Sorry Oli, but what is up with this (and your following) comment?
From what Iâve read from you[1] seem to value what you call âintegrityâ almost as a deontological good above all others. And this has gained you many admirers. But to my mind high integrity actors donât make the claims youâve made in both of these comments without bringing examples or evidence. Maybe youâre reacting to Seanâs use of âgarden variety incompetenceâ which you think is unfair to Bostromâs attempts to tow the fine line between independence and managing university politics but still, I feel you could have done better here.
To make my case:
When you talk about âother organizations⊠become a hollow shell of political correctness and vapid ideasâ you have to be referring to CSER & Leverhulme here right, like itâs the only context that makes sense.
If not, I feel like thatâs very misleadingly phrased.
But if it is, then calling those organisations âhollow shellsâ of âvapid ideasâ is like really rude, and if youâre going to go there at least have the proof to back it up?
Now that just might be you having very different politics from CSER & Leverhulme people. But then you say âhe [Bostrom] didnât compromise on the integrity of the institution he was buildingâ, which again I read as you directly contrasting against CSER & Leverhulmeâor even Sean in person.
Is this true? Surely organisation can have different politics or even have worse ideas without compromising on integrity?
If they did compromise on integrity, feels like you should share what those are.
If it is directed at Sean personally, that feels very nasty. Making assertions about someoneâs integrity without solid proof isnât just speculation, itâs harmful to the person and also poor âepistemic hygieneâ for the community at large.
You say âthe track record here speaks quite badly to Seanâs allocation of responsibility by my lightsâ. But I donât know what âtrack recordâ your speaking about here. Is it at FHI? CSER & Leverhulme? Sean himself?
Finally, this trio of claims in your second comment really rubbed me[2] the wrong way. You say that you think:
âCSER and Leverhulme, which I think are institutions that have overall caused more harm than good and I wish didnât existâ
This is a huge claim imo. More harm than good? So much so that you wish it didnât exist? With literally no evidence apart from it being your opinion???
âSean thought were obvious choices were things that would have ultimately had long-term bad consequencesâ
I assume that this is about relationship management with the university perhaps? But I donât know what to make of it because you donât say what these âobvioous choices areâ, or why you think theyâre so likely to have bad consequences
âI also wouldnât be surprised if Seanâs takes were ultimately responsible for a good chunk of associated pressure and attacks on peopleâs intellectual integrityâ
This might be the worst one. Why are Seanâs takes responsible? What were the attacks on peopleâs integrity? Was this something Sean did on purpose?
I donât know what history youâre referring to here, and the language used is accusatory and hostile. It feels really bad form to write it without clarifying what youâre referring to for people (like me) who donât know what context youâre talking about.
Maybe from your perspective you feel like youâre just floating questions here and sharing your personal perspective, but given the content of what youâve said I think it would have been better if you had either brought more examples or been less hostile.
I donât understand. I do not consider myself to be under the obligation that all negative takes I share about an organization must be accompanied by a full case for why I think those are justified.
Similar to how it would IMO be crazy to request people to justify that all positive comments about an organization must be accompanied by full justifications for ones judgement.
I have written about my feelings about CSER and Leverhulme some in the past (one of my old LTFF writeups for example includes a bunch of more detailed models I have of CSER). I have definitely not written up most of my thoughts, as they would span many dozens of pages.
But to my mind high integrity actors donât make the claims youâve made in both of these comments without bringing examples or evidence.
I think holding criticism to a higher standard than praise is one of the most common low level violations of integrity that people engage in on an ongoing basis. I absolutely do not consider it part my of concept of integrity to only make negative claim about people without also making a comprehensive argument and providing extensive evidence of its veracity.
Indeed the honor culture from which my guess that instinct comes from is one of the things I am culturally most opposed to, so in as much as you have a concept of integrity here, it doesnât seem that have that much overlap with mine (which is fine, words are hard, we can disambiguate in the future).
