I know this is a fraught topic that is hard to discuss but IMO your thinking about diversity here really lacks nuance, basically misses the main problem, and leaves me feeling troubled. Moreover I don’t feel like I really understand your motivations for writing this essay. (Though I hesitate to actually say that “I’m confused” here, since that may make you question me.)
To get at the core issue:
Top of this list is that most of our best applicants are male and white.
I think this is the core problem with regard to diversity that we should work to address. Why are your best applicants male and white? Surely this isn’t a fact about x-risk as a field—that there’s something about being male and white that makes you better at addressing x-risk. And surely there’s way more that can be done to fix this other than “distort the bar” to let the presumably less good people in?
I think the whiteness and male-ness of x-risk/longtermism is a major liability for the movement for a variety of reasons. I don’t see this as an applause light—I see this as a core problem to address to (yes instrumentally) further our goal of reducing x-risk.
Also...
So, if we want to include more females and more non-white folks, then, given our fixed quota of places, this will mean distorting the bar to being accepted.
Note that, at least in the United States, doing this is usually illegal.
surely there’s way more that can be done to fix this other than “distort the bar” to let the presumably less good people in?
Reading this comment makes me realize that perhaps a significant fraction of the awkwardness and not-facing-the-issue that Alice was met with was due to people in the room realizing, upon hearing Alice’s thoughts, that it was too late to promote diversity, and that this made them feel icky. And that all that could be done was to do better next time around.
(It probably wasn’t clear in the post, but the context was that all the applications were in, and they’d all been evaluated and ranked already. At that point, it does seem that there’s not much—if anything—that can be done other than distorting the bar?)
For what it’s worth, I believe Alice and co. are working on things for their next internship round like targeted outreach to underrepresented groups at the bottom-of-the-pipeline level (to help more of these people get into x-risk reduction and/or EA, e.g., by participating in seminar programmes), and trying to especially encourage these folks to apply to internships/fellowships (to help more of these people move up the EA-aligned research pipeline).
I think this is the core problem with regard to diversity that we should work to address. Why are your best applicants male and white? Surely this isn’t a fact about x-risk as a field—that there’s something about being male and white that makes you better at addressing x-risk.
I agree that this is a problem to be worked on. I also notice that this discussion might be prone to talking-past-one-another on account of setting different targets. (For instance, I’m not sure whether I fully agree with you or only partially agree with you.)
As a toy example to illustrate my different targets point, let’s consider just technical AI safety. Now, I don’t know the exact numbers, but within this toy example let’s say that, of the undergraduate population as a whole that studies relevant subjects (like computer science): 80% are male; 65% are white. To me, this would imply that trying to go much above 20% female and 35% non-white working in technical AI safety is going to be difficult, and that there’ll be increasingly diminishing returns, just by the nature of the statistics at play here, to the resources (e.g., effort, time) put towards trying to achieve >20% and >35%. Like, getting to 50% and 50% would be extremely costly, I think, and so 50% would not be an appropriate target.
Therefore, I’m saying—as an independent impression—that it is a fact about technical AI safety as a field that we should expect most of the best researchers to be male and white (around 80% and 65%, respectively, within my example). There’s the separate problem of promoting diversity within the relevant populations (e.g., CS undergrads) that AI safety is drawing from, but I don’t think that problem falls within AI safety field-builders’ purview.
As a toy example to illustrate my different targets point, let’s consider just technical AI safety. [...] Therefore, I’m saying—as an independent impression—that it is a fact about technical AI safety as a field that we should expect most of the best researchers to be male and white (around 80% and 65%, respectively, within my example). There’s the separate problem of promoting diversity within the relevant populations (e.g., CS undergrads) that AI safety is drawing from, but I don’t think that problem falls within AI safety field-builders’ purview.
Here’s a few things I’d say, that maybe we agree or disagree with:
1.) There are diminishing marginal returns and difficult relevant trade-offs to hitting more ambitious targets.
