Dale

Dutch anti-trust reg­u­la­tor bans pro-an­i­mal welfare chicken cartel

• Dale 22 Mar 2021 17:23 UTC

  36 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: Progress Open Thread: March 2021

  Thanks for the feedback. While you are a moderator and can of course moderate as you wish, I must admit I found it confusing. I tried looking through the rules to find anything related to this:

  The current comment makes unkind assumptions about a group of people without accurate data to back them — so despite the good intentions, it falls afoul of our rules.

  The closest I could find was this section:

  Unnecessary rudeness or offensiveness

  But this is of course quite different. My comment’s tone was not particularly rude (e.g. no swearing, personal attacks), and nor was the content ‘unnecessary’ - or at least no more so than many other comments on the forum. In a situation whether there is a logical reason why a course of action is bad, but no hard empirical data, what alternative is there but to share our best attempt at reasoning?

  Furthermore, I am not sure it is true that I made unkind assumptions; I assume you are refering to this section, but it is clearly an inference, not an assumption, that older adopted children present an elevated risk, and one that is couched in measured language like ‘consider’ and ‘might’:

  Finally, it is a well established fact that one of the biggest threats to children comes from their mothers getting new boyfriends who are not genetically related to the child; this results in a something like a 10x increase in child abuse risk vs traditional families. I have never seen similar statistics around older adopted children but I would consider whether they might present a similar risk to your son given the 12 year age gap.

  Indeed, arguably my comment was actually encouraged by the rules:

  Polish: We’d rather see an idea presented imperfectly than not see it at all.

  Worse, I think your objection is an isolated demand for rigor. It is very common for people to express arguments in the absence of hard statistical data; such data-heavy comments are a minority of those on the forum. Even among top-level articles such sources are often omitted—for example this highly upvoted post from the frontpage contains almost no statistics at all, yet I don’t think this is a major problem.

  So what is different here? My guess is the true crux of your objection is that my comment expresses a negative view of a group who it is not socially acceptable to criticize (you will note that Denise’s comment also implies negative things, about a different group, but she has received no pushback because her target is considered socially acceptable to criticize)

  But I encourage you to reconsider this, because as Effective Altruists we need to ensure our beliefs are as accurate as possible. This is not a topic of idle speculation: my comment was written to be specifically action guiding, and the negative facts about adopted children, especially older adopted children, are a crucial component of any fair evaluation of the risks and benefits of this decision. We should not be straw rationalists who are unable to act in the absence of RCTs; we can and should use evidence from other domains to make logical inferences when we have to make decisions under uncertainty. If we punish such comments, while allowing relatively statistic-light ‘positive’ comments we create a persistent bias which will lead us to social desirability bias. It is well known that the EA movement has a bias against conservatives; we should not let this bias morph into a moderation policy.

  
  Less importantly, I also think you may not have properly understood my argument, because you raise this as a challenge:

  I think it’s very likely that adopted teenagers report higher life satisfaction than teenagers who don’t get adopted. I’ll gladly donate $50 to the charity of someone’s choice if they find solid data showing otherwise, since my first few minutes of research didn’t get me anywhere.

  Yet better outcomes for adopted teenagers over non-adopted teenagers is actually a logical consequence of the considerations I mentioned, because never-adopted children will have even worse adverse selection problems than late-adopted children!

• Dale 16 Jul 2020 14:20 UTC

  35 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ob­jec­tions to Value-Align­ment be­tween Effec­tive Altruists

  Interesting article. I would like to raise one quabble:

  Advocates for traditional diversity metrics such as race, gender and class do so precisely because they track different ways of thinking.

  I agree this is the stated reason for many corporate diversity advocates, but I think it is not their true reason. In practice many companies recruit using basically a combination of filters whose purpose is to select people with a certain way of thinking (e.g. resumes, interviews, psychological screens) combined with various quotas for desired racial groups. If getting cognitive diversity was the goal they would try testing and selecting for that directly, or at least stop actively selecting against it. The status quo is likely to mean McKinsey get people from a variety of races, all of whom went to Harvard Business School, which I presume is basically what we want. After all, while cognitive diversity in some regards is useful, we want everyone to have the same (high) level of the cluster of skills that make up being a good consultant, like diligence, intelligence and sociability.

  In particular, that even if hypothetically research showed that traditional racial/​sexual diversity inhibited useful cognitive diversity (perhaps by making people less comfortable about sharing their views), advocates would be unlikely to change their mind.

