Her post was strongly downvoted, and she eventually removed it.
This claim seems misleading at best
Edit: That’s not to say I disagree with the central thrust of the article—I find it plausible, and I wish the community health team was able to handle this problem more effectively. I hope they are trying to figure out want went wrong in cases like Angela Pang’s.
Wokeism has been a on/off discussion topic in EA for about as long as I can remember. My woke friends complain that EA is hopelessly anti-woke, and my anti-woke friends complain that EA is hopelessly woke. The predictions of political schism or ideological takeover keep being made, and keep being false.
In my opinion, we’ve already found a “third option” which works: the empathy to seek mutual understanding, the philosophical sophistication to critique fashionable ideas, and the willingness to share our perspective even when it seems unpopular.
But a problem I have with this is that it’s wrong to interact with people based on averages, basically. If 70% of EA women like or dislike being flirted with in X way, what do you do? Do the 30% minority just have to put up with discomfort (or, less seriously, a lack of enjoyable flirting)? Are you 70% flirtatious (pleasing no-one fully)?
I agree this is a problem, but I don’t think we solve this problem by ignoring it.
Right now men are choosing to flirt with women/not flirt with women based on some mishmash of: past experiences, flirting intuitions, cultural conditioning, etc. My claim isn’t that the approach I suggested is perfect. My claim is that it’s likely an improvement on this baseline.
I’d suggest getting the community health team to analyze the survey results and generate some guidelines that are acceptable to, say, 95% of women surveyed. Publish the guidelines and say “if you don’t like the guidelines, we recommend you avoid EA events”.
I think if EA has a major problem with sexual harassment, an approach like this could be really effective. On the other hand, if sexual harassment is not actually much of a problem in EA, we may as well continue with the current approach.
I think the problem with checklists is that fundamentally, negotiating social interactions so that everyone is happy and comfortable, and flirting and appropriate escalation, are social skills. And social skills tend to be fuzzy and involve very different types of thinking than analysis, or rule-following. So when people throw their hands up in despair, or ask for explicit rules, it feels a bit like they’re getting annoyed that they can’t just throw their technical skills at a social-skills problem. (Written as someone who finds some social skills hard, including in the areas of flirting/romance)
First, I suspect there are cultures in which romantic interactions are much more ritualized than our current culture. Flirting doesn’t have to be this super fuzzy thing if we don’t want it to be.
I also think there’s room for social skills in the approach I suggested. People seem to believe there are situations where you shouldn’t flirt with someone even if you think they’re trying to flirt with you—some examples might be: when you’re interviewing them for a job, when you’re in a confined space, when you’re on a deserted street late at night, etc. Basically, social perception can just be another factor on the list of factors to consider. But, as you state, it’s an inherently fuzzy factor, so it probably shouldn’t be as load-bearing as it currently is.
I don’t know Owen that well—I’ve probably interacted with him for half an hour or something—but he never struck me as particularly deficient in social skills. My guess is if he had read this situation accurately, and the woman in question appreciated his edginess, we never would’ve heard about any of this. People seem to favor a really punitive approach to Owen’s actions, but the problem is that even if you’re really good at reading social situations, say 99% accurate, there are always going to be those 1% misreadings which show up if you have a large enough number of social interactions.
Speaking for myself, I don’t think I am notably deficient in social skills. I enjoy social deduction games, acting classes, etc. In my mind, the issue has more to do with differing moral intuitions, especially regarding when harsh punishments are appropriate. (My own moral intuitions would be along the lines of: “First, there is no such thing as a romantically or sexually successful person who has never ever creeped anyone out. Give yourself permission to be creepy. I am not saying that you should go around trying to creep people out… [but, stuff happens].”) I’m usually comfortable trusting my social intuitions, but when so many condemn so harshly based on a short description of a situation with very little social context, that’s when I wonder if social intuitions are really enough.
Maybe a good intuition pump is: Imagine if people could send you to jail if they thought you were being kind of an asshole. Can you see how you would be tempted to stop posting on social media and never leave your room? Even if you’re fairly skilled socially, it’s inevitable that people will sometimes think you’re being kind of an asshole, unless you have an unhealthy obsession with what others think. Now consider that, as far as I can tell, Owen’s crime was essentially “being kind of an asshole”, but in the romantic/sexual domain. If the costs of “being kind of an asshole” in the romantic/sexual domain are much higher than in other domains—I have no particular reason to doubt that—then maybe it’s worthwhile to add in additional precautions beyond just “use social skills”?
this comment is frustrating to read as a woman who has experienced unwanted sexual harassment/attention in the EA community
Sorry to hear that.