2.) The correct target shouldn’t be perfect representation of the global population (there’s no internal consensus at RP on what our target should be but we’ve been thinking of trying to match STEM PhDs, or the stats at RAND, or the stats at Brookings.)
3.) There is a large “pipeline problem” (e.g., AI safety recruits from fields that have their own diversity issues and thus inherits these problems).
4.) There is more than just the “pipeline problem”, e.g., there are areas where AI safety etc. are less diverse than their pipelines and this is in part due to systematic issues that are worth fixing.
5.) Determining there is a “pipeline problem” does not mean our work is over. It is still valuable to do some work to fix the pipeline or find other ways to be better than the pipeline. Thus some (but not all) of the problem of the pipeline still should fall within AI safety field-builders’ purview.
Reading this comment makes me realize that perhaps a significant fraction of the awkwardness and not-facing-the-issue that Alice was met with was due to people in the room realizing, upon hearing Alice’s thoughts, that it was too late to promote diversity, and that this made them feel icky. And that all that could be done was to do better next time around.
(It probably wasn’t clear in the post, but the context was that all the applications were in, and they’d all been evaluated and ranked already. At that point, it does seem that there’s not much—if anything—that can be done other than distorting the bar?)
Sorry yeah for me that wasn’t very clear and I thought you were basically accusing of (1) diversity work not being worth it and (2) diversity advocates of not being sincere (but instead engaging in applause lights). I think I then felt a little bit personally attacked by my imaginations of what you were saying—which I see now are different from what you were actually saying. This contributed to my response.
I can say that I’ve definitely been in this position before facing the applications and feeling the dread that nothing can be done. I totally empathize with all your feelings here. I’ve felt every single one of them myself. By the time you get the applications in, there’s really not much you can do and it is very uncomfortable.
To the extent you think diversity in backgrounds within AI safety can be useful in contributing to alignment for a more representative or wider range of humanity, I think you can definitely make a case that it does fall within field-builders’ purview to promote diversity, no? Whose job are you suggesting it should it be otherwise?
(Note that I’ve addressed other parts of your comment in a separate response.)
Moreover I don’t feel like I really understand your motivations for writing this essay.
I’ve sat with this part of your comment for a few minutes, and, to be honest, it makes me feel a bit… unsafe?
I am aware that some posts include a “Why did I write this?” section (see, e.g., this one), or similar, and that this is very helpful because it makes clear the decision relevance of the post (among maybe other things).
But I’m fairly sure that most posts don’t have a section like this, and that most authors don’t explicitly address their motivations for writing their post.
Like, I started putting pen to paper (or, rather, fingers to keyboard) on something I’d been thinking about lately, and that’s how the post came into existence. I think that a decent fraction of forum posts get written in roughly this manner?
(Some of my other motivation for writing this post was Cunningham’s Law-related, which I think is also a pretty regular motivation?)
I personally find it motivating to publish things I’ve written: the feeling of creating something and having it be permanent somewhere helps in getting me actually sit down in the first place and put pen to paper. (Permanent, at least, within the bounds my foreseeable lifetime.) This is a behavior I want to reinforce, I believe it’s valuable.
But now your comment is making me second-guess this learning by writing habit that I thought I wanted to cultivate.
(If your reason for questioning my motivations is something along the lines of, “I think it’s net-negative that you’ve published this post, because it’s not productive or decision relevant, and so I don’t see why you wrote it in the first place. Moreover, it’s drawing attention away from other posts on this forum that are productive and decision relevant”, then I think I (and most other authors?) would have been happy for you to simply down-vote. (Note that I do think the other points in your comment on my post are valuable, and I appreciate you making them—I’m talking here about your questioning my motivations for writing the post at all.))
As things stand, I feel like I’m being made to reexamine and defend the existence of my post, and this feels like… an unwarranted burden?
I mean, getting into the specifics of the post, I think when I started writing I envisaged it being more about applause lights in general and less about diversity in particular, but the way the post ended up is just, kind of, how it happened to write itself.