  I think their true motivations are more like some combination of:

  • Desire to appeal to a variety of audiences who would be less likely to buy from an outsider (e.g. hiring black sales guys to sell in black areas).

  • Wanting to avoid being criticized as racist by hostile outsiders.

  • Left wing conceptions of fairness on behalf of HR staff and other management, unrelated to firm objectives.

  • Intellectual conformism with others who believe for the previous three reasons.

  A non-exhaustive subset of admired individuals I believe includes: … As far as I perceive it, all revered individuals are male.

  It seems a little rude to make public lists of perceived intelligence. Imagine how it would feel to be a prominent EA and to be excluded from the list? :-( In this case, I think you have excluded some people who are definitely higher in community estimation that some on your list, including some prominent women.

  Members write articles about him in apparent awe and possibly jest

  The linked article is from over eleven years ago. I think GWWC hadn’t even launched at that point, let alone the rest of the EA community. This is like attacking democrats because Obama thought gay marriage was immoral and was trying to build a border wall with Mexico, both of which were the case in 2009.

• Dale 10 Jun 2020 15:42 UTC

  30 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: matthewp’s comment on: Will protests lead to thou­sands of coro­n­avirus deaths?

  Who is the ‘we’ here and by whose yardstick the benefit measured?

  Investigations into police brutality that follow viral footage have historically been quite harmful for all involved. The upside is a small reduction in police brutality. The downside is a massive increase in non-police brutality, as found in this recent paper:

  all investigations that were preceded by “viral” incidents of deadly force have led to a large and statistically significant increase in homicides and total crime. We estimate that these investigations caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies. The leading hypothesis for why these investigations increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%. Other theories we test such as changes in community trust or the aggressiveness of consent decrees associated with investigations—all contradict the data in important ways.

  Indeed the harm done by one day of reduced policing in Chicago may have already rendered the protests a net negative, even ignoring spreading Coronavirus:

  From 7 p.m. Friday, May 29, through 11 p.m. Sunday, May 31, 25 people were killed in the city, with another 85 wounded by gunfire, according to data maintained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

  In a city with an international reputation for crime — where 900 murders per year were common in the early 1990s — it was the most violent weekend in Chicago’s modern history, stretching police resources that were already thin because of protests and looting.

  The Rev. Michael Pfleger, a longtime crusader against gun violence who leads St. Sabina Church in Auburn Gresham, said it was “open season” last weekend in his neighborhood and others on the South and West sides.

  
  

  I also think you misunderstand your fellow EAs:

  Animal rights activists are not turning out in large numbers to get tear gassed and beaten for the cause. This is pretty good evidence that they are not in the set of ‘everyone else who thinks their reason is as good as I think this one is’.

  Many animal rights activists believe that the status quo is far far worse than the holocaust. There are billions of animals being farmed for meat today, generally treated very cruelly. Whatever you think of the state of US race relations, it is clear that, if animals matter, they are much worse off—both much more numerous and treated much much worse!

  I think what you are missing is that there are factors other than believed importance of cause that determine one’s actions. For example, animal rights activists might care about suppressing the pandemic! Or they might think getting tear gassed was counter-productive!

  
  

  You suggest that concessions will help reduce the scale of the protests, but my impression is that the literature suggests that actually repression is effective. For example, this study on the 2011 London Riots, where first-time looters were punished relatively harshly, found it was successful in reducing crime:

  The criminal justice response was to make sentencing for rioters much more severe. We show a significant drop in riot crimes across London in the six months after the riots, consistent with a deterrence effect from the tougher sentencing. Moreover, we find that non-riot crimes actually went in the opposite direction, suggesting a response from criminals who look to have substituted away from the types of crimes that received tougher sentences. We find little evidence that spatial displacement or extra police presence on the streets of London in the wake of the riots accounts for these patterns of change. More evidence of general deterrence comes from the observation that crime also fell in the post-riot aftermath in areas where rioting did not take place.

  Similarly, this study on Israeli counter-terrorism police:

  An increase in repressive actions leads to a reduction in terrorist attacks. … An increase in conciliatory actions has no effect on terrorism.

  
  

  Finally my guess is that this is sort of irrelevant anyway because OP is probably not a senior government official; she may be able to persuade some friends not to go protest, but probably can’t change US policy.

