I appreciate that Larks sent a draft of this post to CEA, and that we had the chance to give some feedback and do some fact-checking.
I agree with many of the concerns in this post. I also see some of this differently.
In particular, I agree that a climate of fear — wherever it originates— silences not only people who are directly targeted, but also others who see what happened to someone else. That silencing limits writers/speakers, limits readers/listeners who won’t hear the ideas or information they have to offer, and ultimately limits our ability to find ways to do good in the world.
These are real and serious costs. I’ve been talking with my coworkers about them over the last months and seeking input from other people who are particularly concerned about them. I’ll continue to do that.
But I think there are also real costs to pushing groups to go forward with events they don’t want to hold. I’m still thinking through how I see the tradeoffs between these costs and the costs above, but here’s one I think is relevant:
It makes it more costly to be an organizer. In one discussion amongst group organizers after the Munich situation, one organizer wrote about the Peter Singer talk their group hosted. [I’m waiting to see if I can give a fuller quote, but their summary was about how the Q&A session got conflicted enough that the group was known as “the group that invited Peter Singer” for two years and basically overpowered any other impression students had of what the EA group was about.]
“It seemed like the talk itself went pretty well, but during the Q&A section a few people basically took over the discussion and only asked question about all the previous things he has said about disabled people (and possibly some other things). The Q&A is basically all people remembered from the event. I think it did a lot of reputation damage to our group, which took 2 years to get over (by which point many attendees of the talk graduated). Before that, people basically didn’t know what EA was and after it was “the group that invited Peter Singer”. ”
Hosting Singer and other speakers who have said controversial things has been good for many EA groups. But I also think it’s okay for individual organizers to decide they’re not up for hosting an event that carries some risk of seriously throwing their group off the rails. Being at the center of a controversy, especially for student organizers constantly living in the same environment where the talk is held, can bear a heavy personal cost as well. (Of course, knowing that people will back down if you make it costly enough for them to follow through is exactly what incentivizes you to make it costly.)
On the specifics: I was the main staff member who advised the Munich organizers, and I’d like to add more detail about how this all unfolded. There are a lot of quotes so I’ll italicize them.
The week before Hanson’s scheduled online talk about tort law reform for the Munich group, the organizers contacted CEA to say they were considering canceling the event after learning about some of Hanson’s past writing. From my first message to the Munich organizers:
“I don’t have a clear answer about whether to cancel the event. I could it being reasonable either way. . . . If the discussion goes into areas where you think people may be offended or upset, maybe have an organizer or two stay behind after to have continued discussion after the Q&A with Hanson is done. I looked at what I think is basically the same talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPdHXw05SvU Some parts will probably go over ok with an audience that’s used to thinking about alternate governance systems. But for example he suggests torture as a possible penalty, and as far as I saw from a cursory look through the slides, he doesn’t address objections to that. People seem to find his work very polarizing, so some people find it very refreshing because he says things almost no one else says, and other people hate it. So you may well get some indication from the Q&A about how people are feeling, and you may want to follow up with them if they seem upset.”
After that, the Munich organizers discussed the situation internally, held a vote, and wrote to Hanson saying that they had decided to cancel the talk. Hanson tweeted about the cancellation, indicating he didn’t think they had adequately explained their decision.
I wrote to the Munich organizers:
“If you were going to respond, I’d send this both to Hanson and perhaps also reply on the Twitter, with points along these lines:
We weren’t familiar with all of Hanson’s work, but we saw (and still believe) that he has raised some interesting and valuable ideas. We booked him to give a talk about an idea for reforming the legal system. It was not a large event—around 17 people were RSVPd.
After booking the talk, we heard about some of his work that we weren’t familiar with, specifically his posts on “gentle silent rape” and sex redistribution.
We discussed what to do, and found it a difficult decision. The strongest consideration in favor of continuing the event was that we did not want to further “cancel culture” or make it so that only uncontroversial ideas could be shared in EA spaces.