To clarify my perspective more broadly, I’ll link to an older comment I made: “Even in the hypothetical where you dotted every possible i and crossed every possible t, getting affirmative verbal consent for every individual muscle movement as though you were in some sort of parody video—if she feels violated afterwards, something went wrong.”
I personally have spent so much of my own time gently and patiently trying to explain to “awkward” men why their behaviour sucks. I’m so tired.
It seems to me that this is a valuable activity and it would be good if it was possible to do it in a more scalable way, to improve the benefit-to-effort ratio. Obviously if you’re feeling burnt out on it, you should take a break.
I’m sorry you’re feeling tired.
(Side note: I had some responses to your other points, but I kept deleting them because I didn’t have a good theory of how they would help move the discussion forwards. It felt like there was a danger of getting lost in the weeds in an “ordinary internet argument” which didn’t contribute to any “action-relevant” important broader point. If you want to discuss more, maybe you could articulate specific important broader points you think we disagree on that would be good to hash out. Alternatively, if you want to have an ordinary internet argument, we could move this to a different medium, e.g. you can send me a private message.)
I largely agree. I think the thing to do is to poll a representative sample of women in EA regarding when they would / would not want a guy to flirt with them (and how), then formulate some guidelines based on the poll results and publish the guidelines.
Julia Wise previously expressed skepticism, saying:
My sense is that pre-specified criteria for what constitutes something like “offensive actions” or “unwanted sexual attention” and what the response should be isn’t realistic or a good idea. A lot of factors play into what constitutes a problem — words, body language, setting (the career fair vs. an afterparty vs. a deserted street outside the venue at night), power and status differences between the people, etc.
However, I don’t think this has to be an obstacle in principle. It’s easy to imagine separating these factors out into a point system or rubric—some sort of checklist, decision rule, or decision tree that I can memorize and go through in my head before flirting with someone.
As a side note, I see this as more of an issue with society than with EA. I’d love to see the poll idea done for the general population as well, and given the place we’re at right now as a society, I’m not sure I would expect anyone to reliably forecast the results of such a poll. (As an intuition pump, consider the massive standard deviation values found in Aella’s rape spectrum survey.)
EDIT: I did some introspection on this, and it seems to me like positive “do this” guidelines (like “prioritize ensuring that the other person is comfortable”) could be a lot more effective than negative “don’t do this” guidelines.
How do you define “decent”?
I’m a straight guy, and I grew up in an era of pre-#metoo, sex-positive feminism. The doctrine of the day was “men and women are pretty much the same in every way and it’s sexist to claim otherwise”. “Slut shaming is bad, women can be just as horny as men, wanting women to be chaste and pure is patriarchical and bad, trying to give women special protection from harm is benevolent sexism and therefore bad, treating people the same regardless of their gender is good and desirable.”
An anecdote from this era of feminism—I once read a woman claim something like: if a man hears a new dirty joke, and he tells it to his male friends but not his female friends, that’s sexism.
I figured: “OK, well if men and women are pretty much the same in every way, and treating women as delicate flowers is sexist and bad, that means I can model women’s dating preferences by just putting myself in their shoes and asking myself how I would feel if I was in their situation. Women are just people, after all!”
Obviously, at a certain point I figured out that this was a bad heuristic. I believe I’ve technically been the victim of sexual assault (rot13′d: n qehax thl ng n cnegl tenoorq zl pebgpu bhg bs gur oyhr nsgre V gbyq uvz ur jnf cneglvat gbb uneq—V unir ab vagrerfg va thlf naq jnf tvivat fvtanyf bs naablnapr, abg frkhny vagrerfg). I found it about as unpleasant as brushing off a persistent insect. I basically forgot about it for years, until #metoo came along and I thought to myself “huh, I guess maybe I’ve been assaulted too.”
I’ve also been catcalled by women a few times—those are fond memories that I recall when my self-esteem is low.
