This is quite a long article so forgive me if I’ve missed it, but it seems like you’re arguing that someone’s general character—for example, whether they have a history of embezzling money or using racial slurs—shouldn’t affect whether or not we invite them to speak at EA events. Whether or not we invite them should only depends on the quality of their ideas, not their reputation or past harmful actions. Is that what you’re saying?
I cannot find any section of this article that sounds like this hypothesis, so I am pretty confident the answer is that no, that is not what the article says. The article responds relatively directly to this:
Of course, being a prolific producer of premium prioritisation posts doesn’t mean we should give someone a free pass for behaving immorally. For all that EAs are consequentialists, I don’t think we should ignore wrongdoing ‘for the greater good’. We can, I hope, defend the good without giving carte blanche to the bad, even when both exist within the same person.
Thanks Oli. So I guess this article is arguing that EA Munich was either mistaken about Robin Hanson’s character or they were prioritizing reputation over character?
I find this discussion very uncomfortable because I really don’t like publicly saying “I have concerns about the impact an individual has on this community”—I prefer that individual groups like EA Munich make the decision on their own and as discreetly as possible—but it seems the only way they could defend themselves is to publicly state everything they dislike about Robin Hanson. I know they’ve said a couple things already but I don’t love that we’re encouraging a continued public prosecution and defense of Robin Hanson’s character.
I read this piece as proposing a stance towards a social dynamic (“how EA should orient to cancel culture”), rather than continuing litigation of anyone’s character.
Judgments about someone’s character are, unfortunately, extremely tribal. Different political tribes have wildly different standards for what counts as good character and what counts as mere eccentricity. In many cases one tribe’s virtue is another tribe’s vice.
In light of this, I think we should view with suspicion the argument that it’s OK to cancel someone because they have bad character. Yes, some people really do have bad character. But cancel culture often targets people who have excellent character (this is something we all can agree on, because cancel culture isn’t unique to any one tribe; for examples of people with excellent character getting cancelled, just look at what the other tribe is doing!) so we should keep this sort of rationale-for-cancellation on a tight leash.
Here is a related argument someone might make, which I bring up as an analogy to illustrate my point:
Argument: Some ideas are true, others are false. The false ideas often lead to lots of harm, and spreading false ideas therefore often leads to lots of harm. Thus, when we consider whether to invite people to events, we shouldn’t invite people insofar as we think they might spread false ideas. Duh.
My reply: I mean, yeah, it seems like we have to draw the line somewhere. But the overwhelming lesson of history is that when communities restrict membership on the basis of true ideas, that just leads to an epistemic death spiral where groupthink and conformity reign, ideology ossifies into dogma, and the community drifts farther from the truth instead of continually seeking it. Instead, communities that want to find the truth need to be tolerant of a wide range of opinions, especially opinions advanced politely and in good faith, etc. There’s a lot more to say about best practices for truth-seeking community norms, and I’d be happy to go into more detail if you like, but you get the idea.
I think the legal/justice system is another example of this.
Argument: Look, we all know OJ Simpson did it. It’s pretty obvious at this point. So why don’t we just… go grab him and put him in jail? Or beat him up or something?
Reply: Vigilante justice often makes mistakes. Heck, even the best justice systems often make mistakes. Worse, sometimes the mistakes are systemically biased in various ways, or even not even mistakes at all, but rather intentional patterns of oppression. And the way we prevent this sort of thing is by having all sorts of rules for what counts as admissible evidence, for when the investigation into someone’s wrongdoing is supposed to be over and they are supposed to go free, etc. And yeah, sometimes following these rules means that people we are pretty sure are guilty end up going free. And this is bad. But it’s better than the alternative.
EDIT: I plausibly misunderstood kokotajlod, see his reply.
I think there’s a dangerous rhetorical slip when we construe “do not invite someone to [speak at] events” as “cancel culture.”
Judgments about someone’s character are, unfortunately, extremely tribal. Different political tribes have wildly different standards for what counts as good character and what counts as mere eccentricity. In many cases one tribe’s virtue is another tribe’s vice.
In light of this, I think we should view with suspicion the argument that it’s OK to cancel someone because they have bad character.
