Brief note on why EA should be careful to remain inclusive & welcoming to neurodiverse people:
As somebody with Aspergers, I’m getting worried that in this recent ‘PR crisis’, EA is sending some pretty strong signals of intolerance to those of us with various kinds of neurodiversity that can make it hard for us to be ‘socially sensitive’, to ‘read the room’, and to ‘avoid giving offense’. (I’m not saying that any particular people involved in recent EA controversies are Aspy; just that I’ve seen a general tendency for EAs to be a little Aspier than other people, which is why I like them and feel at home with them.)
There’s an ongoing ‘trait war’ that’s easy to confuse with the Culture War. It’s not really about right versus left, or reactionary versus woke. It’s more about psychological traits: ‘shape rotators’ versus ‘wordcels’, ‘Aspies’ versus ‘normies’, systematizers versus empathizers, high decouplers versus low decouplers.
EA has traditionally been an oasis for Aspy systematizers with a high degree of rational compassion, decoupling skills, and quantitative reasoning. One downside of being Aspy is that we occasionally, or even often, say things that normies consider offensive, outrageous, unforgiveable, etc.
If we impose standard woke cancel culture norms on everybody in EA, we will drive away everybody with the kinds of psychological traits that created EA, that helped it flourish, and that made it successful. Politically correct people love to Aspy-shame. They will seek out the worst things a neurodiverse person has ever said, and weaponize it to destroy their reputation, so that their psychological traits and values are allowed no voice in public discourse. (Systematizing and decoupling are existential threats to political correctness....)
I’ve seen this happen literally dozens of times in academia over the last decade. High emphathizers and low decouplers are taking over the universities from high systematizers and high decouplers. They will do the same to EA, if we’re not careful.
I’ve written in much more depth about this in my 2017 essay ‘The neurodiversity case for free speech’ (paywalled here on Quillette, free pdf here). IMHO, it’s more relevant than ever, in relation to some of EA’s recent public relations issues.
FWIW despite having pretty diametrically opposed views on a lot of these things, I agree that there is something to the issue/divide you reference. It seems correlated with the “normie-EA vs. rationalist-EA” divide I mentioned elsewhere on this page, and I think there are potential tradeoffs from naively responding to the (IMO) real issues at stake on the other side of the ledger. How to non-naively navigate all this seems non-obvious.
Miles. I agree, more or less. It is very tricky to navigate, because EA does include poeple with different personality traits and cognitive styles. These are almost like different Bayesian priors with respect to ‘social cause areas’, eg the relative importance of being nice vs being empirically accurate.
Will ruminate more about all this....
I wholeheartedly agree that EA must remain welcoming to neurodiverse people. Part of how we do that is being graceful and forgiving for people who inadvertantly violate social norms in pursuit of EA goals.
But I worry this specific comment overstates its case by (1) leaving out both the “inadvertent” part and the “in pursuit of EA goals” part, which implies that we ought to be fine with gratuitous norm violation, and (2) incorporating political bias. You say:
If we impose standard woke cancel culture norms on everybody in EA, we will drive away [neurodiverse people]. Politically correct people love to Aspy-shame. They will seek out the worst things a neurodiverse person has ever said, and weaponize it to destroy their reputation, so that their psychological traits and values are allowed no voice in public discourse.
I don’t want to speak for anyone with autism. However, as best I can tell, this is not at all a universal view. I know multiple peope who thrive in lefty spaces despite seeming (to me at least) like high decouplers. So it seems more plausible to me that this isn’t narrowly true about high decouplers in “woke” spaces; it’s broadly true about high decouplers in communities who’s political/ethical beliefs the decoupler does not share.
I also think that, even for a high decoupler (which I consider myself to be, though as far as I know I’m not on the autism spectrum) the really big taboos—like race and intelligence—are usually obvious, as is the fact that you’re supposed to be careful when talking about them. The text of Bostrom’s email demonstrates he knows exactly what taboos he’s violating.
I also think we should be careful not to mistake correlation for causation, when looking at EA’s success and the traits of many of its members. For example, you say:
[if we punish social norm violation] we will drive away everybody with the kinds of psychological traits that created EA, that helped it flourish, and that made it successful
There are valuable EA founders/popularizers who seem pretty adept at navigating taboos. For example, every interview I’ve seen with Will MacCaskill involves him reframing counterintuitive ethics to fit with the average person’s moral intuitions. This seems to have been really effective at popularizing EA!
I agree that there are benefits from decoupling. But there are clear utilitarian downsides too. Contextualizing a statement is often necessary to anticipate its social welfare implications. Contextualizing therefore seems necessary to EA.