I hesitate to share this, because I fear readers will think I’m suggesting that women’s preferences are somehow less important or legitimate. That’s not the case. I recognize that society is full of diverse peope with diverse preferences, and I think we should work to satisfy everyone’s preferences in a harmonious way.
Rather, what I’m trying to say is: I think society underrates how often men have trouble modeling women’s preferences. It looks to me like a preference modeling failure at least partially explains the OP. I think failure to model preferences accurately is a mistake that decent people sometimes make. The OP doesn’t read at all to me like an instance of premeditated, deliberate harm. (And, separately, I wish women would invest more in helping men model their preferences. It seems like if a guy says “that doesn’t seem bad to me”, the most common response is some variant of “you’re a horrible person!”, which is counterproductive for learning. It doesn’t communicate any general rule which could allow me to extrapolate from this instance and accurately model your preferences in other situations.)
This post is an interesting case study of how important branding and idea presentation are if you want EAs to buy into your ideas. I proposed something vaguely similar but called it a “giving circle” and got a bunch of upvotes; this post’s score is currently negative. If I was the post author, I think I would probably feel a bit annoyed by this—props to him for responding with good cheer.
I admire the audacity and vision of someone who learned about EA 5 months ago and now has the ambition of affecting $1 billion in EA funds. But realistically, this is an incredibly ambitious goal and you shouldn’t take it personally if you fail!
To maximize your chances of success, you might try taking more of a consensus-building approach: reach out to people like ConcernedEAs, try to get on a video call with one of them, pitch your idea, listen and respond to objections (including improving your idea based on their input). Once you’ve done enough calls like this, you’ll understand the most common objections—and if you’ve found convincing responses to those objections, you can build your next post around those responses, and try to gather advisors and team members.
The information from her included serious concerns about various people in the Bay Area, most of whom had no connection to EA as far as we know.
I’m concerned that predators may be claiming EA affiliation to gain the trust of victims.
I’m concerned about situations where something goes very wrong with EA, outsiders notice this and experience+express strong negative emotion, but the expression of emotion causes people within EA to disregard the outsider because “obviously their thinking is clouded by emotion”.
It’s probably true that strong emotions cloud judgement, but they’re also evidence that something is very wrong.
Reduced accuracy, combined with increased potential importance, could mean that the expected value of listening to an emotional person is about as high overall.
Ideas that you talk about don’t stand on their own. They exist within a historical and social context.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy
As a concrete example, suppose that 100 years ago, a bunch of racist politicians passed a minimum wage law in order to price a local ethnic minority out of the labor market. The minimum wage exists within that historical and social context. However, if more recent research shows definitively that the minimum wage is now improving employment outcomes for that same ethnic minority, the historical and social context would appear to be irrelevant.
If you’re in the democratic coalition, being called racist on a flimsy basis by people on twitter is actually fairly inevitable. I can’t think of a single politician or faction this hasn’t happened to. And yet somehow, they keep on trucking.
Do you think this is an incentive that people don’t respond to?
The actual response to warning about the pandemic would be a handful of twitter weirdos calling you racist, most people going “that seems unreasonable”, and everyone continuing on with their lives. this is mainly because warning about pandemics isn’t actually racist.
See this search of pandemic news articles prior to March 2020. You can see lots of news outlets downplaying the virus in favor of racism concerns.
I’m curious just how many people reacted to these articles at the time by saying “that seems unreasonable”. I don’t remember much of anyone publicly reacting that way. This would be a good test of the degree to which “being called a racist” is an incentive people respond to, if you can find a number of prominent examples of people saying “that seems unreasonable” within the Democratic coalition.
My model is that if the coronavirus caused just as much damage, but in some complicated semi-hidden way that wasn’t directly attributable to a pandemic, people would still be just as focused on the racism aspect of coronavirus discussion.
I still don’t think being in the coalition is a good idea, but the portrayal here makes it seem like being loosely affiliated with a political movement makes you a dogmatic zombie.
As far as I can tell, Peter Thiel went from being an interesting and intelligent person I had a ton of respect for (he donated lots to MIRI and gave a couple of EA summit keynotes) to a dogmatic zombie, primarily due to loose affiliation with a couple of political movements (neoreaction and the Republican party).
If someone who’s famously contrarian and independently wealthy can’t resist the pull of polarization, I’m not betting on anybody.