I think this is one of the things that sounds really good in the abstract, but in practice not the practical way to think about how to do local group organizing. If I think about people who I was part of decisions of banning/softbanning from our meetups, I definitely don’t think “in many cases one tribe’s virtue is another tribe’s vice” feels like a particularly appealing abstract argument relative to more concrete felt sense of “this person negatively impacts the experience of others at the meetup much more than they plausibly derive value from it.” Though it hasn’t been immediately applicable in the examples I’ve mentioned (since we can point to concrete issues), I’d argue that in many situations “character” makes the situation overdetermined, so we’d arguably have been in the right to exclude people before the concrete problems very obviously surface.
I’m also very much not convinced by meta-level arguments that EA (in this context, local EA meetups) has too much exclusion rather than too little. I think people by default (myself included), especially group organizers, have a very strong egalitarian instinct/distaste for being mean/cliquish, so will by default tolerate much higher levels of social infractions than are plausibly +EV. See EY on well-kept gardens.
(Aside: Being explicitly disinvited; akin to “hi I don’t wanna be friends with you” is very unpleasant. This can be worse if you’ve formed being part of a group as part of your identity. In some cases there’s a risk of harm to others as well. For an organizer, being in the situation of disinviting someone who wants to attend your meetup is in a sense admitting failure. If the meetup structure was designed well to begin with, people who should self-select out of wanting to attend, or alternatively, have the meetup designed around them in such a way that everybody can plausibly contribute positively. However, if we say that organizers should have events iff they can guarantee that their meetup will not accidentally have people who will be net negative for the group, this will be a high cost to organizing, maybe implausibly high)
If we reframe “do not invite someone to events” as “do we want to hang out with them,” I feel like the alternative “we must not consider the quality of someone’s character in our friendships, only the quality of their ideas” will be absurd.
Now I think the bar for not inviting someone to a local meetup has to be somewhat higher (or at least different) than to not be friends with them. For example, having similar musical preferences is a valid preference for friends, but will be absurd as an exclusion criteria for a meetup (unless it’s a music lover’s meetup of a specific genre).
But the bar shouldn’t be infinitely high (and honestly I’m not convinced that it should be very high at all), and I think it’s better for local groups to handle this themselves in their local context.
Now I think the modal example of CC is plausibly pernicious for other important reasons, namely that the appeal isn’t to whether local group A benefits from interacting with person B, but in a (sometimes implausible) appeal to externalities, that A meeting with B somehow substantially negatively impacts the experience of C, where C can be individuals from across the world who had no desire to attend A. To the extent CC is global, the bar then becomes excluding folks from every social group, which ought to be much higher than the bar for excluding them from a single social group.
Reply: Vigilante justice often makes mistakes. Heck, even the best justice systems often make mistakes. Worse, sometimes the mistakes are systemically biased in various ways, or even not even mistakes at all, but rather intentional patterns of oppression. And the way we prevent this sort of thing is by having all sorts of rules for what counts as admissible evidence, for when the investigation into someone’s wrongdoing is supposed to be over and they are supposed to go free, etc. And yeah, sometimes following these rules means that people we are pretty sure are guilty end up going free. And this is bad. But it’s better than the alternative.
Anglo-Saxxon criminal justice (in theory, not in practice) has a fundamental conception of erring on the side of innocence: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” I think the bar ought to be much lower for EA meetups, eg if you prefer >10 cases of sexual harassment, or physical threatening, or yelling at people, or just general unpleasantness, to a single case of a wronged innocent due to false accusations or plausible misunderstanding, I think you’re not going to have a good time.
I’m not construing “do not invite someone to speak at events” as cancel culture.
This was an invite-then-caving-to-pressure-to-disinvite. And it’s not just any old pressure, it’s a particular sort of political tribal pressure. It’s one faction in the culture war trying to have its way with us. Caving in to specifically this sort of pressure is what I think of as adopting cancel culture.
Got it, I must have misunderstood you! I think it’s a little difficult for me to understand how much people were talking about the general principles vs the specific example in Munich, and/or how much they believe the Munich example generalizes.
I think this discussion can benefit from more rigor, though it’s unclear how to advance it in practice.