Am I missing something? I currently feel genuinely unsure about publishing posts in future. (For instance, whether I should evaluate drafts once I’m done writing, and only publish if they meet a certain bar; whether I should move away from the sit-and-start-writing process that led to this post’s creation, and toward only writing posts that have clear theory of change/decision relevance from the get-go.)
Hey Will, I just want to say I do appreciate hearing your genuine feelings and I appreciate your writing. I certainly don’t want to make you feel unsafe and I apologize for doing so. I also certainly don’t want to induce a chilling effect on your future posting. I had thought that we were of roughly similar status with roughly similar abilities to harm the other professionally, such that by picking on you I wouldn’t be threatening or punching down. Note obviously I have no intention of actually harming you. Furthermore, my overall view of you, which is quite high/positive, remains unchanged.
I think I could’ve picked my question more carefully and I think it’s totally fair for you to not choose to defend the existence of your post. I think there’s a lot here related to the content that makes it unusually difficult to engage on this.
On the other side, I will say that considering your audience before publishing is a good norm. If you don’t currently do that, taking 5 minutes to think about “Who do I want to read this post? What do I want them to do?” could be a good change in routine. For posts without any editing or consideration of audience, I think more informal platforms like Shortform or Facebook can be better suited.
I notice that it would be helpful if there was some way of seeing whether it’s your first point,
IMO your thinking about diversity here really lacks nuance, basically misses the main problem, and leaves me feeling troubled
or your second point,
Note that, at least in the United States, doing this is usually illegal
that’s garnering most of the upvotes and agreement votes.
Because the second point is a statement of fact that, while being important in general, isn’t so important to me. Whereas the first point could potentially majorly update my all-things-considered belief on the topic at hand, and cause me to change my actions.
(My guess, however, is that this doesn’t happen frequently enough for there to be, for example:
a new Forum norm like making separate points as separate comments
a new Forum feature like being able to add multiple points in a comment at which others can agree/disagree vote)
Just for note, I posted a link to this survey SJ Beard is doing on their project on diversity in X-Risk (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3iSoc7EBLQWrwGdCE/diversity-in-existential-risk-studies-survey-sj-beard). In total it only got 6 votes, and ended up on 7 Karma. 6 of which was due to my double up vote, so it was on 1 Karma off 5 votes. Of course that’s a very small sample size, but perhaps that says something about how we view diversity and X-Risk in the EA community (or maybe it just says something about me!)
This analysis seems fair to me.
One mitigating feature I think is that precisely because the vacuous applause light statements aren’t meant to be action-guiding, they generally are not action-guiding. Hopefully Bob makes his remark and then people nod wisely and go on with selecting the best candidates as if ~nothing had happened.
I think there is still a danger that something that should have been a mere applause light is misinterpreted as action-guiding (as Alice did here) but this time by Chloe who accepts the remark uncritically. Chloe may then go on to form real policies and plans based on Bob’s remark.
So yes this seems bad, but hopefully not really bad. In terms of what to do about it, perhaps if more people start engaging critically with applause light statements and they are shown up to be without much thought or substance, this renders making such statements negative in terms of social value and fixes the problem. But perhaps more likely is that the people engaging critically with applause lights are hounded down for being insensitive. Tricky.
TL;DR—I’m pretty uncertain about the value of reversal tests as a test for determining whether something is an applause light or not.
-- Pretty minor, but I think some nuance about the usage of the reversal test is warranted. I think the idea of an applause light is useful, but I’m uncertain that anything which fails the reversal test should be seen as an applause light, and subsequently discarded as “an empty statement” which “doesn’t convey new information”. I think we should consider not discarding statements just because they fail the reversal test. We should judge statements by the extent to which decision-relevant next steps can be discussed and considered. Not all statements which fail the reversal test don’t convey new information, and thus the reversal test is not a perfect proxy for statements that are empty and can be disregarded.
