Like many other problems that EAs are aware of, the particular incident you described comes from an outlier that drives the mean significantly forward (I of course know who you are talking about, and the fact that many who’ve been in EA for a long time know as well should indicate that this is both rare in terms of % of people yet perhaps not that rare in terms of % of drama it accounts for).
The key insight here is that the long-tail matters. As a rough prior we could anticipate that 80% of the drama will come from 20% of people (in my experience this is even more skewed, to perhaps 98% of drama coming from 2% of people). In which case, advocating for self-censorship in general in the community is stifling and unnecessary for the bulk of people (who already doubt themselves), and desperately necessary for the outliers who just march forward without much self-awareness in some or other controversial direction, as if mandated by a higher power to cause as much drama as possible.
If we recognize that the problem per person follows a long-tail distribution, our strategies should look very different than if it was a kind of normal/Gaussian distribution.
Like many other problems that EAs are aware of, the particular incident you described comes from an outlier that drives the mean significantly forward (I of course know who you are talking about, and the fact that many who’ve been in EA for a long time know as well should indicate that this is both rare in terms of % of people yet perhaps not that rare in terms of % of drama it accounts for).
The key insight here is that the long-tail matters. As a rough prior we could anticipate that 80% of the drama will come from 20% of people (in my experience this is even more skewed, to perhaps 98% of drama coming from 2% of people). In which case, advocating for self-censorship in general in the community is stifling and unnecessary for the bulk of people (who already doubt themselves), and desperately necessary for the outliers who just march forward without much self-awareness in some or other controversial direction, as if mandated by a higher power to cause as much drama as possible.
If we recognize that the problem per person follows a long-tail distribution, our strategies should look very different than if it was a kind of normal/Gaussian distribution.
That’s a good point. What kind of strategies do you think we should adopt?