Yeah, I wasn’t super clear, sorry. I think I basically agree with you that communities can and should have higher standards than society at large, and that communities can and should be allowed to set their own standards to some extent. And in particular I think that insofar as we think someone has bad character, that’s a decently good reason not to invite them to things. It’s just that I don’t think that’s the most accurate description of what happened at Munich, or what’s happening with cancel culture more generally—I think it’s more like an excuse, rationalization, or cover story for what’s really happening, which is that a political tribe is using bullying to get us to conform to their ideology. As a mildly costly signal of my sincerity here, I’ll say this: I personally am not a huge fan of Robin Hanson and if I was having a birthday party or something and a friend of his was there and wanted to bring him along, I’d probably say no. This is so even though I respect him quite a lot as an intellectual.
I should also flag that I’m still confused about the best way to characterize what’s going on. I do think there are people within each tribe explicitly strategizing about how the tribe should bully people into conformity, but I doubt that they have any significant control over the overall behavior of the tribe; instead I think it’s more of an emergent/evolved phenomenon… And of course it’s been going on since the dawn of human history, and it waxes and wanes. It just seems to be waxing now. Personally I think technology is to blame—echo chambers, filter bubbles, polarization, etc. I think that if these trends are real then they are extremely important to predict and understand because they are major existential risk factors and also directly impede the ability of our community to figure out what we need to do to help the world and coordinate to do it.
This study looked at nine countries and found that polarisation had decreased in five. The US was an outlier, having seen the largest increase in polarisation. That may suggest that American polarisation is due to US-specific factors, rather than universal technological trends.
Here are some studies suggesting the prevalence of technology-driven echo chambers and filter bubbles may be exaggerated.
Please note that this study does not measure “polarization”—but instead “polarization between the top two parties”! See: > “We analyze the sensitivity of our findings to restricting attention to the top two parties in each country and focusing on periods in which this pair of parties is stable”
This does not work for any country with proportional electoral systems. I can speak to the German case, since I live there:
The two big parties are CDU/CSU (christian democrat / conservative) and SPD (social democrat). Both parties have become more similar to each other over the decades, and SPD in particular has bled voters like crazy for it. Here you can see current and historical polling data: CDU/CSU in black, SPD in red.
The most notable events here may be the “Energiewende” and the response to the mass migration in context of the Syrian civil war 2015 for the CDU/CSU, and the “Agenda 2010″ and the continual “great coalition” as the junior partner with the conservatives with the SPD.
This has opened up space to the right of the conservatives (the AfD has taken this space), and to the left of the SPD (taken up in parts by the far left party PDS / DIE LINKE and the green party BÜNDNIS 90 / DIE GRÜNEN). The SPD is now arguably not in the top two anymore, the greens seem to have taken that spot, possibly for good.
So, indeed, the polarization between CDU/CSU and SPD may have gone down, but this does not generalize. Germany has also become more polarized.
Figure 2 looks at the top two parties, but the legend to Figure 1 doesn’t say it’s restricted to the top two parties. And Figure 1 also shows decreasing polarisation in Germany. However, I haven’t looked into this research in depth.
Interesting that one of the two main hypotheses advanced in that paper is that media is influencing public opinion, but the media is not the internet, but TV!
The rise of 24-hour partisan cable news provides another potential explanation. Partisan cable networks emerged during the period we study and arguably played a much larger role in the US than elsewhere, though this may be in part a consequence rather than a cause of growing affective polarization.9 Older demographic groups also consume more partisan cable news and have polarized more quickly than younger demographic groups in the US (Boxell et al. 2017; Martin and Yurukoglu 2017). Interestingly, the five countries with a negative linear slope for affective polarization all devote more public funds per capita to public service broadcast media than three of the countries with a positive slope (Benson and Powers 2011, Table 1; see also Benson et al. 2017). A role for partisan cable news is also consistent with visual evidence (see Figure 1) of an acceleration of the growth in affective polarization in the US following the mid-1990s, which saw the launch of Fox News and MSNBC.
(The other hypothesis is “party sorting”, wherein people move to parties that align more in ideology and social identity.)
Perhaps campaigning for more money to PBS or somehow countering Fox and MSNBC could be really important for US-democracy.
Also, if TV has been so influential, it also suggests that even if online media isn’t yet influential on the population-scale, it may be influential for smaller groups of people, and that it will be extremely influential in the future.
