I agree that a low-weirdness EA would have fewer weird scandals.
Caveat: “a low-weirdness EA would have fewer weird scandals” is compatible with “trying on the margin to make EA less weird will increase the number of weird scandals”.
It’s important to keep in mind that a lot of scandals are happening at around the same time right now because a few known individuals are trying to make a lot of scandals happen for EA right now, including via saying a lot of things that are not true. (And a lot more things that they know will mislead their reader on a local point, albeit I assume they think this is justified because they genuinely believe in the gist / the high-level claims they’re trying to establish.)
In an adversarial game where the other party is trying to pressure you into doing something by bending the truth in some convenient direction, capitulating won’t necessarily get you what you want. Game-theoretically, this encourages any adversaries you have to crank up the juice and try to pressure you to do even more of what they want. And socially, signs of eagerness to capitulate and optimize-for-optics often feel like “blood in the water”, an opportunity to go after a group more because it’s showing weakness.
Trying to combat scandals by becoming more normal is doubly myopic: it’s something you wouldn’t do (at least to the same degree) if you weren’t being pressured by an adversary to do it, so the myopic gains risk being offset by the visible increase in how easy it is for people to push you around; and it targets PR goals and proxies for bad behavior rather than directly targeting the bad behavior, which risks encouraging EAs to hide their own bad behavior and cover up for other EAs’ misconduct. (They can even rationalize this as a wise and altruistic way to protect EA’s reputation, since we’ve apparently decided that that’s the real priority!)
In contrast, directly targeting the bad behavior may or may not have PR benefits, but it’s something we’d want to do anyway, whether or not anyone was pressuring us to; and it seems more to me like the sort of thing I’d expect from a vibrant intellectual community that ends up figuring out how to save the world.
Caveat: “a low-weirdness EA would have fewer weird scandals” is compatible with “trying on the margin to make EA less weird will increase the number of weird scandals”.
It’s important to keep in mind that a lot of scandals are happening at around the same time right now because a few known individuals are trying to make a lot of scandals happen for EA right now, including via saying a lot of things that are not true. (And a lot more things that they know will mislead their reader on a local point, albeit I assume they think this is justified because they genuinely believe in the gist / the high-level claims they’re trying to establish.)
In an adversarial game where the other party is trying to pressure you into doing something by bending the truth in some convenient direction, capitulating won’t necessarily get you what you want. Game-theoretically, this encourages any adversaries you have to crank up the juice and try to pressure you to do even more of what they want. And socially, signs of eagerness to capitulate and optimize-for-optics often feel like “blood in the water”, an opportunity to go after a group more because it’s showing weakness.
Trying to combat scandals by becoming more normal is doubly myopic: it’s something you wouldn’t do (at least to the same degree) if you weren’t being pressured by an adversary to do it, so the myopic gains risk being offset by the visible increase in how easy it is for people to push you around; and it targets PR goals and proxies for bad behavior rather than directly targeting the bad behavior, which risks encouraging EAs to hide their own bad behavior and cover up for other EAs’ misconduct. (They can even rationalize this as a wise and altruistic way to protect EA’s reputation, since we’ve apparently decided that that’s the real priority!)
In contrast, directly targeting the bad behavior may or may not have PR benefits, but it’s something we’d want to do anyway, whether or not anyone was pressuring us to; and it seems more to me like the sort of thing I’d expect from a vibrant intellectual community that ends up figuring out how to save the world.