Imagine someone runs up to your house with a can of gasoline and some matches. They start talking about how there are bad men living in your walls and they need to burn the place down. Now, the fact that this person wants to burn you house down doesn’t allow you to determine whether there are bad men hiding in your walls. But focusing on that epistemological point would be a distraction.
The salient thing to notice is that this person wants to burn your house down.
The salient thing to notice is that this person wants to burn your house down.
In your example, after I notice this, I would call the police to report this person. What do you think I should do (or what does David want me to do) after noticing the political agenda of the people he mentioned? My own natural inclination is to ignore them and keep doing what I was doing before, because it seems incredibly unlikely that their agenda would succeed, given the massive array of political enemies that such agenda has.
The macro question is what to do about white supremacists in general in society. I will leave that topic to another place and time.
The micro question is what to do about white supremacists on the EA Forum. I think we should ban them.
I think @titotal very eloquently described the Nazi death spiral problem. If you don’t take a hard stance against white supremacists, you signal your welcomingness to white supremacists and you signal your unwelcomingness to people who don’t like sharing a community with white supremacists. This runs the risk of a range of bad outcomes from severe reputational damage to destroying the effective altruist community as we know it.
Imagine someone runs up to your house with a can of gasoline and some matches. They start talking about how there are bad men living in your walls and they need to burn the place down. Now, the fact that this person wants to burn you house down doesn’t allow you to determine whether there are bad men hiding in your walls. But focusing on that epistemological point would be a distraction.
The salient thing to notice is that this person wants to burn your house down.
In your example, after I notice this, I would call the police to report this person. What do you think I should do (or what does David want me to do) after noticing the political agenda of the people he mentioned? My own natural inclination is to ignore them and keep doing what I was doing before, because it seems incredibly unlikely that their agenda would succeed, given the massive array of political enemies that such agenda has.
The macro question is what to do about white supremacists in general in society. I will leave that topic to another place and time.
The micro question is what to do about white supremacists on the EA Forum. I think we should ban them.
I think @titotal very eloquently described the Nazi death spiral problem. If you don’t take a hard stance against white supremacists, you signal your welcomingness to white supremacists and you signal your unwelcomingness to people who don’t like sharing a community with white supremacists. This runs the risk of a range of bad outcomes from severe reputational damage to destroying the effective altruist community as we know it.