Some argue, however, that partisan TV and radio was helped by the abolition of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987. That amounts to saying that polarisation was driven at least partly by legal changes rather than by technological innovations.
Obviously media influences public opinion. But the question is whether specific media technologies (e.g. social media vs TV vs radio vs newspapers) cause more or less polarisation, fake news, partisanship, filter bubbles, and so on. That’s a difficult empirical question, since all those things can no doubt be mediated to some degree through each of these media technologies.
I think that if these trends are real then they are extremely important to predict and understand because they are major existential risk factors and also directly impede the ability of our community to figure out what we need to do to help the world and coordinate to do it.
This seems like an interesting line of reasoning, and I’d maybe be excited to see more strategic thinking around this.
Might eventually turn out to be pointless and/or futile, of course.
I agree! I’d love to see more research into this stuff. In my relevant pre-agi possibilities doc I call this “Deterioration of collective epistemology.” I intend to write a blog post about a related thing (Persuasion Tools) soon.
This is quite a long article so forgive me if I’ve missed it, but it seems like you’re arguing that someone’s general character—for example, whether they have a history of embezzling money or using racial slurs—shouldn’t affect whether or not we invite them to speak at EA events. Whether or not we invite them should only depends on the quality of their ideas, not their reputation or past harmful actions. Is that what you’re saying?
I cannot find any section of this article that sounds like this hypothesis, so I am pretty confident the answer is that no, that is not what the article says. The article responds relatively directly to this:
Thanks Oli. So I guess this article is arguing that EA Munich was either mistaken about Robin Hanson’s character or they were prioritizing reputation over character?
I find this discussion very uncomfortable because I really don’t like publicly saying “I have concerns about the impact an individual has on this community”—I prefer that individual groups like EA Munich make the decision on their own and as discreetly as possible—but it seems the only way they could defend themselves is to publicly state everything they dislike about Robin Hanson. I know they’ve said a couple things already but I don’t love that we’re encouraging a continued public prosecution and defense of Robin Hanson’s character.
I read this piece as proposing a stance towards a social dynamic (“how EA should orient to cancel culture”), rather than continuing litigation of anyone’s character.
Judgments about someone’s character are, unfortunately, extremely tribal. Different political tribes have wildly different standards for what counts as good character and what counts as mere eccentricity. In many cases one tribe’s virtue is another tribe’s vice.
In light of this, I think we should view with suspicion the argument that it’s OK to cancel someone because they have bad character. Yes, some people really do have bad character. But cancel culture often targets people who have excellent character (this is something we all can agree on, because cancel culture isn’t unique to any one tribe; for examples of people with excellent character getting cancelled, just look at what the other tribe is doing!) so we should keep this sort of rationale-for-cancellation on a tight leash.
Here is a related argument someone might make, which I bring up as an analogy to illustrate my point:
Argument: Some ideas are true, others are false. The false ideas often lead to lots of harm, and spreading false ideas therefore often leads to lots of harm. Thus, when we consider whether to invite people to events, we shouldn’t invite people insofar as we think they might spread false ideas. Duh.
My reply: I mean, yeah, it seems like we have to draw the line somewhere. But the overwhelming lesson of history is that when communities restrict membership on the basis of true ideas, that just leads to an epistemic death spiral where groupthink and conformity reign, ideology ossifies into dogma, and the community drifts farther from the truth instead of continually seeking it. Instead, communities that want to find the truth need to be tolerant of a wide range of opinions, especially opinions advanced politely and in good faith, etc. There’s a lot more to say about best practices for truth-seeking community norms, and I’d be happy to go into more detail if you like, but you get the idea.
I think the legal/justice system is another example of this.
Argument: Look, we all know OJ Simpson did it. It’s pretty obvious at this point. So why don’t we just… go grab him and put him in jail? Or beat him up or something?
Reply: Vigilante justice often makes mistakes. Heck, even the best justice systems often make mistakes. Worse, sometimes the mistakes are systemically biased in various ways, or even not even mistakes at all, but rather intentional patterns of oppression. And the way we prevent this sort of thing is by having all sorts of rules for what counts as admissible evidence, for when the investigation into someone’s wrongdoing is supposed to be over and they are supposed to go free, etc. And yeah, sometimes following these rules means that people we are pretty sure are guilty end up going free. And this is bad. But it’s better than the alternative.