...I do not consider myself to be under the obligation that all negative takes I share about an organization...
Fwiw I think part of the issue that I had[1] with your comment is that the comment came across much more aggressively and personally, rather than as a critique of an organization. I do think the bar for critiquing individuals ought to be moderately higher than the bar for critiquing organizations. Particularly when the critique comes from a different place/âcapacity[2] than strictly necessary for the conversation[3].
I expect some other people like JWS had a similar reaction to me, and stronger in magnitude. I did think your comment was on net useful for the conversation (not including the more global effects/âexternalities).
Before your comment blew up, I upvoted/âagreevoted it because I do think thereâs a true and important point to be made about FHI being much more successful at doing future-of-humanityish research than âpeerâ organizations that are more successful at looking like a normal/ârespectable organization. But I did wince (and didnât strong upvote). I also lacked the information necessary to judge whether your perceived causal models were correct.
Put another way, I read your comment as quite far on the âcontextualizingâ end of contextualizaing vs decoupling norms, and I expected more decoupling in online spaces we both frequent.
Eg, if this was a fundraising post for CSER, or a post similar to the Conjecture critique, public criticisms of Sean in his capacity as director might be necessary. Similarly, if Sean made logical errors locally in his comment, or displayed poor reading comprehension, or was overly aggressive, criticisms of him in his capacity as an internet commentator may be necessary.
Hmm, I agree that there was some aggression here, but I felt like Sean was the person who first brought up direct criticism of a specific person, and very harsh one at that (harsher than mine I think).
Like, Seanâs comment basically said âI think it was directly Bostromâs fault that FHI died a slow painful death, and this could have been avoided with the injection of just a bit of competence in the relevant domainâ. My comment is more specific, but I donât really see it as harsher. I also have a prior to not go into critiques of individual people, but thatâs what Sean did in this context (of course Bostromâs judgement is relevant, but I think in that case so is Seanâs).
Sure, social aggression is a rather subjective call. I do think decoupling/âlocality norms are relevant here. âGarden variety incompetenceâ may not have been the best choice of words on Seanâs part,[1] but it did seem like a) a locally scoped comment specifically answering a question that people on the forum understandably had, b) much of it empirically checkable (other people formerly at FHI, particularly ops staff, could present their perspectives re: relationship management), and c) Bostomâs capacity as director is very much relevant to the discussion of the organizationâs operations or why the organization shut down.
Your comment first presents what I consider to be a core observation that is true and important, namely, FHI did a lot of good work, and this type of magic might not be easy to replicate if you do everything with apparent garden-variety competence. But afterwards, it also brought in a bunch of what I consider to be extraneous details on Seanâs competency, judgment, and integrity. The points you raise are also more murkily defined and harder to check. So overall I think of your comment as more escalatory.
It wasnât carefully chosen. It was the term used by the commenter I was replying to. I was a little frustrated, because it was another example of a truth-seeking enquiry by Milena getting pushed down the track of only-considering-answers-in-which-all-the-agency/âwrongness-is-on-the-university side (including some pretty unpleasant options relating to people Iâd worked with (âparasitic egregore/âsiphon moneyâ).
>Did Oxford think it was a reputation risk? Were the other philosophers jealous of the attention and funding FHI got? Was a beaurocratic parasitic egregore putting up roadblocks to siphon off money to itself? Garden variety incompetence?
So I just did copy and paste on the most relevant phrase, but flipped it. Bit blunter and more smart-arse than I would normally be (as youâve presumably seen from my writing, I normally caveat to a probably-tedious degree), but I was finding it hard to challenge the simplistic fhi-good-uni-bad narrative. It was one line, I didnât think much about it.
I remain of the view that the claim is true/âa reasonable interpretation, but de novo /â in a different context I would have phrased differently.
One other observation that might explain some of the different perceptions on âblameâ here.
