authorship and we considered collaborating with respected EAs to give it more credibility but we decided both against name-dropping those people who invested via long conversations and commentary in the piece to boost it as much as we decided not to advertise that there are obvious overlaps with some of Torres’ critiques. There is nothing to hide in my view: one can read Torres’ work and Democratising Risk (and in fact many other peoples’ critiques) and see similarities—this should probably strengthen one’s belief that there’s something in that ballpark of arguments that many people feel we should take seriously?
Apart from the fact that it really is an entirely different paper (what you saw is version 26 or something and I think about 30 people have commented on it. I’m not sure it’s meaningful to speak about V1 and V20 as being the same paper. And what you see is all there is: all the citations of Torres are indeed pointing to writing by Torres, but they are easily found and you’ll see that it is not a disproportionate influence), we did indeed hope to avoid the exact scenario we find ourselves in now! The paper is at risk of being evaluated in light of any connection to Torres rather than on it’s own terms, and my trustworthiness in reporting on EAs treatment of critiques is being questioned because I cared about the presentation and reception of the arguments in this paper? A huge amount of work went into adjusting the tone of the paper to EAs (irrespective of Torres, this was a point of contention between Luke and I too), to ensure the arguments would get a fair hearing and we had to balance this against non-EA outsiders who thought we were not forceful enough.
I think we succeeded in this balance, since both sides still to tell us we didn’t do quite enough (the tone still seems harsh to EAs and too timid to outsiders) but both EAs and outsiders do engage with the paper and the arguments and I do think it is true that there is a greater awareness about (self-) censorship risk and critiques being valuable. Having published , EAs have so far been kind towards me. This is great! I do hope it’ll stay this way. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not sexy to be seen as the critic. It doesn’t feel great to be told a paper will damage an institution, to have others insinuate that I plug my own papers under pseudonyms in forum comments or that I had malicious intentions in being open about the experience, and it’s annoying to be placed into boxes with other authors who you might strongly disagree with. While I understand that those who don’t know me must take any piece of evidence they can get to evaluate the trustworthiness of my claims, I find it a little concerning that anyone should be willing to infer and evaluate character from minor interactions. Shouldn’t we rather say: given that we can’t fully verify her experience, can we think about why such an experience would be bad for the project of EA and what safeguards we have in place such that those experiences don’t happen? My hope was that I can serve as a positive example to others who feel the need to voice whatever opinion (“see it’s not so bad!”), so I thank anyone on here who is trying to ease the exhaust that inevitably comes with navigating criticism in a community. The experience so far has made me think that EAs care very much that all arguments (including those they disagree with) are heard. Even if you don’t think I’m trustworthy and earnest in my concerns, do please continue to keep the benefit of doubt in mind towards your perceived critics, I think we all agree they are valuable to have among us and if you care about EA, do keep the process of assessing trustworthiness amicable, if not for me then for future critics who do a better job than I.
Just a thought: if people on this forum don’t want accusations of supremacist ideological adherence to sprout up and maybe take root, then maybe be more conscientious about proactively not perpetuating supremacist behaviors. You are literally quoting a tweet here that contains a transgender pride flag and the this person’s full name. I find it hard to believe you have missed these things, yet you’ve inexplicably misgendered and misnamed this person.