^This entire paragraph was intentionally written to fail the reversal test. By the reversal test’s standards all of these sentences sounds pretty bad![1]
Yet, was no new information conveyed? If someone who didn’t know about applause lights (like me!) reads this post, it seems completely reasonable for them to come away with some heuristic like, “Wow, this was cool, I’m going to filter statements through the reversal test and consider statements that fail to be ‘empty statements’ that ‘aren’t intended to be action relevant’”. And while I agree it makes sense to prioritise statements that are intended to be action relevant, after some closer examination, I’m uncertain that the reversal test is a reliable way of differentiating between ones that are vs ones that aren’t. Especially if you think there’s some value in considering things like, practical realities around how your statement lands, or things like whether or not someone feels comfortable voicing disagreement or being confrontational in a scenario where there’s a power differential, all of which I think could be considered reasonable justifications for someone to make a statement that might fail the reversal test (but nevertheless conveys the point they wish to make).[2]
But perhaps I’m not really understanding the reversal test or its applications well. Again—I think the idea of an applause light is useful, I’m just less sure about the usefulness of the reversal test as a measure for whether a statement is an applause light or not, and I think the appropriateness of statements that fail the reversal test is pretty context + norm dependent.
-I think no nuance about the usage of the reversal test is warranted.
-I’m certain that anything which fails the test should be seen as an applause light and subsequently discarded as an empty statement which doesn’t convey new information
-I think we shouldn’t consider not discarding statements just because they fail the reverse test.
-We shouldn’t judge statements by the extent to which decision relevant next steps can be discussed and taken seriously.
-All statements which fail the reversal test don’t convey new information, and thus the reversal test is a perfect proxy for statements that are empty and can be disregarded.
Yes, this paragraph was also written to fail the reversal test.
-...it seems completely unreasonable for them to come away with some heuristic like
-...it doesn’t make sense to prioritise statements that are intended to be action relevant
-...I’m certain that the reversal test is a reliable way of differentiating between them
- Especially if you think there’s no value in considering things like, practical realities around how your statement lands, or things like whether or not someone feels comfortable voicing disagreement or being confrontational in a scenario where there’s a power differential,
-all of which I think could not be considered reasonable justifications for someone to say something that might fail the reversal test (but still conveys the point they wish to make)
Another point to keep in mind is that fairness and high impact is impossible to achieve both at the same time, and that continuous fighting is therefore guaranteed between those that aim for high impact and those that want fairness or equality.
Also another impossibility paper, in that 3 fairness conditions, balance for the positive/negative class and well calibrated decisions only work in 2 regimes: Perfect prediction or equal base rates
I know this is a fraught topic that is hard to discuss but IMO your thinking about diversity here really lacks nuance, basically misses the main problem, and leaves me feeling troubled. Moreover I don’t feel like I really understand your motivations for writing this essay. (Though I hesitate to actually say that “I’m confused” here, since that may make you question me.)
To get at the core issue:
I think this is the core problem with regard to diversity that we should work to address. Why are your best applicants male and white? Surely this isn’t a fact about x-risk as a field—that there’s something about being male and white that makes you better at addressing x-risk. And surely there’s way more that can be done to fix this other than “distort the bar” to let the presumably less good people in?
I think the whiteness and male-ness of x-risk/longtermism is a major liability for the movement for a variety of reasons. I don’t see this as an applause light—I see this as a core problem to address to (yes instrumentally) further our goal of reducing x-risk.
Also...
Note that, at least in the United States, doing this is usually illegal.
Direct response:
Many thanks for your comment, Peter.
Reading this comment makes me realize that perhaps a significant fraction of the awkwardness and not-facing-the-issue that Alice was met with was due to people in the room realizing, upon hearing Alice’s thoughts, that it was too late to promote diversity, and that this made them feel icky. And that all that could be done was to do better next time around.
(It probably wasn’t clear in the post, but the context was that all the applications were in, and they’d all been evaluated and ranked already. At that point, it does seem that there’s not much—if anything—that can be done other than distorting the bar?)
