I see, we’re just thinking of “combative” differently.
Kelly_Witwicki
Karma: 328
I agree that that qualification suggests his view on the contribution of biology to the gender gap is weaker than his otherwise definitive framings suggest. [Edit: Sentence here removed because I’m too tired and my thoughts are not in order, will get sleep before responding to any more comments. Replacement: He’s still presenting it as a black-and-white issue if he’s only presenting one side.]
Google may have had that conversation on prejudice going, but he is very oversimplistic and offers the essentialist view as so definitive that his solutions are the right ones, that Google is the “biased” party for talking about prejudice, and that it isn’t worth even mentioning that evidence demonstrating a bias against women exists (if he even knows or believes that), not to mention that the evidence for the real-world effect of prejudice is far more vast and robust than his evidence for biological causes. And he does all this when the essentialist view has been so dominant and people are only talking so much about prejudice because they’re trying to overcome the essentialist thinking that so inhibits people. (Sure, there are differences, but there are even more misconceptions, as well as oversimplistic and deterministic assumptions about what real differences mean.)
[Edit for clarification and additional analysis: In a context of prejudice, presenting stereotypes is a delicate matter even if you think them sufficiently biologically valid and are content to make simplistic inferences about their real-world effects. Doing so without acknowledgement of the prejudices people experience which line up with these stereotypes and which harm them serves to reinforce those stereotypes and prejudices.]
So it’s not an appropriate way to contribute to the conversation—at best it’s reacting to perceived overshooting by retreating to a flawed status quo.
Regarding discussion style: I think several EAs are great at discussions where they’re fully critical of each other but aren’t combative (e.g. they don’t raise their voices, go ad hominem, tear apart one aspect of an argument to dismiss the rest, or downvote comments that signal an identity that theirs is constructed in opposition to). I think it’s possible to get all the benefit of criticism and disagreement without negative emotions clouding our judgement.
I think the key may be to work against the impulse to be right, or the impulse that someone who disagrees with you is your enemy. I’m much better than I used to be at seeing disagreement as the route to everyone in the discussion getting closer to the truth, though unfortunately that takes a constant drive to improve. (It does help a lot to just remind myself that the person I’m disagreeing with -- in most cases at least—is on my team in the bigger picture.) Doing more to penalize combative behavior and reward constructive behavior—like how downvotes and upvotes are supposed to be used in this forum—seems like a feasible solution.
Regarding the grab-bag: That was my intention, to get the ball rolling. I hope for others to bring in their own thinking on prioritization and implementation.
Unfortunately since the respondents would be members of the EA community, it would be hard to control that data for cultural fit in order to get at how robustly EA people from each demographic are. People have stuck around in the community for reasons other than how EA they are or can be, as I hope I’ve shed some light on.
Danke schoen :)
The histories of many forms of prejudice are histories biological essentialism and biological determinism. Even if such claims are now made out of a “willingness to explore” alternative hypotheses despite this long history of precisely being an unwillingness to explore the much newer hypothesis of prejudice, they tend to be over-simplistic, as in the memo, and tend to have the effect—if not also the intention—of dismissing the other, newer hypothesis of prejudice, which is robustly supported by data that the memo’s author fails to include.
That’s not to say it’s a black and white matter of total biological similarity or total culturally-imposed disparities and prejudice. That’s what the author of the memo implies, and I disagree. The evidence that prejudice is a major problem that is holding people back is substantial nonetheless.
Some of his suggestions for ways to reduce the gender gap are worth considering, and charitably he’s not exceptionally prejudiced and is able to analyze information that has found its way to him, but is just very poorly informed and has no willingness to explore the alternative explanation of prejudice. At most charitable this still enables that prejudice.
Given the extent of my knowledge, which is just the words in the memo, I can agree he’s not an outright asshole, and I should have phrased my side note about this example of zero tolerance with a heavy hand differently. It may even be a poor example, as I would say corrective action should have been taken in his case before he was fired if it wasn’t, which I don’t know about either way.
I couldn’t find it unfortunately, and was just relying on the veracity of that rather detailed extract and the credibility of the source publication. I considered not putting that in at all since what matters is that the prejudiced view doesn’t seem to have backing, but I figured this was still information, worth a “may be more likely” even if I couldn’t confirm that it’s been demonstrated.
I haven’t thought about prioritization yet, and was hoping other people would discuss that here. Since a lot of these are actions individuals can take, it will vary a lot by what roles an individual plays and what they have the most room for improvement in.
