Thanks for writing this <3
Habiba Banu
Karma: 1,228
If you’d like to do something about sexual misconduct and don’t know what to do…
Haha this is a great hypothetical comment!
The concreteness is helpful because I think my take is that, in general, writing something like this is emotionally exhausting (not to mention time consuming!) - especially so if you’ve got skin in the game and across your life you often come up across things like this to respond to and you keep having the pressure to force your feelings into a more acceptable format.
I reckon that crafting a message like that if I were upset about something could well take half a work day. And I’d have in my head all the being upset / being angry / being scared people on the forum would find me unreasonable / resentful that people might find me unreasonable / doubting myself the whole time. (Though I know plausibly that I’m in part just the describing the human condition there. Trying to do things is hard...!)
Overall, I think I’m just more worried than you that requiring comments to be too far in this direction has too much of a chilling effect on discourse and is too costly for the individuals involved. And it really just is a matter of degree here and what tradeoffs we’re willing to make.
(It makes me think it’d be an interesting excerise to write a number of hypothetical comments arrange them on a scale of how much they major on carefully explaining priors, caveating, communicating meta-level intention etc. and then see where we’d draw the line of acceptable / not!)
Just a quick note to say thanks for such a thoughtful response! <3
I think you’re doing a great job here modelling discourse norms and I appreciate the substance of your points!
Ngl I was kinda trepidatious opening the forum… but the reasonableness of your reply and warmth of your tone is legit making me smile! (It probably doesn’t hurt that happily we agree more than I realised. :P )
I may well write a litte more substantial response at some point but will likely take a weekend break :)
P.S. Real quick re social media… Things I was thinking about were phrases from fb like “EAs f’d up” and the “fairly shameful initial response”- which I wondered if were stronger than you were expressing here but probably just you saying the same thing. And in this twitter thread you talk about the “cancel mob”—but I think you’re talking there are about a general case. You don’t have to justify yourself on those I’m happy to read it all via the lens of the comments you’ve written on this post.
I also spent too much time on comments :P
I wanted to say a bit about the “vibe” / thrust of this comment when it comes to community discourse norms...
(This is somewhat informed by your comments on twitter / facebook which themselves are phrased more strongly than this and are less specific in scope )
I suspect you and I agree that we should generally encourage posters to be charitable in their takes and reasonable in their requests—and it would be bad overall for discussions in general where this not the case. Being angry on the internet is often not at all constructive!
However, I think that being angry or upset where it seems like an organisation has done something egregious is very often an appropriate emotional response to feel. I think that the ideal amount of expressing that anger / upset that community norms endorse is non-zero! And yes when people are hurt they may go somewhat too far in what they request / suggest / speculate. But again the optimal amount of “too strong requests” is non-zero.
I think that expressing those feeling of hurt / anger / upset explicitly (or implicitly expressing them through the kinds of requests one is making) has many uses and there are costs to restricting it too much.
Some uses to expressing it:
Conveying the sheer seriousness or importance of the question to the poster. That can be useful information for the organisation under scrutiny about whether / how much people think they messed up (which itself is information about whether / how much they actually messed up). It will lead to better outcomes if organisation in fact get the information that some people are deeply hurt by their actions. If the people who are deeply hurt cannot / do not express this the organisation will not know.
Individuals within a community expressing values they hold dear (and which of those are strong enough to provoke the strongest emotional reaction) is part of how a community develops and maintains norms about behaviour that is / isn’t acceptable.
Some costs to restricting it:
People who have stronger emotional reactions are often closer to the issue. It is very hard when you feel really hurt by something to have to reformulate that in terms acceptable to people who are not at all affected by the thing.
If people who are really hurt by something get the impression from community norms that expressing their hurt is not welcome they may well not feel welcome in the community at all. This seems extra bad if you care about diversity in the community and certain issues affect certain groups more. (E.g. antisemitism, racism, sexism etc.)
If people who are really hurt by something do not post, the discourse will be selected towards people who aren’t hurt / don’t care as strongly. That will systematically skew the discussion towards a specific set of reactions and lead you further away from understanding what people across the community actually think about something.
I think that approaching online discussions on difficult topics is really really hard! I do not think I know what the ideal balance is. I have almost never before participated in such discussions and I’m personally finding my feet here. I am not arguing in favour of carte blanche for people making unreasonable angry demands.
