I don’t have any arguments over cancel culture or anything general like that, but I am a bit bothered by a view that you and others seem to have. I don’t consider Robin Hanson an “intellectual ally” of the EA movement; I’ve never seen him publicly praise it or make public donation decisions, but he has claimed that do-gooding is controlling and dangerous, that altruism is all signaling with selfish motivations, that we should just save our money and wait for some unspecified future date to give it away, and that poor faraway people are less likely to exist according to simulation theory so we should be less inclined to help them. On top of that he made some pretty uncharitable statements about EA Munich and CEA after this affair. And some of his pursuits suggest that he doesn’t care if he turns himself into a super controversial figure who brings negative attention towards EA by association. These things can be understandable on their own, you can rationalize each one, but when you put it all together it paints a picture of someone who basically doesn’t care about EA at all. It just happens to be the case that he was big in the rationalist blogosphere and lots of EAs (including me) think he’s smart in some ways and has some good ideas. He’s just here for the ride, we don’t owe him anything.
I’m definitely not trying to character-assassinate or ‘cancel’ him, I’m just saying that he only deserves as much community respect from us as any other decent academic does, we shouldn’t give him the kind of special anti-cancelling loyalty that we would reserve for people who have really worked as allies for us.
I don’t have any arguments over cancel culture or anything general like that, but I am a bit bothered by a view that you and others seem to have. I don’t consider Robin Hanson an “intellectual ally” of the EA movement; I’ve never seen him publicly praise it or make public donation decisions, but he has claimed that do-gooding is controlling and dangerous, that altruism is all signaling with selfish motivations, that we should just save our money and wait for some unspecified future date to give it away, and that poor faraway people are less likely to exist according to simulation theory so we should be less inclined to help them. On top of that he made some pretty uncharitable statements about EA Munich and CEA after this affair. And some of his pursuits suggest that he doesn’t care if he turns himself into a super controversial figure who brings negative attention towards EA by association. These things can be understandable on their own, you can rationalize each one, but when you put it all together it paints a picture of someone who basically doesn’t care about EA at all. It just happens to be the case that he was big in the rationalist blogosphere and lots of EAs (including me) think he’s smart in some ways and has some good ideas. He’s just here for the ride, we don’t owe him anything.
I’m definitely not trying to character-assassinate or ‘cancel’ him, I’m just saying that he only deserves as much community respect from us as any other decent academic does, we shouldn’t give him the kind of special anti-cancelling loyalty that we would reserve for people who have really worked as allies for us.