That said… toning down jargon, I suspect you’d agree, is probably pretty cost-effective, as I would think is toning up the visibility of people from underrepresented groups. A Diversity & Inclusion Officer who could review and advise on social media communications, ads, community recruitment, website UX, conference speakers, talk content and descriptions, job postings and hiring processes, etc, and who could establish metrics and goals for and conduct annual reviews on inclusionary practices, sounds easily worth their salary, at the very least as an experiment for a year.
Thanks! I added a note about the debate.
I’m not sure what your comments about critical discussion style are referring to in the post.
I believe sexuality is a demographic we do well on.
I only hold this view weakly, but yes, I’m worried that, as you put it, “E first, A second” people are less likely to stick around.
I don’t think “A first, E second” people are necessarily easier to get in the first place though, as they are more likely to already have a calling (and so to have less personally to gain) and to be committed to other altruistic pursuits that are hard for them to drop as “ineffective.”
That said, I’ve seen significant movement among heavily committed farmed animal advocates towards thinking more about and acting in the interest of maximizing impact… though farmed animal advocates are often already doing that advocacy because they’re already thinking about effectiveness: they see the issue as massively important and very tractable. So I suppose realistically I’m putting most of my investments in people who are A first, but still clearly already E.
That doesn’t seem like what I’m doing. Georgia doesn’t seem to be disagreeing with my post’s overall argument (that EA would benefit from diversity; she actually seems to explicitly agree with that in her last paragraph), and she doesn’t explicitly agree or disagree with the argument of that specific paragraph (that diversity tends to be net beneficial for groups). The quote you cite is about a “clear” effect on groups, from the evidence she evaluates, and I might not have the same bar for robustness that she’s thinking of with that claim.
Moreover, her post argues
If we look at [the effect of diversity] further, we can decompose it into two effects (one where diversity has a neutral or negative impact on performance, and one where it has a mostly positive impact)
and goes onto explore these effects. The negative ones seem related to something like tribalism (e.g. less identification with the group), and I hope the EA community is able to overcome these avoidable downsides so it can on net benefit from diversity. I didn’t mention them in the post because I think we can overcome them given our desire to de-bias ourselves, and given the tools that Georgia mentions we have to overcome them:
The more balanced a team is along some axis of diversity, the less likely you are to see negative effects on performance… recognition of less-obvious cognitive differences (e.g. personality and educational diversity) increases over time… diverse teams end up outperforming non-diverse teams [over time]… the longer a group works together, the less surface-level differences matter
I linked to her whole post so readers could see all of that. Linking directly to the citations I was pointing to in her post would have felt like cherry-picking. I could have given more explanation of her whole post in my own, and if I had spent more time writing this post, I probably would have done that.
[Edit: Georgia made a comment above that suggests she believes the statement without the robustness qualification, so we do have disagreement here.]
I didn’t mean to imply that — I just cited it as a source for the specific claims in that sentence. The other evidence I cite seems to imply it overall, and she doesn’t seem to account for all of that evidence.
I can’t tag here, but Georgia, if you see this I’d be curious for your opinion on how the totality of evidence weighs, particularly in expectation regardless of how robust it is.
Why & How to Make Progress on Diversity & Inclusion in EA
Also, could respondents not say anything about being e.g. Native American, Middle Eastern, or at least “Other”? I’m sure the structure of these questions has been thoroughly discussed in social sciences literature and I don’t think the options shown here are in line with the standard style.
In addition to how people “think” about EA as an “opportunity” or “obligation” (and FYI I for one would have been unclear if I saw both “moral duty” and “obligation”), I’d be interested to see how many people “feel” like EA/A is an obligation as opposed to an opportunity.
I would also be interested to see a question for what value people assign to life on Earth at present.
I imagine for instance this is much higher, and may even be the difference between highly positive and highly negative, for EAs who are most concerned with x-risk as compared to those more interested in animal farming. (And more obviously, s-risk, but it would still be interesting to quantify the difference, if just in terms of e.g. “highly negative” to “highly positive”.)
Seeing how e.g. depression correlates with cause area preferences would be interesting.
The difficulty for movements against discrimination (between humans) in a lot of modern society lies in that definition of what constitutes “clear” discrimination. For instance, people don’t say explicitly discriminatory things as much as they used to, but they still hold discriminatory beliefs that make them e.g. mistrust, discredit and undervalue others, and we can for the most part only assess e.g. hiring bias by looking at whole samples, not at any one individual.