However, we’re aware that many people, particularly women, have found Hanson’s writing on rape and “redistribution” of sex to be offensive and disturbing.
We got in touch with CEA, who said they could see either decision about the event being reasonable. We discussed ways to mitigate negative effects if we went ahead with the event.
In the end, we decided that Hanson’s previous work was not something we were comfortable tying to our group.
Instead, we scheduled a discussion about cancel culture, to give our group a chance to discuss how we could handled controversial ideas and speakers in the future.
Using these suggestions, the Munich organizers drafted their statement explaining the situation and their decision, and a coworker and I made some minor suggestions afterwards.
Since they were volunteers writing what was probably their first public statement to be read by the wider internet on a tight timeframe, I do wish I had given them more feedback on the draft. I also wish I had focused my advice not just on the practicalities, but also on the tradeoffs discussed above. Specifically, I should have checked that organizers were tracking some of the things that Larks raises in the conclusion. I also agree that when CEA leaves the final decision to organizers, we aren’t off the hook — we aim to provide the best advice we can to organizers, and to learn from experience.
It makes it more costly to be an organizer. In one discussion amongst group organizers after the Munich situation, one organizer wrote about the Peter Singer talk their group hosted. [I’m waiting to see if I can give a fuller quote, but their summary was about how the Q&A session got conflicted enough that the group was known as “the group that invited Peter Singer” for two years and basically overpowered any other impression students had of what the EA group was about.]
Just for context, if anyone is unaware, Peter Singer is extremely controversial in Germany, much (/even) more so than in the English-speaking world. There was a talk by him in Cologne a few years ago, and everyone was a bit surprised it didn’t get shouted down by student activists.
So I can definitely see this happening, and sympathise with the desire for it not to happen again, even though I still think the Hanson decision was ill-made.
+1, in the German-speaking area, activists have tried to prevent people from gaining physical access to where Singer’s talk was to be hosted, and Singer was even physically assaulted on one occasion (a couple of decades ago though). Some venues have cancelled him. There are often protests (by disability rights activists, religious people, etc.) where he speaks.
As one of the organisers of the EA Munich group this was the first thing I thought of when we heard about the press coverage of Robin Hanson: What can we learn from the EA association of the controversies of Peter Singer. I was thinking of your comment and of Ben Todd’s quote “Once your message is out there, it tends to stick around for years, so if you get the message wrong, you’ve harmed years of future efforts.” I think there is much harm that can be done in canceling but it should be weighed against the potential harm of hurting the movement in a country where values and sentiments can be different than in the english speaking world.
For me the Robin Hanson talk would have been the first event as a co-organiser and seeing a potential cooperation partner unearthing the negative press about Robin Hanson and telling us that they would not be able to work with us if we hosted him, was an indication that we shouldn’t rush to hold this talk. Oliver Habryka summarised this pretty well:
Having participated in a debrief meeting for EA Munich, my assessment is indeed that one of the primary reasons the event was cancelled was due to fear of disruptors showing up at the event, similar to how they have done for some events of Peter Singer. Indeed almost all concerns that were brought up during that meeting were concerns of external parties threatening EA Munich, or EA at large, in response to inviting Hanson. There were some minor concerns about Hanson’s views qua his views alone, but basically all organizers who spoke at the debrief I was part of said that they were interested in hearing Robin’s ideas and would have enjoyed participating in an event with him, and were primarily worried about how others would perceive it and react to inviting him.
I just looked up what I wrote internally after the decision and still think this is a good summary:
In an ideal world we have known about the issues beforehand, would have talked them through internally and if we had invited him we would have known how to address them in a way that is not harmful to the EA community. However given the short time we saw more risks in alienating people than getting them interested in EA through the talk.