I donât think Oxfordâs bureaucracy/âadministration is good, and I think it did behave very badly at points*. But overall, I donât think Oxfordâs bureaucracy/âbehaviour was a long way outside what you would expect for the reference class of thousand-year-old-institutions with >10,000 employees. And Nick knew that was what it was, chose to be situated there, and did benefit (particularly in the early days) from the reputation boost. I think there is some reasonable expectation that having made that choice, he would put some effort into either figuring out how to operate effectively within its constraints, or take it somewhere else.
(*it did at point have the feeling of grinding inevitability of a failing marriage, where beyond a certain point everything one side did was perceived in the worst light and with maximal irritation by the other side, going in both directions, which contributed to bad behaviour I think).
For what itâs worth, Iâm (at least partly) sympathetic to Oliâs position here. If nothing else, from my end Iâm not confident that the combined time usage of:
[Oli producing book-length critique of CSER/âLeverhulme, or me personally, depending] + [me producing presumably book-length response] + [further back and forth] + [a whole lot of forum readers trying to unpick the disagreements]
is overall worth it, particularly given (a) it seems likely to me there are some worldview/âcultural differences that would take time to unpick and (b) I will be limited in what I can say on certain matters by professional constraints/ânorms.
And as to the claim âI also wouldnât be surprised if Seanâs takes were ultimately responsible for a good chunk of associated pressure and attacks on peopleâs intellectual integrityâ it seems like some of this is based on my online comments/âwriting. I donât believe Iâve ever deleted anything on the EA forum, LW, or very much on twitter/âlinkedin (the online mediums I use), my papers are all online, and so again a decent place to start is to search for my username and come to their own conclusions.
I think this might be one of the LTFF writeups Oli mentions (apologies if wrong), and seems like a good place to start
Yep, thatâs the one I was thinking about. Iâve changed my mind on some of the things in that section in the (many) years since I wrote it, but it still seems like a decent starting point.
In my experience people update less from positive comments and more from negative comments intuitively to correct for this asymmetry (that itâs more socially acceptable to give unsupported praise than unsupported criticism). Your preferred approach to correcting the asymmetry, while I agree is in the abstract better, doesnât work in the context of these existing corrections.
Yeah, I agree this is a real dynamic. It doesnât sound unreasonable for me to have a standard link that l link to if I criticize people on here that makes it salient that I am aspiring to be less asymmetric in the information I share (I do think the norms are already pretty different over on LW, where if anything I think criticism is a bit less scrutinized than praise, so its not like this is a totally alien set of norms).
Perhaps this old comment from Rohin Shah could serve as the standard link?
(Note that itâs on the particular case of recommending people do/âdonât work at a given org, rather than the general case of praise/âcriticism, but I donât think this changes the structure of the argument other than maybe making point 1 less salient.)
Excerpting the relevant part:
On recommendations: Fwiw I also make unconditional recommendations in private. I donât think this is unusual, e.g. I think many people make unconditional recommendations not to go into academia (though I donât).
I donât really buy that the burden of proof should be much higher in public. Reversing the position, do you think the burden of proof should be very high for anyone to publicly recommend working at lab X? If not, whatâs the difference between a recommendation to work at org X vs an anti-recommendation (i.e. recommendation not to work at org X)? I think the three main considerations Iâd point to are:
(Pro-recommendations) Itâs rare for people to do things (relative to not doing things), so we differentially want recommendations vs anti-recommendations, so that it is easier for orgs to start up and do things.
(Anti-recommendations) There are strong incentives to recommend working at org X (obviously org X itself will do this), but no incentives to make the opposite recommendation (and in fact usually anti-incentives). Similarly I expect that inaccuracies in the case for the not-working recommendation will be pointed out (by org X), whereas inaccuracies in the case for working will not be pointed out. So we differentially want to encourage the opposite recommendations in order to get both sides of the story by lowering our âburden of proofâ.