Edit: Here’s something from Bryan Caplan
Who fears the left? Strangely, the main answer seems to be: leftists. I talk to a wide range of people in academia about left-wing anger and the fear it sustains. As you’d expect, the people who are most outraged by the climate of fear are non-leftists. But the people who personally experience the most fear are leftists themselves. In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.
Progressivism is perceived by conservatives as something that creates extreme homogeneity of thought, but that doesn’t really seem the case to me.
You say you happen to already agree on most things, perhaps you therefore wouldn’t experience much pressure.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220407033207/https://www.canceledpeople.com/cancelations
Guy said:
Almost every “bad” thing said here about “Woke EA” sounds good to me
So I quoted a particular “bad” thing that Hanania brought up, and explain why I thought it was, in fact, bad.
I’m unclear on who you believe to be strawmanning who. My best guess is that you believe Hanania to be strawmanning the idea of “being folded into the Democratic coalition”. However, that’s not much of a strawman—it’s a phrase he invented, and he immediately explains what he meant by it.
I’m not reassured by your observation that disagreements within the Democratic coalition only tend to be apparent around primary time.
Nor am I reassured by your “Nobody was kicked out” observation—being kicked out is often the result of ignoring accumulated “mild social pressure”.
Again, benefit of hindsight—suppose COVID-19 turned out to be a dud, and EA suffers the racism accusation without any corresponding vindication. How many dud pandemics before enough “mild social pressure” has accumulated that we are de facto no longer part of the coalition? My suspicion is less than ten—we’d get an image as “those racists who are always warning about pandemics from other countries”. So if EAs were significantly motivated by staying in the coalition, I think we could easily end up paying too little attention to pandemics.
I certainly hope EA would’ve been able to resist such social pressure if we were part of the coalition. But pro-woke EAs make me nervous, because they aren’t providing a blueprint for when and how such social pressure should be resisted—and I observe that social pressure has a tendency to create self-reinforcing spirals.
According to my model, being part of a political coalition means giving something up. I think anyone who wants EA to join a political coalition should explain what, specifically, EA should give up relative to a pure focus on doing the most good, and why this is a worthwhile sacrifice. I found your comment a bit frustrating because you seem to imply that joining a coalition is cost-free, and I don’t think that’s true.
dspeyer brought up an interesting example in another thread:
In early 2020, people were reluctant to warn about covid-19 because it could be taken as justification for anti-chinese racism.
Hanania writes:
One path [EA] can take is to be folded into the Democratic coalition. It’ll have to temper its rougher edges, which means purging individuals for magic words, knowing when not to take an argument to its logical conclusion, compromising on free speech, more peer review and fewer disagreeable autodidacts, and being unwilling to engage with other individuals and communities that are too non-conformist to avoid having any heretical strains.
It seems likely to me that if EA were “folded into the Democratic coalition” in this way, we would’ve been much slower to recognize the importance of COVID-19.
It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that we know COVID-19 was going to be a huge pandemic. A question to think about: What’s the COVID-19 pandemic probability such that we should be indifferent between discussing the virus and staying silent—the pandemic probability such that the expected downside from anti-Chinese racism equals the expected upside from pandemic preparedness?
IMO the benefit of EA getting folded into the Democratic coalition is limited, because people who think it’s racist to discuss low-probability pandemics are already well-served by existing groups in the Democratic coalition. EA shouldn’t try to be all things to all people. It’s OK to leave EA and switch to antiracism advocacy if that’s the cause that really speaks to you.
I think you make good points—these are good cases to discuss.
I also think that motivated reasoners are not the main concern.
My last bullet point was meant as a nudge towards consequentialist communication. I don’t think consequentialism should be the last word in communication (e.g. lying to people because you think it will lead to good consequences is not great).
But consequences are an important factor, and I think there’s a decent case to be made that e.g. Bostrom neglected consequences in his apology letter. (Essentially making statements which violated important and valuable taboos, without any benefit. See my previous comment on this.)
For something like COVID, it seems bad to downplay it, but it also seems bad to continually emphasize its location of origin in contexts where that information isn’t relevant or important.
“We should be reluctant” represents a consideration against doing something, not a complete ban.
Just to be clear, I think many of us in the community are not uncertain about whether racism and sexism are part of EA. Rather I’m certain that they are, in the sense that many in the community exhibited them in discussions in the last few weeks.