EDIT: I plausibly misunderstood kokotajlod, see his reply.
I think there’s a dangerous rhetorical slip when we construe “do not invite someone to [speak at] events” as “cancel culture.”
I think this is one of the things that sounds really good in the abstract, but in practice not the practical way to think about how to do local group organizing. If I think about people who I was part of decisions of banning/softbanning from our meetups, I definitely don’t think “in many cases one tribe’s virtue is another tribe’s vice” feels like a particularly appealing abstract argument relative to more concrete felt sense of “this person negatively impacts the experience of others at the meetup much more than they plausibly derive value from it.” Though it hasn’t been immediately applicable in the examples I’ve mentioned (since we can point to concrete issues), I’d argue that in many situations “character” makes the situation overdetermined, so we’d arguably have been in the right to exclude people before the concrete problems very obviously surface.
I’m also very much not convinced by meta-level arguments that EA (in this context, local EA meetups) has too much exclusion rather than too little. I think people by default (myself included), especially group organizers, have a very strong egalitarian instinct/distaste for being mean/cliquish, so will by default tolerate much higher levels of social infractions than are plausibly +EV. See EY on well-kept gardens.
(Aside: Being explicitly disinvited; akin to “hi I don’t wanna be friends with you” is very unpleasant. This can be worse if you’ve formed being part of a group as part of your identity. In some cases there’s a risk of harm to others as well. For an organizer, being in the situation of disinviting someone who wants to attend your meetup is in a sense admitting failure. If the meetup structure was designed well to begin with, people who should self-select out of wanting to attend, or alternatively, have the meetup designed around them in such a way that everybody can plausibly contribute positively. However, if we say that organizers should have events iff they can guarantee that their meetup will not accidentally have people who will be net negative for the group, this will be a high cost to organizing, maybe implausibly high)
If we reframe “do not invite someone to events” as “do we want to hang out with them,” I feel like the alternative “we must not consider the quality of someone’s character in our friendships, only the quality of their ideas” will be absurd.
Now I think the bar for not inviting someone to a local meetup has to be somewhat higher (or at least different) than to not be friends with them. For example, having similar musical preferences is a valid preference for friends, but will be absurd as an exclusion criteria for a meetup (unless it’s a music lover’s meetup of a specific genre).
But the bar shouldn’t be infinitely high (and honestly I’m not convinced that it should be very high at all), and I think it’s better for local groups to handle this themselves in their local context.
Now I think the modal example of CC is plausibly pernicious for other important reasons, namely that the appeal isn’t to whether local group A benefits from interacting with person B, but in a (sometimes implausible) appeal to externalities, that A meeting with B somehow substantially negatively impacts the experience of C, where C can be individuals from across the world who had no desire to attend A. To the extent CC is global, the bar then becomes excluding folks from every social group, which ought to be much higher than the bar for excluding them from a single social group.
Anglo-Saxxon criminal justice (in theory, not in practice) has a fundamental conception of erring on the side of innocence: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” I think the bar ought to be much lower for EA meetups, eg if you prefer >10 cases of sexual harassment, or physical threatening, or yelling at people, or just general unpleasantness, to a single case of a wronged innocent due to false accusations or plausible misunderstanding, I think you’re not going to have a good time.
I’m not construing “do not invite someone to speak at events” as cancel culture.
This was an invite-then-caving-to-pressure-to-disinvite. And it’s not just any old pressure, it’s a particular sort of political tribal pressure. It’s one faction in the culture war trying to have its way with us. Caving in to specifically this sort of pressure is what I think of as adopting cancel culture.
Got it, I must have misunderstood you! I think it’s a little difficult for me to understand how much people were talking about the general principles vs the specific example in Munich, and/or how much they believe the Munich example generalizes.
I think this discussion can benefit from more rigor, though it’s unclear how to advance it in practice.