Finally, I want to offer a note of sympathy. While I don’t think I’m autistic, I do frequently find myself at odds with mainstream social norms. I prefer more direct styles of communication than most people. I’m a hardcore utilitarian. Many of the leftwing shibboleths common in among my graduate school classmates I find annoying, wrong, and even harmful. For all these reasons, I share your feeling that EA is “oasis.” In fact, it’s the only community I’m a part of that reaffirms my deepest beliefs about ethics in a clear way.
But ultimately, I think EA should not optimize to be that sort of reaffirming space for me. EA’s goal is wellbeing maximization, and anything other than wellbeing maximization will sometimes—even if only rarely—have to be compromised.
AnonymousQualy—You make some valid & thoughtful points. Let me ruminate further about them....
For the moment, I would just question the generality of your claim that ‘the really big taboos—like race and intelligence—are usually obvious’. That might be true within a given culture, generation, social class, and ideological context. However, it is often not true across cultures. (For example, when I taught courses for a mainland Chinese university the last couple of years, the students there really wanted to talk about the evolution of race differences and intelligence—much more than I was comfortable doing.)
If EA aspires to be a global movement, we need to consider the fact that some of our strongest current Anglo-American ideological taboos are not shared by other cultures. And if we impose our taboos on other cultures, we’re not really being culturally inclusive.
I addressed these issues in this other 2018 article on ‘The cultural diversity case for free speech’ (paywalled on Quillette here; free pdf here.)
Thanks a lot for raising this, Geoffrey. A while back I mentioned some personal feelings and possible risks related to the current Western political climate, from one non-Westerner’s perspective. You’ve articulated my intuitions very nicely here and in that article.
From a strategic perspective, it seems to me that if AGI takes longer to develop, the more likely it is that the expected decision-making power would be shared globally. EAs should consider that they might end up in that world and it might not be a good idea to create and enforce easily-violated, non-negotiable demands on issues that we’re not prioritizing (e.g. it would be quite bad if a Western EA ended up repeatedly reprimanding a potential Chinese collaborator simply because the latter speaks bluntly from the perspective of the former). To be clear, China has some of this as well (mostly relating to its geopolitical history) and I think feeling less strongly about those issues could be beneficial.
I agree! Greater leniency across cultural divides is good and necessary.
But I also think that:
(1) That doesn’t apply to the Bostrom letter
(2) There are certain areas where we might think our cultural norms are better than many alternatives; in these situations, it would make sense to tell the person from the alternate culture about our norm and try to persuade them to abide by it (including through social pressure). I’m pretty comfortable with the idea that there’s a tradeoff between cultural inclusion and maintaining good norms, and that the optimal balance between the two will be different for different norms.
Regarding your point (2), I can see both sides of this.
I agree that some cultural norms are generally better, by most metrics, in terms of human flourishing, social cohesion, progress, prosperity, freedom, resilience, longevity, etc. -- although there are almost always tradeoffs, exceptions, and complications that warrant considerable epistemic humility and ethical uncertainty.
My heuristic is that members of Anglo-American cultures should usually err on the side of listening more than preaching when interacting with people from other cultures who probably know much more about our culture (e.g. through US/UK movies, TV, social media, global news) than we know about theirs.
For what it’s worth, I am autistic-and a white man as it happens-and I do not find free, uncensored discussion of race/IQ stuff specifically makes me feel more welcome and comfortable. Rather, it makes me feel sick, and anxious and worried that I am associating with bad people if I participate in the discussion. (I actually agree with Geoffrey Miller that there is probably some connection between autism and what he’s calling “decoupling” though. And that this probably makes EA more welcoming for autistics. But ultimately, the point of EA is meant to be to do good, not to be a social club for autistic people.)
EDIT: I also strongly second AnonymousQualy’s point that Bostrom knew he was saying taboo stuff and so it cannot be dismissed as ‘autistic people don’t know when they are offending others’.
I think censorship would be a bad choice here, because the EA forum hasn’t discussed these concepts previously (in any routine way, I’m sure there is a screed or two that could be dug up from a mound of downvotes) and is unlikely to in the future.
I would agree that race/IQ debates on the EA forum are unlikely to produce anything of value. But it’s my experience that if you have free discussion rights and one banned topic, that causes more issues than just letting people say their piece and move on.
I’d also agree that EA isn’t meant to be a social club for autists—but from a cynical perspective, the blithely curious and alien-brained are also a strategic resource and snubbing them should be avoided when possible.
If people are still sharing takes on race/IQ two weeks from now, I think that would be a measurable enough detraction from the goal of the forum to support the admins telling them to take it elsewhere. But I would be surprised if it were an issue.