For what it’s worth, I believe Alice and co. are working on things for their next internship round like targeted outreach to underrepresented groups at the bottom-of-the-pipeline level (to help more of these people get into x-risk reduction and/or EA, e.g., by participating in seminar programmes), and trying to especially encourage these folks to apply to internships/fellowships (to help more of these people move up the EA-aligned research pipeline).
I agree that this is a problem to be worked on. I also notice that this discussion might be prone to talking-past-one-another on account of setting different targets. (For instance, I’m not sure whether I fully agree with you or only partially agree with you.)
As a toy example to illustrate my different targets point, let’s consider just technical AI safety. Now, I don’t know the exact numbers, but within this toy example let’s say that, of the undergraduate population as a whole that studies relevant subjects (like computer science): 80% are male; 65% are white. To me, this would imply that trying to go much above 20% female and 35% non-white working in technical AI safety is going to be difficult, and that there’ll be increasingly diminishing returns, just by the nature of the statistics at play here, to the resources (e.g., effort, time) put towards trying to achieve >20% and >35%. Like, getting to 50% and 50% would be extremely costly, I think, and so 50% would not be an appropriate target.
Therefore, I’m saying—as an independent impression—that it is a fact about technical AI safety as a field that we should expect most of the best researchers to be male and white (around 80% and 65%, respectively, within my example). There’s the separate problem of promoting diversity within the relevant populations (e.g., CS undergrads) that AI safety is drawing from, but I don’t think that problem falls within AI safety field-builders’ purview.
Here’s a few things I’d say, that maybe we agree or disagree with:
1.) There are diminishing marginal returns and difficult relevant trade-offs to hitting more ambitious targets.
2.) The correct target shouldn’t be perfect representation of the global population (there’s no internal consensus at RP on what our target should be but we’ve been thinking of trying to match STEM PhDs, or the stats at RAND, or the stats at Brookings.)
3.) There is a large “pipeline problem” (e.g., AI safety recruits from fields that have their own diversity issues and thus inherits these problems).
4.) There is more than just the “pipeline problem”, e.g., there are areas where AI safety etc. are less diverse than their pipelines and this is in part due to systematic issues that are worth fixing.
5.) Determining there is a “pipeline problem” does not mean our work is over. It is still valuable to do some work to fix the pipeline or find other ways to be better than the pipeline. Thus some (but not all) of the problem of the pipeline still should fall within AI safety field-builders’ purview.
Sorry yeah for me that wasn’t very clear and I thought you were basically accusing of (1) diversity work not being worth it and (2) diversity advocates of not being sincere (but instead engaging in applause lights). I think I then felt a little bit personally attacked by my imaginations of what you were saying—which I see now are different from what you were actually saying. This contributed to my response.
I can say that I’ve definitely been in this position before facing the applications and feeling the dread that nothing can be done. I totally empathize with all your feelings here. I’ve felt every single one of them myself. By the time you get the applications in, there’s really not much you can do and it is very uncomfortable.
To the extent you think diversity in backgrounds within AI safety can be useful in contributing to alignment for a more representative or wider range of humanity, I think you can definitely make a case that it does fall within field-builders’ purview to promote diversity, no? Whose job are you suggesting it should it be otherwise?
(Note that I’ve addressed other parts of your comment in a separate response.)
I’ve sat with this part of your comment for a few minutes, and, to be honest, it makes me feel a bit… unsafe?
I am aware that some posts include a “Why did I write this?” section (see, e.g., this one), or similar, and that this is very helpful because it makes clear the decision relevance of the post (among maybe other things).
But I’m fairly sure that most posts don’t have a section like this, and that most authors don’t explicitly address their motivations for writing their post.
Like, I started putting pen to paper (or, rather, fingers to keyboard) on something I’d been thinking about lately, and that’s how the post came into existence. I think that a decent fraction of forum posts get written in roughly this manner?
(Some of my other motivation for writing this post was Cunningham’s Law-related, which I think is also a pretty regular motivation?)
