On the one hand, Duncan is thoroughly dead right in this subthread. There’s a bizarre conspiracism and entitlement around experiencing disagreement that I think is poisonous.
On the other hand, formal and informal power itself poisons proper disagreement. We kinda should expect discourse to be like this.
One time I misled a company about how cool I thought their projects were because I was poor and they had money. In my life, a breach of personal integrity like this is well quarantined from EA, I’d rather eat chicken 4x a week for a year and kick a puppy for good measure than manipulate EAs, and I don’t think formal or informal power asymmetries mean that manipulation would be “justified defense” or “punching up”. But when I try to reverse engineer this mindset I’m detecting from the “it was wrong of the employer not to hire someone they in fact disagree with about the fundamentals” crowd, I find myself wondering: are people poor? Is that why it gets adversarial? It’s ok if that’s what’s going on with some of them, I don’t think it justifies manipulative mindset or strategy against EAs and I think they should go manipulate and be strategic in a low stakes setting until their brain repairs itself from the damages of poverty, but it’s something I could understand.
There’s a related topic of making EA orgs robust to password guessing, but I’m not running an org so that’s none of my business. But if I have colleagues who are in the password guessing mindset, I absolutely want to know about it, and I want them to bust out of that mindset.
It’s hard.
On the one hand, Duncan is thoroughly dead right in this subthread. There’s a bizarre conspiracism and entitlement around experiencing disagreement that I think is poisonous.
On the other hand, formal and informal power itself poisons proper disagreement. We kinda should expect discourse to be like this.
One time I misled a company about how cool I thought their projects were because I was poor and they had money. In my life, a breach of personal integrity like this is well quarantined from EA, I’d rather eat chicken 4x a week for a year and kick a puppy for good measure than manipulate EAs, and I don’t think formal or informal power asymmetries mean that manipulation would be “justified defense” or “punching up”. But when I try to reverse engineer this mindset I’m detecting from the “it was wrong of the employer not to hire someone they in fact disagree with about the fundamentals” crowd, I find myself wondering: are people poor? Is that why it gets adversarial? It’s ok if that’s what’s going on with some of them, I don’t think it justifies manipulative mindset or strategy against EAs and I think they should go manipulate and be strategic in a low stakes setting until their brain repairs itself from the damages of poverty, but it’s something I could understand.
There’s a related topic of making EA orgs robust to password guessing, but I’m not running an org so that’s none of my business. But if I have colleagues who are in the password guessing mindset, I absolutely want to know about it, and I want them to bust out of that mindset.