Uncontroversial take: EA wouldn’t exist without the blithely curious and alien-brained.
More controversially: I’ve been increasingly feeling like I’m on a forum where people think the autistic/decoupler/rationalist cluster did their part and now should just… go away. Like, ‘thanks for pointing us at the moral horrors and the world-ending catastrophe, I’ll bear them in mind, now please stop annoying me.’
But it is not obvious to me that the alien-brained have noticed everything useful that they are going to notice, and done all the work that they will do, such that it is safe to discard them.
Let me say this: autism runs in my family, including two of my first cousins. I think that neurodivergence is not only nothing to be ashamed of, and not an “illness” to be “cured”, but in fact a profound gift, and one which allows neurodivergent individuals to see what many of us do not. (Another example: Listen to Vikingur Olafsson play the piano! Nobody else hears Mozart like that.).
Neurodivergent individuals and high decouplers should not be chased out of effective altruism or any other movement. Doing this would not only be intrinsically wrong, but would also deprive the movement of profoundly important insights, and would deprive the neurodivergent of one of the few places where they can genuinely belong.
It is very important to recognize that neurodivergent individuals, among others, sometimes have a harder time recognizing violations of social norms, and to exercise some degree of patience and compassion in responding to norm violations.
It is also important for everyone, no matter their tendency towards decoupling, their neurodiversity, or their background, to understand that words can harm, and to be sensitive to the need to stop and reverse course when presented with credible evidence that words have harmed.
Everyone reading this message, and I mean everyone, is capable of hearing “no, stop. That is wrong” or “racist science has no place in this discussion” and stopping. It is time for the racism to stop, and the healing to begin.
The discussion that needs to be had right now is about healing, growth and change. The time for defense is over. The time for debate is over. It is time to learn to do better. I hope that the coming weeks can be used for growth and change.
I also think that, even for a high decoupler (which I consider myself to be, though as far as I know I’m not on the autism spectrum) the really big taboos—like race and intelligence—are usually obvious, as is the fact that you’re supposed to be careful when talking about them. The text of Bostrom’s email demonstrates he knows exactly what taboos he’s violating.
And honestly, I think this is a great taboo for many reasons. I’d argue this is one of the more intelligent taboos here by the left.
I’m no cultural conservative, but norms are important social tools we shouldn’t expect to entirely discard. Anthropologist Joe Henrich’s writing really opened my eyes to how norms pass down complex knowledge that would be inefficient for an individual to try to learn on their own.
I don’t exactly agree with the case that cultural knowledge is really important like Henrich wants to say, though I do credit cultural knowledge for increasing returns to scale.
Brief note on why EA should be careful to remain inclusive & welcoming to neurodiverse people:
As somebody with Aspergers, I’m getting worried that in this recent ‘PR crisis’, EA is sending some pretty strong signals of intolerance to those of us with various kinds of neurodiversity that can make it hard for us to be ‘socially sensitive’, to ‘read the room’, and to ‘avoid giving offense’. (I’m not saying that any particular people involved in recent EA controversies are Aspy; just that I’ve seen a general tendency for EAs to be a little Aspier than other people, which is why I like them and feel at home with them.)
There’s an ongoing ‘trait war’ that’s easy to confuse with the Culture War. It’s not really about right versus left, or reactionary versus woke. It’s more about psychological traits: ‘shape rotators’ versus ‘wordcels’, ‘Aspies’ versus ‘normies’, systematizers versus empathizers, high decouplers versus low decouplers.
EA has traditionally been an oasis for Aspy systematizers with a high degree of rational compassion, decoupling skills, and quantitative reasoning. One downside of being Aspy is that we occasionally, or even often, say things that normies consider offensive, outrageous, unforgiveable, etc.
If we impose standard woke cancel culture norms on everybody in EA, we will drive away everybody with the kinds of psychological traits that created EA, that helped it flourish, and that made it successful. Politically correct people love to Aspy-shame. They will seek out the worst things a neurodiverse person has ever said, and weaponize it to destroy their reputation, so that their psychological traits and values are allowed no voice in public discourse. (Systematizing and decoupling are existential threats to political correctness....)
I’ve seen this happen literally dozens of times in academia over the last decade. High emphathizers and low decouplers are taking over the universities from high systematizers and high decouplers. They will do the same to EA, if we’re not careful.
I’ve written in much more depth about this in my 2017 essay ‘The neurodiversity case for free speech’ (paywalled here on Quillette, free pdf here). IMHO, it’s more relevant than ever, in relation to some of EA’s recent public relations issues.