I personally find it motivating to publish things I’ve written: the feeling of creating something and having it be permanent somewhere helps in getting me actually sit down in the first place and put pen to paper. (Permanent, at least, within the bounds my foreseeable lifetime.) This is a behavior I want to reinforce, I believe it’s valuable.
But now your comment is making me second-guess this learning by writing habit that I thought I wanted to cultivate.
(If your reason for questioning my motivations is something along the lines of, “I think it’s net-negative that you’ve published this post, because it’s not productive or decision relevant, and so I don’t see why you wrote it in the first place. Moreover, it’s drawing attention away from other posts on this forum that are productive and decision relevant”, then I think I (and most other authors?) would have been happy for you to simply down-vote. (Note that I do think the other points in your comment on my post are valuable, and I appreciate you making them—I’m talking here about your questioning my motivations for writing the post at all.))
As things stand, I feel like I’m being made to reexamine and defend the existence of my post, and this feels like… an unwarranted burden?
I mean, getting into the specifics of the post, I think when I started writing I envisaged it being more about applause lights in general and less about diversity in particular, but the way the post ended up is just, kind of, how it happened to write itself.
Am I missing something? I currently feel genuinely unsure about publishing posts in future. (For instance, whether I should evaluate drafts once I’m done writing, and only publish if they meet a certain bar; whether I should move away from the sit-and-start-writing process that led to this post’s creation, and toward only writing posts that have clear theory of change/decision relevance from the get-go.)
Hey Will, I just want to say I do appreciate hearing your genuine feelings and I appreciate your writing. I certainly don’t want to make you feel unsafe and I apologize for doing so. I also certainly don’t want to induce a chilling effect on your future posting. I had thought that we were of roughly similar status with roughly similar abilities to harm the other professionally, such that by picking on you I wouldn’t be threatening or punching down. Note obviously I have no intention of actually harming you. Furthermore, my overall view of you, which is quite high/positive, remains unchanged.
I think I could’ve picked my question more carefully and I think it’s totally fair for you to not choose to defend the existence of your post. I think there’s a lot here related to the content that makes it unusually difficult to engage on this.
I get some of that feeling, and I disagree with your conclusion. Keep on doing what you are doing, and keep writing possibly wrong posts.
On the other side, I will say that considering your audience before publishing is a good norm. If you don’t currently do that, taking 5 minutes to think about “Who do I want to read this post? What do I want them to do?” could be a good change in routine. For posts without any editing or consideration of audience, I think more informal platforms like Shortform or Facebook can be better suited.
This perspective sounds reasonable to me. Thanks.
Meta-level response:
I notice that it would be helpful if there was some way of seeing whether it’s your first point,
or your second point,
that’s garnering most of the upvotes and agreement votes.
Because the second point is a statement of fact that, while being important in general, isn’t so important to me. Whereas the first point could potentially majorly update my all-things-considered belief on the topic at hand, and cause me to change my actions.
(My guess, however, is that this doesn’t happen frequently enough for there to be, for example:
a new Forum norm like making separate points as separate comments
a new Forum feature like being able to add multiple points in a comment at which others can agree/disagree vote)
Yeah, I’d really like to know this too. Maybe I should’ve made two comments.
I can certainly say my upvote was for the former and not the latter
Just for note, I posted a link to this survey SJ Beard is doing on their project on diversity in X-Risk (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3iSoc7EBLQWrwGdCE/diversity-in-existential-risk-studies-survey-sj-beard). In total it only got 6 votes, and ended up on 7 Karma. 6 of which was due to my double up vote, so it was on 1 Karma off 5 votes. Of course that’s a very small sample size, but perhaps that says something about how we view diversity and X-Risk in the EA community (or maybe it just says something about me!)