Link: Longter­mist In­sti­tu­tional Reform

• Dale 30 Aug 2020 13:34 UTC

  29 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Some thoughts on the EA Mu­nich //​ Robin Han­son incident

  That said, my impression is that, over time, the EA movement has become more attentive to various kinds of diversity, and more cautious about avoiding public discussion of ideas likely to cause offense. This involves trade-offs with other values.

  I am skeptical of this. The EA survey shows that one of the most under-represented group in EA is conservatives, and I have seen little sign that EAs in general, and CEA in particular, have become more cautious about public discussion that will offend conservatives.

  Similarly, I don’t think there is much evidence of people suppressing ideas offensive to older people, or religious people, even though these are also dramatically under-represented groups.

  I think a more accurate summary would be that as EA has grown, it has become subject to Conquest’s Second Law, and this has made it less tolerant of various views and people currently judged to be unacceptable by SJWs. Specifically, I would be surprised if there was much evidence of EAs/​CEA being more cautious about publicly discussing ‘woke’ views out of fear of offending liberals or conservatives.

Why Don’t We Use Chem­i­cal Weapons Any­more?

• Dale 20 Mar 2021 5:21 UTC

  28 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Please stand with the Asian diaspora

  I’m not sure it is clear that the Atlanta shooting was an incidence of anti-asian prejudice. The shooter himself said this was not a significant part of his motivation, and given that he seems willing to confess to killing people for a crazy reason I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt:

  Long said his actions were not racially motivated, but claims instead to be driven by sex addiction at odds with his religious beliefs.^[9][23][24] According to Sheriff Reynolds, Long wanted to “eliminate the temptation” by targeting day spas.^[24][25] Long said he wanted to “help” others dealing with sex addictions by targeting the spas.

  It is true that many people in the media have suggested this was about the ethnicity of many (but not all) of his victims. But they do not have very strong evidence for this, and I think the lesson from many past tragedies like this is that often people’s first impressions are shown to be mistaken as more facts come to light. To the extent that this story causes an emotional toll on readers, we should partly blame the media here for trying to fit a racial narrative to an event where it is not at all clear it fits.

  Despite the lack of good data, I suspect that it is indeed the case that anti-asian crimes have risen significantly this year. We known that violent crime in general has increased significantly since the BLM protests/​riots of last summer, and that attacks on asians are disproportionately caused by blacks (28% for 2018, the last year we have data, vs just 15% for white and hispanic victims). So my guess is that reductions in policing as a result of the protests have left many asians exposed. Most races are primarily victimised by others of the same race (62% for whites, 70% for blacks), but this is far less true for asians (24%). Presumably it is these inter-racial crimes that asians disproportionately suffer from which either are, or at least are reported as, hate crimes.

  However, I’m not sure in practice there is very much we can directly do about the issue. Trying to reduce crime in the US seems like a very difficult task.

Ide­ol­ogy and Perfor­mance in Public Organizations

• Dale 21 Mar 2021 2:59 UTC

  25 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: jsteinhardt’s comment on: Please stand with the Asian diaspora

  There is a lot of discrimination that isn’t violence.

  This is a good point, and definitely true. One example is the massive discrimination that asians face in college admissions. During the Harvard admissions trial, both sides agreed that asian applicants had generally superior academic and extracurricular credentials to white applicants, and much higher than black applicants, and yet were admitted at significantly lower rates. The university’s defence was that on average asians had inferior personalities, a finding which to my knowledge not supported by academic research, and seems potentially somewhat offensive to asian people.

  What links here?

  • Linch's comment on Please stand with the Asian diaspora by BrownHairedEevee (23 Mar 2021 3:12 UTC; 43 points)

• Dale 27 Oct 2020 2:28 UTC

  25 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: 4 Years Later: Pres­i­dent Trump as a Global Catas­trophic Risk

  I like that you went back and reviewed your predictions. However, this piece could have been better if you had also reviewed the ways in which Trump has been better than you expected.

  For example, under ‘Authoritarianism’ you list the election of some authoritarian and anti-globalist leaders. But equally there are positive cases—in France Macron, a highly globalist and neoliberal candidate, won the election. Similarly in the UK, the relatively authoritarian May was replaced with the much more libertarian Johnson. This is a far cry from your worries about France exiting the EU and breaking up NATO:

  Le Pen wants France to leave the EU, the euro and NATO. Were that to happen I doubt whether the euro or EU would survive in anything like its current form, and NATO would be put further at risk.