(Pro-recommendations) Recommendations have a nice effect of getting people excited and positive about the work done by the community, which can make people more motivated, whereas the same is not true of anti-recommendations.
Overall I think point 2 feels most important, and so I end up thinking that the burden of proof on critiques /â anti-recommendations should be lower than the burden of proof on recommendationsâand the burden of proof on recommendations is approximately zero. (E.g. if someone wrote a public post recommending Conjecture without any concrete details of whyâjust something along the lines of âitâs a great place doing great workââI donât think anyone would say that they were using their power irresponsibly.)
I would actually prefer a higher burden of proof on recommendations, but given the status quo if Iâm only allowed to affect the burden of proof on anti-recommendations Iâd probably want it to go down to ~zero. Certainly Iâd want it to be well below the level that this post meets.
Yeah, thatâs a decent link. I do think this comment is more about whether anti-recommendations for organizations should be held to a similar standard. My comment also included some criticisms of Sean personally, which I think do also make sense to treat separately, though at least I definitely intend to also try to debias my statements about individuals after my experiences with SBF in-particular on this dimension.
I donât understand your lack of understanding. My point is that youâre acting like a right arse.
When people make claims, we expect there to be some justification proportional to the claims made. You made hostile claims that werenât following on from prior discussion,[1] and in my view nasty and personal insinuations as well, and didnât have anything to back it up.
I donât understand how you wouldnât think that Sean would be hurt by it.[2] So to me, you behaved like arse, knowing that youâd hurt someone, didnât justify it, got called out, and are now complaining.
So I donât really have much interest in continuing this discussion for now, or much opinion at the moment of your behaviour or your âintegrityâ
You made hostile claims that werenât following on from prior discussion,[1] and in my view nasty and personal insinuations as well, and didnât have anything to back it up.
This seems relatively straightforwardly false. In as much as Sean is making claims about the right strategy to follow for FHI, and claiming that the errors at FHI were straightforwardly Bostromâs fault and attributable to âgarden variety incompetenceâ, the degree of historical success of the strategies that Sean seems to be advocating for is of course relevant in assessing whether thatâs accurate. And CSER and Leverhulme seem like the obvious case studies that are available here.
We can quibble over the exact degree of relevance of the points I brought up, but the logical connection here seems straightforward.
didnât have anything to back it up.
Separately, I see no way how you could know whether I have anything to back up my criticism. I have written about my thoughts on CSER in the past, and I did not intend to write up all the thoughts and evidence I have in this thread.
If you want we can have a call for an hour, or you can investigate this question yourself and come to your own conclusion, and then you can make a judgement of whether I have anything to back up my opinion, but as I have said upthread, I donât consider myself to have an obligation to extensively document the evidence for all of my opinions and judgements before I feel comfortable expressing them.
When people make claims, we expect there to be some justification proportional to the claims made.
To be clear, I also absolutely do not hold myself to this standard. I feel totally fine, and encourage others to do as well, to casually mention controversial and important beliefs of theirs whenever it seems relevant, without an obligation to fully back up that claim. Indeed, I am pretty confused what norm you are referring to here, since I also canât think of this norm in almost any context I am in.
If someone mentions they believe in god, I donât expect that this means they are ready or want to have a conversation about theology with me right then and there. When someone says they vote libertarian in the US general election I totally donât expect to have a conversation with them about macroeconomic principles right there. People express large broad claims all the time without wanting to go into all the details.
In the examples you give, the arguments for and against are fairly cached so thereâs less of a need to bring them up. That doesnât apply here. I also think your argument is often false even in your examplesâin my experience, the bigger the gap between the belief the person is expressing and that of the ~average of everyone else in the audience, the more likely there is to be pushback (though not always by putting someone on the spot to justify their beliefs, e.g. awkwardly changing the conversation or straight out ridiculing the person for the belief)
Pushback (in the form of arguments) is totally reasonable! It seems very normal that if someone is arguing for some collective path of action, using non-shared assumptions, that there is pushback.