This analysis seems fair to me. One mitigating feature I think is that precisely because the vacuous applause light statements aren’t meant to be action-guiding, they generally are not action-guiding. Hopefully Bob makes his remark and then people nod wisely and go on with selecting the best candidates as if ~nothing had happened. I think there is still a danger that something that should have been a mere applause light is misinterpreted as action-guiding (as Alice did here) but this time by Chloe who accepts the remark uncritically. Chloe may then go on to form real policies and plans based on Bob’s remark. So yes this seems bad, but hopefully not really bad. In terms of what to do about it, perhaps if more people start engaging critically with applause light statements and they are shown up to be without much thought or substance, this renders making such statements negative in terms of social value and fixes the problem. But perhaps more likely is that the people engaging critically with applause lights are hounded down for being insensitive. Tricky.
TL;DR—I’m pretty uncertain about the value of reversal tests as a test for determining whether something is an applause light or not.
--
Pretty minor, but I think some nuance about the usage of the reversal test is warranted. I think the idea of an applause light is useful, but I’m uncertain that anything which fails the reversal test should be seen as an applause light, and subsequently discarded as “an empty statement” which “doesn’t convey new information”. I think we should consider not discarding statements just because they fail the reversal test. We should judge statements by the extent to which decision-relevant next steps can be discussed and considered. Not all statements which fail the reversal test don’t convey new information, and thus the reversal test is not a perfect proxy for statements that are empty and can be disregarded.
^This entire paragraph was intentionally written to fail the reversal test. By the reversal test’s standards all of these sentences sounds pretty bad![1]
Yet, was no new information conveyed? If someone who didn’t know about applause lights (like me!) reads this post, it seems completely reasonable for them to come away with some heuristic like, “Wow, this was cool, I’m going to filter statements through the reversal test and consider statements that fail to be ‘empty statements’ that ‘aren’t intended to be action relevant’”. And while I agree it makes sense to prioritise statements that are intended to be action relevant, after some closer examination, I’m uncertain that the reversal test is a reliable way of differentiating between ones that are vs ones that aren’t. Especially if you think there’s some value in considering things like, practical realities around how your statement lands, or things like whether or not someone feels comfortable voicing disagreement or being confrontational in a scenario where there’s a power differential, all of which I think could be considered reasonable justifications for someone to make a statement that might fail the reversal test (but nevertheless conveys the point they wish to make).[2]
But perhaps I’m not really understanding the reversal test or its applications well. Again—I think the idea of an applause light is useful, I’m just less sure about the usefulness of the reversal test as a measure for whether a statement is an applause light or not, and I think the appropriateness of statements that fail the reversal test is pretty context + norm dependent.
Sentences reversed:
-I think no nuance about the usage of the reversal test is warranted.
-I’m certain that anything which fails the test should be seen as an applause light and subsequently discarded as an empty statement which doesn’t convey new information
-I think we shouldn’t consider not discarding statements just because they fail the reverse test.
-We shouldn’t judge statements by the extent to which decision relevant next steps can be discussed and taken seriously.
-All statements which fail the reversal test don’t convey new information, and thus the reversal test is a perfect proxy for statements that are empty and can be disregarded.
Yes, this paragraph was also written to fail the reversal test.
-...it seems completely unreasonable for them to come away with some heuristic like
-...it doesn’t make sense to prioritise statements that are intended to be action relevant
-...I’m certain that the reversal test is a reliable way of differentiating between them
- Especially if you think there’s no value in considering things like, practical realities around how your statement lands, or things like whether or not someone feels comfortable voicing disagreement or being confrontational in a scenario where there’s a power differential,
-all of which I think could not be considered reasonable justifications for someone to say something that might fail the reversal test (but still conveys the point they wish to make)
Another point to keep in mind is that fairness and high impact is impossible to achieve both at the same time, and that continuous fighting is therefore guaranteed between those that aim for high impact and those that want fairness or equality.
Link below:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-03-27/algorithms-unfair-racial-bias-math
Paper below:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3097983.3098095
Similarly, group fairness and individual fairness can’t both be achieved at the same time:
Paper below:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.07236
Also another impossibility paper, in that 3 fairness conditions, balance for the positive/negative class and well calibrated decisions only work in 2 regimes: Perfect prediction or equal base rates
Paper below:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807
Could you give an example of this? I’m confused about what you mean.