Some words of caution here which I want to be brief with to (ideally) set someone up for taking down in a steel-man.
The tl;dr version is Twitter excels at meming misinformed, outraged takes on nuanced things.
First off, EA and in particular long-termism has some vocal detractors who do not seem to use the same norms as most people on the EAF.
Second, Twitter is a forum which people who dislike an event / idea can easily weaponise to discredit the thing and the poster, and do so through (sometimes deliberate) misinterpretation. So it’s plausible that long-termist posts on Twitter—if not steel-manned rigorously beforehand—would be vulnerable for this. For example, any post not triple-checked could be retweeted with a misinterpreting comment that argues how long-termism is a bad ideology, and provoke a negative meme-and-outrage-cascade / pile-on.
Third, even with excellent codes of conduct in place (and I agree with disseminating the EAF CoC more widely where possible), an actor who wants to misinterpret something can and will. There is a fairly substantial risk that, should this happen, it would skew the discourse on long-termism outside EA for quite some time, and it may prove very challenging to reset this.
The above are some hot-takes, which I genuinely thought about *not* posting because I haven’t had time to mull over them much but thought better to do it than not.
Also, I genuinely hope I’m wrong (especially because I hate being the Helen Lovejoy “won’t someone please think of the (future) children?!” voice!) - I think it would be helpful for someone to give some arguments against those or propose some potential mitigations, maybe those seen in other Twitter forums?
Some words of caution here which I want to be brief with to (ideally) set someone up for taking down in a steel-man.
The tl;dr version is Twitter excels at meming misinformed, outraged takes on nuanced things.
First off, EA and in particular long-termism has some vocal detractors who do not seem to use the same norms as most people on the EAF.
Second, Twitter is a forum which people who dislike an event / idea can easily weaponise to discredit the thing and the poster, and do so through (sometimes deliberate) misinterpretation. So it’s plausible that long-termist posts on Twitter—if not steel-manned rigorously beforehand—would be vulnerable for this. For example, any post not triple-checked could be retweeted with a misinterpreting comment that argues how long-termism is a bad ideology, and provoke a negative meme-and-outrage-cascade / pile-on.
Third, even with excellent codes of conduct in place (and I agree with disseminating the EAF CoC more widely where possible), an actor who wants to misinterpret something can and will. There is a fairly substantial risk that, should this happen, it would skew the discourse on long-termism outside EA for quite some time, and it may prove very challenging to reset this.
The above are some hot-takes, which I genuinely thought about *not* posting because I haven’t had time to mull over them much but thought better to do it than not.
Also, I genuinely hope I’m wrong (especially because I hate being the Helen Lovejoy “won’t someone please think of the (future) children?!” voice!) - I think it would be helpful for someone to give some arguments against those or propose some potential mitigations, maybe those seen in other Twitter forums?