  Similarly, you listed worries about social progress:

  Third, social progress is important. One of the reasons to prevent global catastrophes, aside from saving lives, is to ensure that the future is better than the past. Under the liberal global order the world has had unusually positive scientific, technological, and social progress since WWII. Improvements include the spread of democracy; the rise of tolerance for religious, ideological, and philosophical diversity; the civil rights movement; the rise of women’s equality and feminism; the increase in per capita incomes; and the lowest levels of per capita violence in human history. We should want these trends to continue. We should want the world to move in an anti-authoritarian direction not just because it is safer, but because that is a better future.

  Many of these things have improved under Trump. For example, a Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice wrote a decision extending anti-discrimination rights to transsexuals. The US murder rate fell from 5.4 under Obama in 2016 to 5.0 in 2019 (source). The Trump administration is (trying to) promote religious freedom. Per capita income has risen (at least pre-covid).

  You spend a lot of time text worrying that Trump might use nuclear weapons:

  There are three risks associated with nuclear weapons.

  First is simply that Trump uses nuclear weapons – either in a Cuban Missile Crisis situation or in a ‘limited’ way.

  ...

  But he has not done so. In fact, he has generally been quite pacifistic: the Wikipedia list of US Wars does not list a single one starting during his administration, unlike most (all?) previous presidents.

  Despite this and your worries about the decline of Pax Americana, in some ways the situation seems better than before. For example, Russia invaded Ukraine during the Obama Administration, despite a US commitment to protect Ukraine. Under Trump I do not think Russia has invaded anywhere.

  Similarly, you worried that he might cause other countries might try to get nukes:

  Trump has made statements that have been interpreted as encouraging Saudi Arabia to do so. … Trump has made statements that have been interpreted as encouraging Japan and South Korea to do so.

  Again I am not aware of any of these countries acquiring any nuclear weapons, or even making significant progress.

  You worried that he might start a public bioweapon program that could undermine the international stigma against their use:

  I also think Trump would be less hesitant to use or develop biological weapons. Were he to start developing them – let alone use them – it would strongly undermine norms against them.

  To my knowledge he has not done this.

  In some cases Trump has been bad, but for the opposite reason than you were worried about! For example you criticized him for supporting travel bans during Ebola:

  He reacted poorly to the Ebola outbreak – exaggerating fears and proposing populist solutions.

  Given that covid has turned out to be much more dangerous than the WHO initially said, if he had exaggerated fears this time it would have been much more accurate. Similarly travel bans have been extremely effective with regard covid: they have kept New Zealand and Taiwan basically safe, and the lockdowns that have been employed by virtually all governments are basically internal travel bans. To the extent that Trump responded poorly to covid, it was largely by making the same mistakes he criticized obama for.

• Dale 17 Jul 2020 16:44 UTC

  24 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Sys­temic change, global poverty erad­i­ca­tion, and a ca­reer plan re­think: am I right?

  I doubt it will be a fringe view on this forum that Western colonialism tended to cripple poor countries’ economies, or that certain European and US interventions (like the Iraq War) led to huge devastation.

  You’re right that this is not a fringe view, and it is probably one of the more mainstream views Hickel has. However, I do not think that it is obviously true. Poor countries suffered many disadvantages from colonialism, but also gained many advantages, like education, infrastructure, and more advanced legal systems. The earliest western colonialism seemed quite brutal and destructive, like the Spanish in South America, but the later kinds were much more benign, ultimately culminating in extremely beneficial British rule over Hong Kong. There are clearly some parts of the world that have ended up very rich as a direct result of colonial rule, like the US, Canada, Australia or Hong Kong. Within sub-Saharan Africa, the area that was colonized the longest (South Africa) is also the richest, and the only part of Africa that wasn’t colonized (Ethiopia) is no richer than most other sub-Saharan African countries. Whether this colonization was beneficial on net is an empirical question; the only paper I have seen with an even vaguely credible methodology is this one on shipping islands:

  Using a new database of islands throughout the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans we examine whether colonial origins affect modern economic outcomes. We argue that the nature of discovery and colonization of islands provides random variation in the length and type of colonial experience. We instrument for length of colonization using wind direction and wind speed. Wind patterns which mattered a great deal during the age of sail do not have a direct effect on GDP today, but do affect GDP via their historical impact on colonization. The number of years spent as a European colony is strongly positively related to the island’s GDP per capita and negatively related to infant mortality. This basic relationship is also found to hold for a standard dataset of developing countries. … The timing of the colonial experience seems to matter. Time spent as a colony after 1700 is more beneficial to modern income than years before 1700, consistent with a change in the nature of colonial relationships over time.

