Yeah. I was quite nervous about posting this as a written critique because I agree—it can be really easy to talk past each other in discussions about colonialism and institutional racism, and this is exacerbated on text convos because (in my experience) people often have different meanings, experiences or inferences for the same word.
When I usually discuss these topics, it’s a physical conversation where people are trying to really understand and connect to the others in the convo, and have time to check understanding and rephrase as the conversation continues.
What kind of caveats would you add, out of interest?
One framework I’ve come across for discussing racism is to keep it personal, local and immediate—i.e. talk about your own experiences, and avoid speaking for other people. However, this seems counter to the EA conversational norms (e.g. see my reply to Rubi’s comment on this post) where we like to use concrete examples and hypotheticals.
I guess, if I was forced not to use hypotheticals or advocate for others’ experiences in EA, I would be really incentivised to seek others’ voices, and maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing, in terms of genuinely bringing others to the table.
Is there a high-quality facilitator available who will be respected by both people in favour of these frameworks and who are skeptical of them?
Are the actual conversation participants likely to be able to have a productive conversation or are people likely to just talk past each other even with a quality facilitator?
One caveat is that it would need to be heavily moderated in order to be useful, and the moderators will need to be willing to swiftly ban people who derail from the topic or are using it to politicize the event. Normally, EA’s freewheeling norms are enough, but that’s only because very little politics enters the EA forum, and EA itself is mostly apolitical, so the most severe forms of motivated reasoning are less problematic. Given that it’s a political topic, there needs to be much stronger moderation if it’s to be useful.
Another caveat is to display trigger warnings. Normally, I don’t think trigger warnings are necessary, but in this context, where real politics are being discussed, and usually the worst forms of political topics to discuss, it’s almost a necessity to make sure everyone is aware of that problem.
This conversation can be useful, which is why I support it, but there are severe problems that need to be addressed in order to make it a reality.
Yeah. I was quite nervous about posting this as a written critique because I agree—it can be really easy to talk past each other in discussions about colonialism and institutional racism, and this is exacerbated on text convos because (in my experience) people often have different meanings, experiences or inferences for the same word.
When I usually discuss these topics, it’s a physical conversation where people are trying to really understand and connect to the others in the convo, and have time to check understanding and rephrase as the conversation continues.
What kind of caveats would you add, out of interest?
One framework I’ve come across for discussing racism is to keep it personal, local and immediate—i.e. talk about your own experiences, and avoid speaking for other people. However, this seems counter to the EA conversational norms (e.g. see my reply to Rubi’s comment on this post) where we like to use concrete examples and hypotheticals.
I guess, if I was forced not to use hypotheticals or advocate for others’ experiences in EA, I would be really incentivised to seek others’ voices, and maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing, in terms of genuinely bringing others to the table.
I guess the two main aspects are:
Is there a high-quality facilitator available who will be respected by both people in favour of these frameworks and who are skeptical of them?
Are the actual conversation participants likely to be able to have a productive conversation or are people likely to just talk past each other even with a quality facilitator?
One caveat is that it would need to be heavily moderated in order to be useful, and the moderators will need to be willing to swiftly ban people who derail from the topic or are using it to politicize the event. Normally, EA’s freewheeling norms are enough, but that’s only because very little politics enters the EA forum, and EA itself is mostly apolitical, so the most severe forms of motivated reasoning are less problematic. Given that it’s a political topic, there needs to be much stronger moderation if it’s to be useful.
Another caveat is to display trigger warnings. Normally, I don’t think trigger warnings are necessary, but in this context, where real politics are being discussed, and usually the worst forms of political topics to discuss, it’s almost a necessity to make sure everyone is aware of that problem.
This conversation can be useful, which is why I support it, but there are severe problems that need to be addressed in order to make it a reality.