The thing that feels weirder is to invoke social censure, or to insist on pushback when someone is talking about their own beliefs and not clearly advocating for some collective path of action. I really donât think itâs common for people to push back when someone is expressing some personal belief of theirs that is only affecting their own actions.
In this case, I think itâs somewhat ambiguous whether there I am was arguing for a collective path of action, or just explaining my private beliefs. By making a public comment I at least asserted some claim towards relevance towards others, but I also didnât explicitly say that I was trying to get anyone else to really change behavior.
And in either case, invoking social censure on the basis of someone expressing a belief of theirs without also giving a comprehensive argument for that belief seems rare (not unheard of, since there are many places in the world where uniform ideologies are enforced, though I donât think EA has historically been such a place, nor wants to be such a place).
Sorry Oli, but what is up with this (and your following) comment?
From what Iâve read from you[1] seem to value what you call âintegrityâ almost as a deontological good above all others. And this has gained you many admirers. But to my mind high integrity actors donât make the claims youâve made in both of these comments without bringing examples or evidence. Maybe youâre reacting to Seanâs use of âgarden variety incompetenceâ which you think is unfair to Bostromâs attempts to tow the fine line between independence and managing university politics but still, I feel you could have done better here.
To make my case:
When you talk about âother organizations⊠become a hollow shell of political correctness and vapid ideasâ you have to be referring to CSER & Leverhulme here right, like itâs the only context that makes sense.
If not, I feel like thatâs very misleadingly phrased.
But if it is, then calling those organisations âhollow shellsâ of âvapid ideasâ is like really rude, and if youâre going to go there at least have the proof to back it up?
Now that just might be you having very different politics from CSER & Leverhulme people. But then you say âhe [Bostrom] didnât compromise on the integrity of the institution he was buildingâ, which again I read as you directly contrasting against CSER & Leverhulmeâor even Sean in person.
Is this true? Surely organisation can have different politics or even have worse ideas without compromising on integrity?
If they did compromise on integrity, feels like you should share what those are.
If it is directed at Sean personally, that feels very nasty. Making assertions about someoneâs integrity without solid proof isnât just speculation, itâs harmful to the person and also poor âepistemic hygieneâ for the community at large.
You say âthe track record here speaks quite badly to Seanâs allocation of responsibility by my lightsâ. But I donât know what âtrack recordâ your speaking about here. Is it at FHI? CSER & Leverhulme? Sean himself?
Finally, this trio of claims in your second comment really rubbed me[2] the wrong way. You say that you think:
âCSER and Leverhulme, which I think are institutions that have overall caused more harm than good and I wish didnât existâ
This is a huge claim imo. More harm than good? So much so that you wish it didnât exist? With literally no evidence apart from it being your opinion???
âSean thought were obvious choices were things that would have ultimately had long-term bad consequencesâ
I assume that this is about relationship management with the university perhaps? But I donât know what to make of it because you donât say what these âobvioous choices areâ, or why you think theyâre so likely to have bad consequences
âI also wouldnât be surprised if Seanâs takes were ultimately responsible for a good chunk of associated pressure and attacks on peopleâs intellectual integrityâ
This might be the worst one. Why are Seanâs takes responsible? What were the attacks on peopleâs integrity? Was this something Sean did on purpose?
I donât know what history youâre referring to here, and the language used is accusatory and hostile. It feels really bad form to write it without clarifying what youâre referring to for people (like me) who donât know what context youâre talking about.
Maybe from your perspective you feel like youâre just floating questions here and sharing your personal perspective, but given the content of what youâve said I think it would have been better if you had either brought more examples or been less hostile.
And I feel like Iâve read quite a bit, both here, on LW, and on your Twitter
And given the votes, a lot of readers including some who may have agreed with your first comment
I donât understand. I do not consider myself to be under the obligation that all negative takes I share about an organization must be accompanied by a full case for why I think those are justified.