But I want to push back pretty strongly against the idea that people should never be able to post hurt / upset comments or that the comments above seem very badly wrong. (Or that they warrant the things you said on facebook / twitter about EA discourse norms)
P.S. I’m wondering whether you would agree with me for all the above if the organisational behaviour was egregious enough by your / anyone’s lights? [Insert thought experiment here about shockingly beyond the pale behaviour by an organisation that people on the forum express angry comments about]. If yes, then we just disagree on where / how to draw the line not that there is a line at all. If not, then I think we have a more fundamental disagreement about how humans can be expected to communicate online.
I just wanted to chip in to say that this does indeed seem like this has been a very stressful period for the team.
I cannot read their minds but it certainly seems possible to me that part of the reason some folks could find a situation like this stressful is precisely because they felt that some of the objections and critical comments were reasonable.
The statement says in point 8 of the FAQ (my emphasis)
The way we see it, we rejected a grant proposal that deserved to be rejected, and challenging, reasonable questions have been asked as to why we initially considered it and didn’t reject it earlier. We deeply regret that we may have inadvertently compromised the confidence of our community and constituents. This causes us huge distress, as does the idea that FLI or its personnel would somehow align with ideologies to which we are fundamentally opposed. We are working hard to continue improving the structure and process of our grantmaking processes, including more internal and (in appropriate cases) external review. For starters, for organizations not already well-known to FLI or clearly unexceptionable (e.g. major universities), we will request and evaluate more information about the organization, its personnel, and its history before moving on to additional stages.
Maybe this is a super weird thing to say but, were I a staff member at a place affected by this kind of thing, my distress would have been because: I was shocked / upset myself that grant seemed to have nearly been given and I would have been really hurt and shaken by that, confused about what had happened given senior leadership were not able to respond and frustrated I couldn’t get a sooner reply, really disappointed / angry about the initial response from Max Tegmark which seemed poor and didn’t represent the values of an organisation I wanted to work for etc. etc.
I’m absolutely not claiming that anyone at FLI feels like this! But I just wanted to say that just because something was hard for staff, doesn’t necessarily mean it was hard because the critical comments were wrong/misguided.
Hi Rob!
Just a quick note to say I don’t think everything in your comment above is entirely fair characterisation of the comments.
Two specific points (I haven’t checked everything you say above, so I don’t claim this is exhaustive):
I think you’re mischaracterising Shakeel’s 9.18pm response quite significantly. You paraphrased him as saying he sees no reason FLI wouldn’t have released a public statement but that is I think neither the text nor the spirit of that comment. He specifically acknowledged he might be missing some reasons. He said he thinks the lack of response is “very weird” which seems pretty different to me to “I see no reason for this”. Here’s some quoting but it’s so short people can just read the comment :P “Hi Jack — reasonable question! When I wrote this post I just didn’t see what the legal problems might be for FLI… Jason’s comment has made me realise there might be something else going on here, though; if that is the case then that would make the silence make more sense. I do still think it’s very weird that FLI hasn’t condemned Nya Dagbladet though”
You also left out that Shakeel did already apologise to Max Tegmark for in his words “jumping to conclusions” when Max explained a reason for the delay, which I think is relevant to the timeline you’re setting out here.
I think both those things are relevant to how reasonable some of these comments were and to what extent apologies might be owed.
Thanks for this comment :)
For what it’s worth, if people want to see what Adam Rutherford himself thinks of this, he has been fairly forthright in his response on his twitter see:
https://twitter.com/AdamRutherford/status/1613534548779843588?s=20&t=3cy41nQ9L-8MvljHAn9Fog
https://twitter.com/AdamRutherford/status/1614239120552857600
A personal response to Nick Bostrom’s “Apology for an Old Email”
winsome, eh :P
Podcasts with 80k advisors on career planning and how advising can help
omg writing a comment adding another useful thing we can do = the best kind of positive feedback :P thank you! And I’m really pleased that helped!
And yes I think this is definitely another thing we try and do! It can be really helpful to have a call with someone who shares similar values with you especially when the things you’re considering seem less familiar to friends / family. It’s really quite a privilege to sometimes be the first person involved in the EA community that people speak to :)
I think that local EA group leaders / members can play a similar function. Though there’s some nice complementarity − 80k is very keen to connect people up with folks in their local EA community too and I think groups can suggest folks chat to the 80k team.
80,000 Hours wants to talk to more people than ever
This is a very lovely read—the stories about EAG SF and getting the grant are so great! <3
Grateful to have a played a little role in this. Best of luck for the coming year and beyond! :)
I think people’s tastes may vary but I appreciated the humour in this post, thanks :)