The monthly talks we host are public and posted on Meetup and Facebook so our audience consists of people who are new to the community. We as EA local groups are the first impression many people get of the community and are the faces of the community in our region so I would argue we should be well prepared and versed in potential controversies before hosting talks especially with prominent people and on a video platform where all statements can be recorded and shared. As a group that had just one female speaker in the last 15 talks I think this is especially the case if press coverage may seem that the speaker has views that may make women feel less welcome.
At the time it seemed riskier to try to assess and reduce the risks about the potential negative consequences around the talk then to cancel it. However my error was in not assessing risks around signaling in terms of Cancel Culture.
I appreciate that Larks sent a draft of this post to CEA, and that we had the chance to give some feedback and do some fact-checking.
I agree with many of the concerns in this post. I also see some of this differently.
In particular, I agree that a climate of fear — wherever it originates— silences not only people who are directly targeted, but also others who see what happened to someone else. That silencing limits writers/speakers, limits readers/listeners who won’t hear the ideas or information they have to offer, and ultimately limits our ability to find ways to do good in the world.
These are real and serious costs. I’ve been talking with my coworkers about them over the last months and seeking input from other people who are particularly concerned about them. I’ll continue to do that.
But I think there are also real costs to pushing groups to go forward with events they don’t want to hold. I’m still thinking through how I see the tradeoffs between these costs and the costs above, but here’s one I think is relevant:
It makes it more costly to be an organizer. In one discussion amongst group organizers after the Munich situation, one organizer wrote about the Peter Singer talk their group hosted. [I’m waiting to see if I can give a fuller quote, but their summary was about how the Q&A session got conflicted enough that the group was known as “the group that invited Peter Singer” for two years and basically overpowered any other impression students had of what the EA group was about.]
“It seemed like the talk itself went pretty well, but during the Q&A section a few people basically took over the discussion and only asked question about all the previous things he has said about disabled people (and possibly some other things). The Q&A is basically all people remembered from the event. I think it did a lot of reputation damage to our group, which took 2 years to get over (by which point many attendees of the talk graduated). Before that, people basically didn’t know what EA was and after it was “the group that invited Peter Singer”. ”
Hosting Singer and other speakers who have said controversial things has been good for many EA groups. But I also think it’s okay for individual organizers to decide they’re not up for hosting an event that carries some risk of seriously throwing their group off the rails. Being at the center of a controversy, especially for student organizers constantly living in the same environment where the talk is held, can bear a heavy personal cost as well. (Of course, knowing that people will back down if you make it costly enough for them to follow through is exactly what incentivizes you to make it costly.)
On the specifics: I was the main staff member who advised the Munich organizers, and I’d like to add more detail about how this all unfolded. There are a lot of quotes so I’ll italicize them.
The week before Hanson’s scheduled online talk about tort law reform for the Munich group, the organizers contacted CEA to say they were considering canceling the event after learning about some of Hanson’s past writing. From my first message to the Munich organizers:
“I don’t have a clear answer about whether to cancel the event. I could it being reasonable either way. . . . If the discussion goes into areas where you think people may be offended or upset, maybe have an organizer or two stay behind after to have continued discussion after the Q&A with Hanson is done. I looked at what I think is basically the same talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPdHXw05SvU Some parts will probably go over ok with an audience that’s used to thinking about alternate governance systems. But for example he suggests torture as a possible penalty, and as far as I saw from a cursory look through the slides, he doesn’t address objections to that. People seem to find his work very polarizing, so some people find it very refreshing because he says things almost no one else says, and other people hate it. So you may well get some indication from the Q&A about how people are feeling, and you may want to follow up with them if they seem upset.”
After that, the Munich organizers discussed the situation internally, held a vote, and wrote to Hanson saying that they had decided to cancel the talk. Hanson tweeted about the cancellation, indicating he didn’t think they had adequately explained their decision.
I wrote to the Munich organizers:
“If you were going to respond, I’d send this both to Hanson and perhaps also reply on the Twitter, with points along these lines:
We weren’t familiar with all of Hanson’s work, but we saw (and still believe) that he has raised some interesting and valuable ideas. We booked him to give a talk about an idea for reforming the legal system. It was not a large event—around 17 people were RSVPd.