  You’re definitely right that condemning the Iraq war is far from a fringe view, but honesty compels again me to object. While I think the Iraq war was a mistake, it must be noted that as late as 2006 it seems the majority of Iraqis actually thought the war was a good idea, even after seeing 3 years of poorly-administered aftermath:

  A majority of Iraqis (61%) still believe that ousting Saddam Hussein was worth the hardships they might have suffered, but this is down from the 77 percent who said this in January.

  I haven’t checked this, but it seems quite plausible to me that in 2006 the war was actually more popular in Iraq than it was in the west!
  
  Additionally, it’s also important to note that Iraq’s GDP has grown dramatically since the war. In 2002 it was around $19bn; by 2012 it was apparently almost 10x higher at around $218 (and has remained around this level since). They benefited from a rise in the oil price, of course, but I don’t think that can explain everything, and oil prices have fallen again now anyway. Their unemployment rate also apparently fell from around 9-10% pre-war to around 8% now.
  
  More pertinently from your case, the invasion of Iraq was clearly quite an unusual situation. In the 17 years since we have not seen another similar invasion by western powers, partly because western governments have little desire to repeat the expensive war + subsequent nation-building process. Most poor countries have not seen a conflict similar to the Iraq war, and probably will not (if nothing else they rarely pretend to have WMDs!); civil wars are much more common. As such I don’t think the Iraq war experience has much read-through to your ultimate question how how effective farm equipment rental programs in sub-Saharan Africa will be.

  A different scenario to contrast the Iraq experience with would be the English invasion of Sierra Leone in 2000. Unlike Iraq, Sierre Leone is the sort of extremely poor country that EAs typically consider health and poverty interventions in, and the military intervention was extremely successful:

  The rebel forces were scared away from the city, the UN got off its knees and the government army was revitalised. Eighteen months later, Sierra Leone’s 11-year civil war was brought to an end. In the streets of Freetown at the time the graffiti read: “Queen Elizabeth for king!” and “Return to us our colonial mother!” Tony Blair remains more popular here than anywhere else on the planet. He still visits the country every couple of years, and officials from his office are seconded into the finance and health ministries. Several Sierra Leoneans said they would personally campaign for Blair to be the country’s president. A young Freetown documentary-maker, Arthur Pratt, told me: “We think we are to him as a favourite child.”

  Now, the intervention in Sierra Leone was unusual in how well it went. But I don’t think you can consider unusually bad interventions like Iraq without also considering unusually good interventions as well.
  

• Dale 26 Jan 2021 19:27 UTC

  23 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Sarah Eustis-Guthrie’s comment on: Why I’m con­cerned about Giv­ing Green

  I think you have missed one clear downside: that increasing partisanship will make any action that is passed worse. There have been some clear examples historically of where the association of climate change with left wing politics has been a negative:

  • The demonisation of nuclear, which has lead to an increase in coal usage in Germany.

  • The rejection of a carbon tax in Washington State because it was not ‘progressive’ enough, and similar moves in many other states.

  • The inclusion of terrible policies in the ‘Green New Deal’, like banning air travel (which was eventually removed after criticism from conservatives).

  • Inability to reduce emissions when this conflicted with the interests of unions.

  Including more conservatives and moderates in policy design, and marginalizing extreme left-wing groups, could help both improve the prospects for passing policy and result in better policy. We have strong evidence this is the case—look at the example of the UK, where the conservative-led coalition and then conservative majority government has made climate change a significant focus, partly because they were able to ‘reclaim’ the issue.

  What links here?

  • alex lawsen (previously alexrjl)'s comment on Why I’m con­cerned about Giv­ing Green by alex lawsen (previously alexrjl) (2 Feb 2021 22:38 UTC; 13 points)

• Dale 8 Sep 2020 19:28 UTC

  23 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: EricHerboso’s comment on: Some thoughts on the EA Mu­nich //​ Robin Han­son incident

  Surely there exists a line at which we agree on principle. Imagine that, for example, our EA spaces were littered with people making cogent arguments that steel manned holocaust denial, and we were approached by a group of Jewish people saying “We want to become effective altruists because we believe in the stated ideals, but we don’t feel safe participating in a space where so many people commonly and openly argue that the holocaust did not happen.”

