This post presents as the only counterargument to expelling weirdness from our community that we might have less good ideas about how to make the world better. Obviously a big and serious concern! Seems important to include it. But I didn’t hear two other important reasons (in my view) to tolerate weirdness:
Dialling down weirdness is often difficult and stressful, and in some cases effectively amounts to excluding people entirely (whether intentionally or not),
Cultural designation of harmless lifestyles, or beliefs, or neurodivergence, as weird or inappropriate is immoral, and we should not tolerate it lightly.
I agree you shouldn’t do weird bad things, but you shouldn’t do ordinary bad things either. A general campaign against weirdness will hurt people who do not deserve to be hurt, and that’s wrong regardless of whether it will overall be better or worse for the prospects of the movement as a whole.
When the culture you live in is (e.g.) homophobic, or transphobic, or stigmatizes autism, being counter-cultural is a moral obligation.
Dialling down weirdness is often difficult and stressful, and in some cases effectively amounts to excluding people entirely (whether intentionally or not),
Cultural designation of harmless lifestyles, or beliefs, or neurodivergence, as weird or inappropriate is immoral, and we should not tolerate it lightly.
I strongly agree with this.
I do think it’s important to keep in mind that there are competing access needs here: you can’t fully optimize EA for feeling emotionally safe, low-stress, etc. to one group, without giving up on fully optimizing EA for feeling emotionally safe and low-stress to at least one other group.
A classic example is ‘groups for male survivors of rape by women’ and ‘groups for female survivors of rape by men’. Rather than “safe space” being a person-invariant property, it’s relative to what group you’re optimizing the space for. Ditto for spaces that are extra welcoming to left-wing people (which for that very reason tend to feel less comfortable to the average right-wing person), vs. spaces that are extra welcoming to right-wing people (and for that reason are less cozy on average for left-wing people).
It’s possible to create social spaces that are physically safe for everyone, but it’s not possible to create social spaces that feel equally emotionally “safe” for every type of well-intentioned human being. The two bullet points above are true, and also EA does have to make some tradeoffs that will make some people more or less emotionally cozy in EAs social spaces than others.
We don’t have to be happy that we’re doomed to make tradeoffs like this, and we don’t have to think that the tradeoffs are currently being made optimally, but we should recognize this as part of the territory.
Yeah, there are certainly some difficult choices in this domain, but (and I don’t think you said otherwise) not all access needs are competing, not all choices are difficult. My guess is that a general push against weirdness would make some potentially-correct pushes on a few important tradeoffs, a few pushes on tradeoffs that serve to make life slightly easier for a few people and substantially harder for others, and also a few totally unnecessary pushes in directions that benefit no-one. We should target the tradeoffs more precisely and carefully.
This post presents as the only counterargument to expelling weirdness from our community that we might have less good ideas about how to make the world better. Obviously a big and serious concern! Seems important to include it. But I didn’t hear two other important reasons (in my view) to tolerate weirdness:
Dialling down weirdness is often difficult and stressful, and in some cases effectively amounts to excluding people entirely (whether intentionally or not),
Cultural designation of harmless lifestyles, or beliefs, or neurodivergence, as weird or inappropriate is immoral, and we should not tolerate it lightly.
I agree you shouldn’t do weird bad things, but you shouldn’t do ordinary bad things either. A general campaign against weirdness will hurt people who do not deserve to be hurt, and that’s wrong regardless of whether it will overall be better or worse for the prospects of the movement as a whole.
When the culture you live in is (e.g.) homophobic, or transphobic, or stigmatizes autism, being counter-cultural is a moral obligation.
I strongly agree with this.
I do think it’s important to keep in mind that there are competing access needs here: you can’t fully optimize EA for feeling emotionally safe, low-stress, etc. to one group, without giving up on fully optimizing EA for feeling emotionally safe and low-stress to at least one other group.
A classic example is ‘groups for male survivors of rape by women’ and ‘groups for female survivors of rape by men’. Rather than “safe space” being a person-invariant property, it’s relative to what group you’re optimizing the space for. Ditto for spaces that are extra welcoming to left-wing people (which for that very reason tend to feel less comfortable to the average right-wing person), vs. spaces that are extra welcoming to right-wing people (and for that reason are less cozy on average for left-wing people).
It’s possible to create social spaces that are physically safe for everyone, but it’s not possible to create social spaces that feel equally emotionally “safe” for every type of well-intentioned human being. The two bullet points above are true, and also EA does have to make some tradeoffs that will make some people more or less emotionally cozy in EAs social spaces than others.
We don’t have to be happy that we’re doomed to make tradeoffs like this, and we don’t have to think that the tradeoffs are currently being made optimally, but we should recognize this as part of the territory.
Yeah, there are certainly some difficult choices in this domain, but (and I don’t think you said otherwise) not all access needs are competing, not all choices are difficult. My guess is that a general push against weirdness would make some potentially-correct pushes on a few important tradeoffs, a few pushes on tradeoffs that serve to make life slightly easier for a few people and substantially harder for others, and also a few totally unnecessary pushes in directions that benefit no-one. We should target the tradeoffs more precisely and carefully.