Similar to how it would IMO be crazy to request people to justify that all positive comments about an organization must be accompanied by full justifications for ones judgement.
I have written about my feelings about CSER and Leverhulme some in the past (one of my old LTFF writeups for example includes a bunch of more detailed models I have of CSER). I have definitely not written up most of my thoughts, as they would span many dozens of pages.
I think holding criticism to a higher standard than praise is one of the most common low level violations of integrity that people engage in on an ongoing basis. I absolutely do not consider it part my of concept of integrity to only make negative claim about people without also making a comprehensive argument and providing extensive evidence of its veracity.
Indeed the honor culture from which my guess that instinct comes from is one of the things I am culturally most opposed to, so in as much as you have a concept of integrity here, it doesnât seem that have that much overlap with mine (which is fine, words are hard, we can disambiguate in the future).
Fwiw I think part of the issue that I had[1] with your comment is that the comment came across much more aggressively and personally, rather than as a critique of an organization. I do think the bar for critiquing individuals ought to be moderately higher than the bar for critiquing organizations. Particularly when the critique comes from a different place/âcapacity[2] than strictly necessary for the conversation[3].
I expect some other people like JWS had a similar reaction to me, and stronger in magnitude. I did think your comment was on net useful for the conversation (not including the more global effects/âexternalities).
Before your comment blew up, I upvoted/âagreevoted it because I do think thereâs a true and important point to be made about FHI being much more successful at doing future-of-humanityish research than âpeerâ organizations that are more successful at looking like a normal/ârespectable organization. But I did wince (and didnât strong upvote). I also lacked the information necessary to judge whether your perceived causal models were correct.
Put another way, I read your comment as quite far on the âcontextualizingâ end of contextualizaing vs decoupling norms, and I expected more decoupling in online spaces we both frequent.
Eg, if this was a fundraising post for CSER, or a post similar to the Conjecture critique, public criticisms of Sean in his capacity as director might be necessary. Similarly, if Sean made logical errors locally in his comment, or displayed poor reading comprehension, or was overly aggressive, criticisms of him in his capacity as an internet commentator may be necessary.
Hmm, I agree that there was some aggression here, but I felt like Sean was the person who first brought up direct criticism of a specific person, and very harsh one at that (harsher than mine I think).
Like, Seanâs comment basically said âI think it was directly Bostromâs fault that FHI died a slow painful death, and this could have been avoided with the injection of just a bit of competence in the relevant domainâ. My comment is more specific, but I donât really see it as harsher. I also have a prior to not go into critiques of individual people, but thatâs what Sean did in this context (of course Bostromâs judgement is relevant, but I think in that case so is Seanâs).
Sure, social aggression is a rather subjective call. I do think decoupling/âlocality norms are relevant here. âGarden variety incompetenceâ may not have been the best choice of words on Seanâs part,[1] but it did seem like a) a locally scoped comment specifically answering a question that people on the forum understandably had, b) much of it empirically checkable (other people formerly at FHI, particularly ops staff, could present their perspectives re: relationship management), and c) Bostomâs capacity as director is very much relevant to the discussion of the organizationâs operations or why the organization shut down.
Your comment first presents what I consider to be a core observation that is true and important, namely, FHI did a lot of good work, and this type of magic might not be easy to replicate if you do everything with apparent garden-variety competence. But afterwards, it also brought in a bunch of what I consider to be extraneous details on Seanâs competency, judgment, and integrity. The points you raise are also more murkily defined and harder to check. So overall I think of your comment as more escalatory.
or maybe it was under the circumstances. I donât know the details here, maybe the phrase was carefully chosen.
It wasnât carefully chosen. It was the term used by the commenter I was replying to. I was a little frustrated, because it was another example of a truth-seeking enquiry by Milena getting pushed down the track of only-considering-answers-in-which-all-the-agency/âwrongness-is-on-the-university side (including some pretty unpleasant options relating to people Iâd worked with (âparasitic egregore/âsiphon moneyâ).