  In this scenario, I hope that we’d both agree that it would be appropriate for us to tell our fellow EAs to cut it out.

  I agree with your conclusion about this instance, but for very different reasons, and I don’t think it supports your wider point of view. It would be bad if EAs spent all the time discussing the holocaust, because the holocaust happened in the past, and so there is nothing we can possible do to prevent it. As such the discussion is likely to be a purely academic exercise that does not help improve the world.

  It would be very different to discuss a currently occurring genocide. If EAs were considering investing resources in fighting the Uighur genocide, for example, it would be very valuable to hear contrary evidence. If, for example, we learnt that far fewer people were being killed than we thought, or that the CCP’s explanations about terrorism were correct, this would be useful information that would help us prioritize our work. Equally, it would be valuable to hear if we had actually under-estimated the death toll, for exactly the same reasons.

  Similarly, Animal Rights EAs consider our use of factory farming to be a modern holocaust, far larger than any prior. But debate about this is a perfectly acceptable EA topic—even on debate around subjects like ‘but do the victims (animals) have moral value?’

  Or again, pro-life activists consider our use of abortion to be a modern holocaust, far larger than any prior. But debate about this is a perfectly acceptable EA topic—even on debate around subjects like ‘but do the victims (fetuses) have moral value?’

  It might be the case that people make a dedicated ‘Effective Liberation for Xinjiang’ group, and intend to discuss only methods there, not the fundamental premise. But if they started posting about the Uighurs in other EA groups, criticism of their project, including its fundamental premises, would be entirely legitimate.

  I think this is true even if it made some hypothetical Uighur diaspora members of the group feel ‘unsafe’. People have a right to actual safety—clearly no-one should be beating each other up at EA events. But an unlimited right to ‘feel safe’, even when this can only be achieved by imposing strict (and contrary to EA) restrictions on others is clearly tyrannical. If you feel literally unsafe when someone makes an argument on the internet you have a serious problem and it is not our responsibility (or even within our power) to accommodate this. You should feel unsafe while near cliff edges, or around strange men in dark allys—not in a debate. Indeed, if feeling ‘unsafe’ is a trump card then I will simply claim that I feel unsafe when people discuss BLM positively, due to the (from my perspective) implied threat of riots.

  The analogy here I think is clear. I think it is legitimate to say we will not discuss the Uighur genocide (or animal rights, or racism) in a given group because they are off-topic. What is not at all legitimate is to say that one side, but not the other, is forbidden.

  Finally, I also think your strategy is potentially a bit dishonest. We should not hide the true nature of EA, whatever that is, from newcomers in an attempt to seduce them into the movement.

• Dale 27 Mar 2021 1:14 UTC

  22 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: Progress Open Thread: March 2021

  The version of “kind” I’m thinking of doesn’t just encompass “not insulting people”, but covers other everyday aspects of the word. The relevant one here is: “Don’t insinuate that a given member of a certain group is likely to be dangerous, to the point that you don’t recommend people interact closely with them.

  This seems like quite a strange policy. You’re clearly diverging from Scott’s policy in a big way: he is talking about being nice to other commenters (form), but you have some major content-based assumptions baked in.

  Indeed, your approach is in some cases the exact opposite of Scott’s approach!

  Consider a scenario where you are a native of a third world country, and a fellow EA is going to come visit. This person, while well intentioned, is generally quite naive, so you are keen to look out for their welfare. Alas! Shortly before they arrive, you find out they have booked accommodation in an extremely dangerous part of town, where murder, rape and kidnapping are common, and the police fear the gangs. Your country doesn’t have good statistics for this area (as no-one reports crimes to the police), so you can’t prove this to her, yet it is surely the kind thing to warn her of this, and encourage her to rent in a different part of the city. In doing so you are indeed insinuating that a certain group is likely to be dangerous, and encouraging ther hem to avoid contact—but this is the kind thing to do! Staying silent is the socially easy way out, but it does nothing to help your friend. Sacrificing your social standing and reputation to speak uncomfortable truths for the sake of a welfare of someone you have never met is surely the height of kindness.