FWIW despite having pretty diametrically opposed views on a lot of these things, I agree that there is something to the issue/divide you reference. It seems correlated with the “normie-EA vs. rationalist-EA” divide I mentioned elsewhere on this page, and I think there are potential tradeoffs from naively responding to the (IMO) real issues at stake on the other side of the ledger. How to non-naively navigate all this seems non-obvious.
Miles. I agree, more or less. It is very tricky to navigate, because EA does include poeple with different personality traits and cognitive styles. These are almost like different Bayesian priors with respect to ‘social cause areas’, eg the relative importance of being nice vs being empirically accurate. Will ruminate more about all this....
I wholeheartedly agree that EA must remain welcoming to neurodiverse people. Part of how we do that is being graceful and forgiving for people who inadvertantly violate social norms in pursuit of EA goals.
But I worry this specific comment overstates its case by (1) leaving out both the “inadvertent” part and the “in pursuit of EA goals” part, which implies that we ought to be fine with gratuitous norm violation, and (2) incorporating political bias. You say:
I don’t want to speak for anyone with autism. However, as best I can tell, this is not at all a universal view. I know multiple peope who thrive in lefty spaces despite seeming (to me at least) like high decouplers. So it seems more plausible to me that this isn’t narrowly true about high decouplers in “woke” spaces; it’s broadly true about high decouplers in communities who’s political/ethical beliefs the decoupler does not share.
I also think that, even for a high decoupler (which I consider myself to be, though as far as I know I’m not on the autism spectrum) the really big taboos—like race and intelligence—are usually obvious, as is the fact that you’re supposed to be careful when talking about them. The text of Bostrom’s email demonstrates he knows exactly what taboos he’s violating.
I also think we should be careful not to mistake correlation for causation, when looking at EA’s success and the traits of many of its members. For example, you say:
There are valuable EA founders/popularizers who seem pretty adept at navigating taboos. For example, every interview I’ve seen with Will MacCaskill involves him reframing counterintuitive ethics to fit with the average person’s moral intuitions. This seems to have been really effective at popularizing EA!
I agree that there are benefits from decoupling. But there are clear utilitarian downsides too. Contextualizing a statement is often necessary to anticipate its social welfare implications. Contextualizing therefore seems necessary to EA.
Finally, I want to offer a note of sympathy. While I don’t think I’m autistic, I do frequently find myself at odds with mainstream social norms. I prefer more direct styles of communication than most people. I’m a hardcore utilitarian. Many of the leftwing shibboleths common in among my graduate school classmates I find annoying, wrong, and even harmful. For all these reasons, I share your feeling that EA is “oasis.” In fact, it’s the only community I’m a part of that reaffirms my deepest beliefs about ethics in a clear way.
But ultimately, I think EA should not optimize to be that sort of reaffirming space for me. EA’s goal is wellbeing maximization, and anything other than wellbeing maximization will sometimes—even if only rarely—have to be compromised.
AnonymousQualy—You make some valid & thoughtful points. Let me ruminate further about them....
For the moment, I would just question the generality of your claim that ‘the really big taboos—like race and intelligence—are usually obvious’. That might be true within a given culture, generation, social class, and ideological context. However, it is often not true across cultures. (For example, when I taught courses for a mainland Chinese university the last couple of years, the students there really wanted to talk about the evolution of race differences and intelligence—much more than I was comfortable doing.)
If EA aspires to be a global movement, we need to consider the fact that some of our strongest current Anglo-American ideological taboos are not shared by other cultures. And if we impose our taboos on other cultures, we’re not really being culturally inclusive.
I addressed these issues in this other 2018 article on ‘The cultural diversity case for free speech’ (paywalled on Quillette here; free pdf here.)
Thanks a lot for raising this, Geoffrey. A while back I mentioned some personal feelings and possible risks related to the current Western political climate, from one non-Westerner’s perspective. You’ve articulated my intuitions very nicely here and in that article.
From a strategic perspective, it seems to me that if AGI takes longer to develop, the more likely it is that the expected decision-making power would be shared globally. EAs should consider that they might end up in that world and it might not be a good idea to create and enforce easily-violated, non-negotiable demands on issues that we’re not prioritizing (e.g. it would be quite bad if a Western EA ended up repeatedly reprimanding a potential Chinese collaborator simply because the latter speaks bluntly from the perspective of the former). To be clear, China has some of this as well (mostly relating to its geopolitical history) and I think feeling less strongly about those issues could be beneficial.
I agree! Greater leniency across cultural divides is good and necessary.