Yeah, I wasn’t super clear, sorry. I think I basically agree with you that communities can and should have higher standards than society at large, and that communities can and should be allowed to set their own standards to some extent. And in particular I think that insofar as we think someone has bad character, that’s a decently good reason not to invite them to things. It’s just that I don’t think that’s the most accurate description of what happened at Munich, or what’s happening with cancel culture more generally—I think it’s more like an excuse, rationalization, or cover story for what’s really happening, which is that a political tribe is using bullying to get us to conform to their ideology. As a mildly costly signal of my sincerity here, I’ll say this: I personally am not a huge fan of Robin Hanson and if I was having a birthday party or something and a friend of his was there and wanted to bring him along, I’d probably say no. This is so even though I respect him quite a lot as an intellectual.
I should also flag that I’m still confused about the best way to characterize what’s going on. I do think there are people within each tribe explicitly strategizing about how the tribe should bully people into conformity, but I doubt that they have any significant control over the overall behavior of the tribe; instead I think it’s more of an emergent/evolved phenomenon… And of course it’s been going on since the dawn of human history, and it waxes and wanes. It just seems to be waxing now. Personally I think technology is to blame—echo chambers, filter bubbles, polarization, etc. I think that if these trends are real then they are extremely important to predict and understand because they are major existential risk factors and also directly impede the ability of our community to figure out what we need to do to help the world and coordinate to do it.
This study looked at nine countries and found that polarisation had decreased in five. The US was an outlier, having seen the largest increase in polarisation. That may suggest that American polarisation is due to US-specific factors, rather than universal technological trends.
Here are some studies suggesting the prevalence of technology-driven echo chambers and filter bubbles may be exaggerated.
Please note that this study does not measure “polarization”—but instead “polarization between the top two parties”! See:
> “We analyze the sensitivity of our findings to restricting attention to the top two parties in each country and focusing on periods in which this pair of parties is stable”
This does not work for any country with proportional electoral systems. I can speak to the German case, since I live there:
The two big parties are CDU/CSU (christian democrat / conservative) and SPD (social democrat). Both parties have become more similar to each other over the decades, and SPD in particular has bled voters like crazy for it. Here you can see current and historical polling data: CDU/CSU in black, SPD in red.
The most notable events here may be the “Energiewende” and the response to the mass migration in context of the Syrian civil war 2015 for the CDU/CSU, and the “Agenda 2010″ and the continual “great coalition” as the junior partner with the conservatives with the SPD.
This has opened up space to the right of the conservatives (the AfD has taken this space), and to the left of the SPD (taken up in parts by the far left party PDS / DIE LINKE and the green party BÜNDNIS 90 / DIE GRÜNEN). The SPD is now arguably not in the top two anymore, the greens seem to have taken that spot, possibly for good.
So, indeed, the polarization between CDU/CSU and SPD may have gone down, but this does not generalize. Germany has also become more polarized.
Figure 2 looks at the top two parties, but the legend to Figure 1 doesn’t say it’s restricted to the top two parties. And Figure 1 also shows decreasing polarisation in Germany. However, I haven’t looked into this research in depth.
Thanks! This is good news; will go look at those studies...
Interesting that one of the two main hypotheses advanced in that paper is that media is influencing public opinion, but the media is not the internet, but TV!
(The other hypothesis is “party sorting”, wherein people move to parties that align more in ideology and social identity.)
Perhaps campaigning for more money to PBS or somehow countering Fox and MSNBC could be really important for US-democracy.
Also, if TV has been so influential, it also suggests that even if online media isn’t yet influential on the population-scale, it may be influential for smaller groups of people, and that it will be extremely influential in the future.
Some argue, however, that partisan TV and radio was helped by the abolition of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987. That amounts to saying that polarisation was driven at least partly by legal changes rather than by technological innovations.
Obviously media influences public opinion. But the question is whether specific media technologies (e.g. social media vs TV vs radio vs newspapers) cause more or less polarisation, fake news, partisanship, filter bubbles, and so on. That’s a difficult empirical question, since all those things can no doubt be mediated to some degree through each of these media technologies.
This seems like an interesting line of reasoning, and I’d maybe be excited to see more strategic thinking around this.
Might eventually turn out to be pointless and/or futile, of course.
I agree! I’d love to see more research into this stuff. In my relevant pre-agi possibilities doc I call this “Deterioration of collective epistemology.” I intend to write a blog post about a related thing (Persuasion Tools) soon.