  A couple of times in your comment you discuss the danger of stereotypes. Unfortunately I think this shows a very prejudiced (if you will forgive the pun) view of stereotypes. Actually, research suggests that stereotypes are generally very accurate:

  Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. Richard et al (2003) found that fewer than 5% of all effects in social psychology exceeded r’s of .50. In contrast, nearly all consensual stereotype accuracy correlations and about half of all personal stereotype accuracy correlations exceed .50.[1]

  Finally, you suggested this:

  For example, under the standard you seem to be suggesting, you could have gone on in your comment to speculate about the safest gender, race, national origin, and IQ of child to adopt. Even if these were all just “inferences”, I can’t imagine them improving the quality of discussion, because I’ve never seen the internet work that way.

  Actually, this is a great point, and one that I think more supports my argument. One thing that it is very important for adoptive families in the US to be aware of are the issues around adopting Native American children. Because of special laws, you run the risk of the child being taken away from you long after you have taken them into your home, in a way that would not be legally possible for a non-native-american child. As a result of this I would indeed recommend parents take race into account when adopting inside the US, insomuchas they should be extra careful with native children. It is important to be able to discuss this; it’s a significant risk and one we shouldn’t cover up, even if some people might find the topic politically uncomfortable.

• Dale 24 Mar 2021 4:00 UTC

  21 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: AnonymousEAForumAccount’s comment on: Re­sponses and Tes­ti­monies on EA Growth

  For this to be the explanation presumably intra-EA conflict would not merely need to be driving people away, but driving people away at higher rates than it used to. It’s not clear to me why this would be the case.

  It’s also worth noting that highly engaged EAs are quite close socially. It’s possible that many of those 178 people might be thinking of the same people!

• Dale 9 Sep 2020 1:42 UTC

  21 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: abrahamrowe’s comment on: Some thoughts on the EA Mu­nich //​ Robin Han­son incident

  I didn’t downvote it, though probably I should have. But it seems a stretch to say ‘one guy who works for a weird organization that is supposedly EA’ implies ‘congregation’. I think that would have to imply a large number of people. I would be very disappointed if I had a congregation of less than ten people.

  JoshYou also ignores important hedging in the linked comment:

  Bennett denies this connection; he says he was trying to make friends with these white nationalists in order to get information on them and white nationalism. I think it’s plausible that this is somewhat true.

  So instead of saying

  We’ve already seen white nationalists congregate in some EA-adjacent spaces.

  It would be more fair to say

  We’ve already seen one guy with some evidence he is a white nationalist (though he somewhat plausibly denies it) work for a weird organization that has some EA links.

  Which is clearly much less worrying. There are lots of weird ideologies and a lot of weird people in California, who believe a lot of very incorrect things. I would be surprised if ‘white nationalists’ were really high up on the list of threats to EA, especially given how extremely left wing EA is and how low status they are. We probably have a lot more communists! Rather, I think the highlighting of ‘White Nationalists’ is being done for ideological reasons—i.e. to cast shade on more moderate right wing people by using a term that is practically a slur. I think the grandparent would not have made such a sloppy comment had it not been about the hated outgroup.

Blind Spots: Compartmentalizing

Does Bail Re­form In­crease Crime?

• Dale 26 Jan 2021 20:27 UTC

  20 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: BrianTan’s comment on: (Autis­tic) vi­sion­ar­ies are not nat­u­ral-born leaders

  In general on this forum we seek to encourage people to adopt a ‘Scout Mindset’:

  “The drive not to make one idea win or another lose, but to see what’s there as honestly and accurately as you can.”

  Clarity about what you believe, your reasons for believing it, and what would cause you to change your mind.

  Note that this does not require you to have ‘definitive’ proof of something. This would be an unreasonable standard in general, but especially so here, because even if these individuals had been diagnosed (which many autists are not), there is no particular reason to expect them to have shared the diagnosis publicly!

  Instead, calling them autistic represents a reasonable summary of Guzey’s views, and is I think a pretty reasonable position. I think if you showed the average person some videos of early Musk or Page (before they got coaching) they would agree the behavior was pretty autistic. This has been often remarked upon—e.g. here.

  What’s more, this is important to Guzey’s point. He is not claiming that all visionaries are poor leaders, so your suggested edit would be inaccurate. He is specifically claiming that one type of visionary makes a poor leader, so the qualification is important.