>Did Oxford think it was a reputation risk? Were the other philosophers jealous of the attention and funding FHI got? Was a beaurocratic parasitic egregore putting up roadblocks to siphon off money to itself? Garden variety incompetence?
So I just did copy and paste on the most relevant phrase, but flipped it. Bit blunter and more smart-arse than I would normally be (as youâve presumably seen from my writing, I normally caveat to a probably-tedious degree), but I was finding it hard to challenge the simplistic fhi-good-uni-bad narrative. It was one line, I didnât think much about it.
I remain of the view that the claim is true/âa reasonable interpretation, but de novo /â in a different context I would have phrased differently.
One other observation that might explain some of the different perceptions on âblameâ here.
I donât think Oxfordâs bureaucracy/âadministration is good, and I think it did behave very badly at points*. But overall, I donât think Oxfordâs bureaucracy/âbehaviour was a long way outside what you would expect for the reference class of thousand-year-old-institutions with >10,000 employees. And Nick knew that was what it was, chose to be situated there, and did benefit (particularly in the early days) from the reputation boost. I think there is some reasonable expectation that having made that choice, he would put some effort into either figuring out how to operate effectively within its constraints, or take it somewhere else.
(*it did at point have the feeling of grinding inevitability of a failing marriage, where beyond a certain point everything one side did was perceived in the worst light and with maximal irritation by the other side, going in both directions, which contributed to bad behaviour I think).
For what itâs worth, Iâm (at least partly) sympathetic to Oliâs position here. If nothing else, from my end Iâm not confident that the combined time usage of:
[Oli producing book-length critique of CSER/âLeverhulme, or me personally, depending] +
[me producing presumably book-length response] +
[further back and forth] +
[a whole lot of forum readers trying to unpick the disagreements]
is overall worth it, particularly given (a) it seems likely to me there are some worldview/âcultural differences that would take time to unpick and (b) I will be limited in what I can say on certain matters by professional constraints/ânorms.
I think this might be one of the LTFF writeups Oli mentions (apologies if wrong), and seems like a good place to start:
https://ââforum.effectivealtruism.org/ââposts/ââan9GrNXrdMwBJpHeC/ââlong-term-future-fund-august-2019-grant-recommendations-1#Addendum__Thoughts_on_a_Strategy_Article_by_the_Leadership_of_Leverhulme_CFI_and_CSER
And as to the claim âI also wouldnât be surprised if Seanâs takes were ultimately responsible for a good chunk of associated pressure and attacks on peopleâs intellectual integrityâ it seems like some of this is based on my online comments/âwriting. I donât believe Iâve ever deleted anything on the EA forum, LW, or very much on twitter/âlinkedin (the online mediums I use), my papers are all online, and so again a decent place to start is to search for my username and come to their own conclusions.
Yep, thatâs the one I was thinking about. Iâve changed my mind on some of the things in that section in the (many) years since I wrote it, but it still seems like a decent starting point.
In my experience people update less from positive comments and more from negative comments intuitively to correct for this asymmetry (that itâs more socially acceptable to give unsupported praise than unsupported criticism). Your preferred approach to correcting the asymmetry, while I agree is in the abstract better, doesnât work in the context of these existing corrections.
Yeah, I agree this is a real dynamic. It doesnât sound unreasonable for me to have a standard link that l link to if I criticize people on here that makes it salient that I am aspiring to be less asymmetric in the information I share (I do think the norms are already pretty different over on LW, where if anything I think criticism is a bit less scrutinized than praise, so its not like this is a totally alien set of norms).
Perhaps this old comment from Rohin Shah could serve as the standard link?
(Note that itâs on the particular case of recommending people do/âdonât work at a given org, rather than the general case of praise/âcriticism, but I donât think this changes the structure of the argument other than maybe making point 1 less salient.)