I think if we found a comment that you considered racist/sexist and asked the author if they thought their comment was racist/sexist, the author would likely say no.
I wish the Google Doc had been more specific. It could’ve said things like:
It’s important to treat people with respect regardless of their race/sex
It’s important to reduce suffering and increase joy for everyone regardless of their race/sex
We should be reluctant to make statements which could be taken as “scientific” justification for ignoring either of the previous bullet points
As written, it seems like the doc has the disadvantage of being ripe for abuse, without the advantage of providing guidelines that let someone know whether the signatories dislike their comment. I think on the margin, this doc pushes us towards a world where EAs are spending less time on high-impact do-gooding, and more time reading social media to make sure we comply with the latest thinking around anti-racism/anti-sexism.
In those forums, reputation accrues to username; little (or at least less) attention is paid to brand-new accounts.
I’ve spent a lot of time on both HN and slatestarcodex (subreddit/blog comments), and this isn’t really the case. Most usernames I see are ones that I have no particular recollection of. I basically never look at the username to decide whether to read a comment.
HN will display your username in green for the first two weeks after you register, and you get the ability to downvote after accumulating 500 karma, but for the most part people ignore usernames. (Example: I once got a reply from a user who said “I keep seeing people make this argument.” It took me a little while to realize that was because the two of us had a related discussion a few weeks ago, where I’d made this argument to them. It was only after I looked through my comment history for the older discussion that I realized what was going on.)
An exception here is that in both communities there are a few celebrity users that get upvotes more easily, but they’re a small minority.
If you want you could create a post in one of those communities asking people how much they pay attention to usernames and see what responses you get.
Here, a lot of accounts are trying to recruit/use the “I’m a for real serious longtime member of this community” reputational/seriousness boost, while being who the heck knows who.
Maybe a trusted neutral party could vouch for these claims?
We have abundant evidence from society and history that those in positions of power can and do act against them.
Yes, this seems like the human default, and I think anyone who claims the default doesn’t apply to them bears the burden of proof to demonstrate that.
If people like Buck want to convince me that they’re different, the best way to do it would be to give a satisfactory theory of why this happens, then explain the specific measures they take and why they believe those measures are effective (e.g. “this RCT found that the use of Technique X produced a large effect size; I always use Technique X in situations A, B, C”). A person who’s succeeded in solving a problem should be able to demonstrate understanding of both the problem and its solution.
Edit: This paper looks interesting https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22663351/
It greatly increases the odds of the forum being flooded with unaccountable bs
There are low-bs forums such as Hacker News and slatestarcodex where most people don’t use their real names. I’m skeptical that real name use is a good predictor of bs density.
Posting anonymously because you don’t want to be associated with your own views (but you want to inject those views without paying the reputational cost of having them) is.
There are 2 possibilities: either the view is correct, or the view is incorrect.
If the view is correct, the reputational cost is bad, and the person did a service by posting it anonymously.
If the view is incorrect, “injecting” it by posting it anonymously seems not that bad, because others can reply and explain why it’s incorrect.
Insofar as we respect the ability of forum readers to evaluate the correctness of what they read, we shouldn’t be too worried about people posting incorrect views. It’s through discussion itself that we can better determine which views are correct vs incorrect.
Posting anonymously does not instill a false belief in another person, so I don’t see the trickery.
I found your comment concerning. Important-to-enforce punitive measures for wrongthink could be justified in certain limited situations (maybe stuff like “justifying oppression, harassing people, defrauding people”), but let’s just say that if we’re running into those situations on a regular basis, the EA movement is doing something very wrong.
There’s a classic male/female dilemma where women mention problems, men attempt to solve them, but women feel unsatisfied because they are actually seeking emotional support.
I often feel like that’s what’s going on in these discussions. E.g. if I was to mention that the post was not exactly heavily downvoted, from a problem-solving perspective, that makes sense because the first step for solving a problem is usually to understand it accurately. From an emotional-support perspective, it could be helpful as a reminder that people are actually pretty concerned about these issues (and willing to upvote posts about them). Or it could be taken as an “attempt to defend the culture”.
I think people in EA are often problem-solvers by nature. From my perspective, working to understand and solve a problem is generally an expression that I care about something. For whatever that’s worth.