After booking the talk, we heard about some of his work that we weren’t familiar with, specifically his posts on “gentle silent rape” and sex redistribution.
We discussed what to do, and found it a difficult decision. The strongest consideration in favor of continuing the event was that we did not want to further “cancel culture” or make it so that only uncontroversial ideas could be shared in EA spaces.
However, we’re aware that many people, particularly women, have found Hanson’s writing on rape and “redistribution” of sex to be offensive and disturbing.
We got in touch with CEA, who said they could see either decision about the event being reasonable. We discussed ways to mitigate negative effects if we went ahead with the event.
In the end, we decided that Hanson’s previous work was not something we were comfortable tying to our group.
Instead, we scheduled a discussion about cancel culture, to give our group a chance to discuss how we could handled controversial ideas and speakers in the future.
For anyone eager to see the presentation Hanson would have given, we believe this video shares the material he was planning to present”
Using these suggestions, the Munich organizers drafted their statement explaining the situation and their decision, and a coworker and I made some minor suggestions afterwards.
Since they were volunteers writing what was probably their first public statement to be read by the wider internet on a tight timeframe, I do wish I had given them more feedback on the draft. I also wish I had focused my advice not just on the practicalities, but also on the tradeoffs discussed above. Specifically, I should have checked that organizers were tracking some of the things that Larks raises in the conclusion. I also agree that when CEA leaves the final decision to organizers, we aren’t off the hook — we aim to provide the best advice we can to organizers, and to learn from experience.
Just for context, if anyone is unaware, Peter Singer is extremely controversial in Germany, much (/even) more so than in the English-speaking world. There was a talk by him in Cologne a few years ago, and everyone was a bit surprised it didn’t get shouted down by student activists.
So I can definitely see this happening, and sympathise with the desire for it not to happen again, even though I still think the Hanson decision was ill-made.
+1, in the German-speaking area, activists have tried to prevent people from gaining physical access to where Singer’s talk was to be hosted, and Singer was even physically assaulted on one occasion (a couple of decades ago though). Some venues have cancelled him. There are often protests (by disability rights activists, religious people, etc.) where he speaks.
As one of the organisers of the EA Munich group this was the first thing I thought of when we heard about the press coverage of Robin Hanson: What can we learn from the EA association of the controversies of Peter Singer. I was thinking of your comment and of Ben Todd’s quote “Once your message is out there, it tends to stick around for years, so if you get the message wrong, you’ve harmed years of future efforts.” I think there is much harm that can be done in canceling but it should be weighed against the potential harm of hurting the movement in a country where values and sentiments can be different than in the english speaking world.
For me the Robin Hanson talk would have been the first event as a co-organiser and seeing a potential cooperation partner unearthing the negative press about Robin Hanson and telling us that they would not be able to work with us if we hosted him, was an indication that we shouldn’t rush to hold this talk. Oliver Habryka summarised this pretty well:
I just looked up what I wrote internally after the decision and still think this is a good summary:
The monthly talks we host are public and posted on Meetup and Facebook so our audience consists of people who are new to the community. We as EA local groups are the first impression many people get of the community and are the faces of the community in our region so I would argue we should be well prepared and versed in potential controversies before hosting talks especially with prominent people and on a video platform where all statements can be recorded and shared. As a group that had just one female speaker in the last 15 talks I think this is especially the case if press coverage may seem that the speaker has views that may make women feel less welcome.
At the time it seemed riskier to try to assess and reduce the risks about the potential negative consequences around the talk then to cancel it. However my error was in not assessing risks around signaling in terms of Cancel Culture.
I got permission to add the full quote, though the meaning is the same. This example was actually in the US.
Ah, then my comment was based on a misunderstanding. Apologies.
But still relevant for the Munich organizers, since Singer seems to get protested more per event in Germany than in other countries.