Excerpting the relevant part:
Yeah, thatâs a decent link. I do think this comment is more about whether anti-recommendations for organizations should be held to a similar standard. My comment also included some criticisms of Sean personally, which I think do also make sense to treat separately, though at least I definitely intend to also try to debias my statements about individuals after my experiences with SBF in-particular on this dimension.
I donât understand your lack of understanding. My point is that youâre acting like a right arse.
When people make claims, we expect there to be some justification proportional to the claims made. You made hostile claims that werenât following on from prior discussion,[1] and in my view nasty and personal insinuations as well, and didnât have anything to back it up.
I donât understand how you wouldnât think that Sean would be hurt by it.[2] So to me, you behaved like arse, knowing that youâd hurt someone, didnât justify it, got called out, and are now complaining.
So I donât really have much interest in continuing this discussion for now, or much opinion at the moment of your behaviour or your âintegrityâ
Like nobody was discussing CSER/âCFI or Sean directly until you came in with it
Even if you did think it was justified
This seems relatively straightforwardly false. In as much as Sean is making claims about the right strategy to follow for FHI, and claiming that the errors at FHI were straightforwardly Bostromâs fault and attributable to âgarden variety incompetenceâ, the degree of historical success of the strategies that Sean seems to be advocating for is of course relevant in assessing whether thatâs accurate. And CSER and Leverhulme seem like the obvious case studies that are available here.
We can quibble over the exact degree of relevance of the points I brought up, but the logical connection here seems straightforward.
Separately, I see no way how you could know whether I have anything to back up my criticism. I have written about my thoughts on CSER in the past, and I did not intend to write up all the thoughts and evidence I have in this thread.
If you want we can have a call for an hour, or you can investigate this question yourself and come to your own conclusion, and then you can make a judgement of whether I have anything to back up my opinion, but as I have said upthread, I donât consider myself to have an obligation to extensively document the evidence for all of my opinions and judgements before I feel comfortable expressing them.
To be clear, I also absolutely do not hold myself to this standard. I feel totally fine, and encourage others to do as well, to casually mention controversial and important beliefs of theirs whenever it seems relevant, without an obligation to fully back up that claim. Indeed, I am pretty confused what norm you are referring to here, since I also canât think of this norm in almost any context I am in.
If someone mentions they believe in god, I donât expect that this means they are ready or want to have a conversation about theology with me right then and there. When someone says they vote libertarian in the US general election I totally donât expect to have a conversation with them about macroeconomic principles right there. People express large broad claims all the time without wanting to go into all the details.
In the examples you give, the arguments for and against are fairly cached so thereâs less of a need to bring them up. That doesnât apply here. I also think your argument is often false even in your examplesâin my experience, the bigger the gap between the belief the person is expressing and that of the ~average of everyone else in the audience, the more likely there is to be pushback (though not always by putting someone on the spot to justify their beliefs, e.g. awkwardly changing the conversation or straight out ridiculing the person for the belief)
Pushback (in the form of arguments) is totally reasonable! It seems very normal that if someone is arguing for some collective path of action, using non-shared assumptions, that there is pushback.
The thing that feels weirder is to invoke social censure, or to insist on pushback when someone is talking about their own beliefs and not clearly advocating for some collective path of action. I really donât think itâs common for people to push back when someone is expressing some personal belief of theirs that is only affecting their own actions.
In this case, I think itâs somewhat ambiguous whether there I am was arguing for a collective path of action, or just explaining my private beliefs. By making a public comment I at least asserted some claim towards relevance towards others, but I also didnât explicitly say that I was trying to get anyone else to really change behavior.
And in either case, invoking social censure on the basis of someone expressing a belief of theirs without also giving a comprehensive argument for that belief seems rare (not unheard of, since there are many places in the world where uniform ideologies are enforced, though I donât think EA has historically been such a place, nor wants to be such a place).