But I also think that:
(1) That doesn’t apply to the Bostrom letter
(2) There are certain areas where we might think our cultural norms are better than many alternatives; in these situations, it would make sense to tell the person from the alternate culture about our norm and try to persuade them to abide by it (including through social pressure). I’m pretty comfortable with the idea that there’s a tradeoff between cultural inclusion and maintaining good norms, and that the optimal balance between the two will be different for different norms.
Regarding your point (2), I can see both sides of this.
I agree that some cultural norms are generally better, by most metrics, in terms of human flourishing, social cohesion, progress, prosperity, freedom, resilience, longevity, etc. -- although there are almost always tradeoffs, exceptions, and complications that warrant considerable epistemic humility and ethical uncertainty.
My heuristic is that members of Anglo-American cultures should usually err on the side of listening more than preaching when interacting with people from other cultures who probably know much more about our culture (e.g. through US/UK movies, TV, social media, global news) than we know about theirs.
For what it’s worth, I am autistic-and a white man as it happens-and I do not find free, uncensored discussion of race/IQ stuff specifically makes me feel more welcome and comfortable. Rather, it makes me feel sick, and anxious and worried that I am associating with bad people if I participate in the discussion. (I actually agree with Geoffrey Miller that there is probably some connection between autism and what he’s calling “decoupling” though. And that this probably makes EA more welcoming for autistics. But ultimately, the point of EA is meant to be to do good, not to be a social club for autistic people.)
EDIT: I also strongly second AnonymousQualy’s point that Bostrom knew he was saying taboo stuff and so it cannot be dismissed as ‘autistic people don’t know when they are offending others’.
I think censorship would be a bad choice here, because the EA forum hasn’t discussed these concepts previously (in any routine way, I’m sure there is a screed or two that could be dug up from a mound of downvotes) and is unlikely to in the future.
I would agree that race/IQ debates on the EA forum are unlikely to produce anything of value. But it’s my experience that if you have free discussion rights and one banned topic, that causes more issues than just letting people say their piece and move on.
I’d also agree that EA isn’t meant to be a social club for autists—but from a cynical perspective, the blithely curious and alien-brained are also a strategic resource and snubbing them should be avoided when possible.
If people are still sharing takes on race/IQ two weeks from now, I think that would be a measurable enough detraction from the goal of the forum to support the admins telling them to take it elsewhere. But I would be surprised if it were an issue.
Uncontroversial take: EA wouldn’t exist without the blithely curious and alien-brained.
More controversially: I’ve been increasingly feeling like I’m on a forum where people think the autistic/decoupler/rationalist cluster did their part and now should just… go away. Like, ‘thanks for pointing us at the moral horrors and the world-ending catastrophe, I’ll bear them in mind, now please stop annoying me.’
But it is not obvious to me that the alien-brained have noticed everything useful that they are going to notice, and done all the work that they will do, such that it is safe to discard them.
Let me say this: autism runs in my family, including two of my first cousins. I think that neurodivergence is not only nothing to be ashamed of, and not an “illness” to be “cured”, but in fact a profound gift, and one which allows neurodivergent individuals to see what many of us do not. (Another example: Listen to Vikingur Olafsson play the piano! Nobody else hears Mozart like that.).
Neurodivergent individuals and high decouplers should not be chased out of effective altruism or any other movement. Doing this would not only be intrinsically wrong, but would also deprive the movement of profoundly important insights, and would deprive the neurodivergent of one of the few places where they can genuinely belong.
It is very important to recognize that neurodivergent individuals, among others, sometimes have a harder time recognizing violations of social norms, and to exercise some degree of patience and compassion in responding to norm violations.
It is also important for everyone, no matter their tendency towards decoupling, their neurodiversity, or their background, to understand that words can harm, and to be sensitive to the need to stop and reverse course when presented with credible evidence that words have harmed.
Everyone reading this message, and I mean everyone, is capable of hearing “no, stop. That is wrong” or “racist science has no place in this discussion” and stopping. It is time for the racism to stop, and the healing to begin.
The discussion that needs to be had right now is about healing, growth and change. The time for defense is over. The time for debate is over. It is time to learn to do better. I hope that the coming weeks can be used for growth and change.
And honestly, I think this is a great taboo for many reasons. I’d argue this is one of the more intelligent taboos here by the left.
Agreed.
I’m no cultural conservative, but norms are important social tools we shouldn’t expect to entirely discard. Anthropologist Joe Henrich’s writing really opened my eyes to how norms pass down complex knowledge that would be inefficient for an individual to try to learn on their own.
I don’t exactly agree with the case that cultural knowledge is really important like Henrich wants to say, though I do credit cultural knowledge for increasing returns to scale.