Do you happen to have a further breakdown between “EA” and “EA adjacent”?
Kelsey Piper
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New blog: Planned Obsolescence
How oral rehydration therapy was developed
I do not think that bans on a person attending EA events or conferences necessarily should be interpreted as proof that that person was attending them before the ban.
I would expect that in some cases, a person reports “hey, this person acted violently towards me; I have no idea whether they might apply to attend this event, but I want the community health team to know about this so that, should they ever apply, they would be refused.”
Furthermore, lots of people might attend a professional conference who don’t identify with an associated movement or community, and CEA hosts lots of professional events many of which specifically try to attract non-EAs with relevant expertise; it’s not only environmentalists who attend climate change conferences, or only animal rights activists who attend events on the future of agriculture and food! It would be bizarre to me to claim it was proof someone was an environmentalist that they’d been banned from a conference on climate change.
More generally, it seems like a situation where there are bad actors who have been systematically banned from all EA events but who are still harming people at other, non-EA events is very different (in terms of what women should do for our safety) than a situation where bad actors are attending EA events, so I think it’s important for our safety to be clear about which of those situations is what’s happening.
Yeah, I was surprised to see Davis claiming in this comment section that he merely thinks we should combat inappropriate pressure to be polyamorous (which of course we should do!) and of course I want to create space for his views to evolve if they have evolved, but the views he is expressing here are not the views he has routinely espoused in the past, and “I’ve faced backlash for my views” without explaining what the views were does seem disingenuous to me.
Hmm, if Davis had said “I think pressure to be polyamorous has been a problem in the community...” or “I’ve received backlash for speaking out against dynamics surrounding polyamory” then I think I would have reacted differently.
But he said “I think polyamory has been a problem” and “I’ve received backlash for speaking out against polyamory”. He has indeed long been outspoken against polyamory—not against dynamics in polyamory that make the community unwelcoming or unprofessional, against the practice under all circumstances. He has told me at other times that polyamory is inherently immoral and wrong and that no one should ever be polyamorous, which inclined me towards the broader interpretation of what he was trying to say.
I agree many people in the comments do not object to anyone practicing polyamory, but to pressures and dynamics it can create, and those comments did not give me the same reaction. But Davis in particular does think, and has said to me, that my relationships are inherently immoral and that polyamory is never acceptable and I think the wording of his comment reflected that belief of his, and that’s why his framing bothered me when the framing in these other comments (which was focused on specific potential harms) did not bother me.
That seems basically reasonable to me, though it feels operative that you would be acting in your independent capacity as a person with opinions who tries to convince other people that your opinions are correct. I’d be much more uncomfortable with an EA institution that had a ‘talking people out of polyamorous relationships’ department.
I think there are some forms of social pressure which are fine for individuals to apply but which are damaging and coercive if they have formal institutional weight behind them, so calls for “people who agree with me polyamorous relationships are damaging” to advocate for that stance don’t make me uneasy the way calls for “the community” to “handle” those things make me uneasy.
I am very bothered specifically by the frame “I wish we had resolved [polyamory] “internally” rather than it being something exposed by outside investigators.”
I am polyamorous; I am in committed long-term relationships (6 years and 9 years) with two women, and occasionally date other people. I do not think there is anything in my relationships for “the community” to “resolve internally”. It would not be appropriate for anyone to tell me to break up with one of my partners. It would not be appropriate for anyone to hold a community discussion about how to ‘resolve’ my relationships, though of course I disclose them when they are relevant to conflict-of-interest considerations, and go out of my way to avoid such conflicts. I would never ask out a woman who might rely on me as a professional mentor, or a woman who is substantially less professionally established.
There are steps that can be taken, absolutely should be taken, and for the most part to my knowledge have been taken to ensure that professional environments aren’t sexualized and that bad actors are unwelcome. Asking people out or flirting with them in professional contexts should be considered unacceptable. People who engage in a pattern of coercive, harassing, and unwelcoming behavior should be unwelcome as a result. People should have trusted avenues to report misconduct. People should not ask out their employees or anyone they have substantial direct power over.We should talk openly about it when these incidents occur, in order to improve, and we should be fine with those conversations being “external” because the insistence that we resolve things “internally” is to me incredibly inappropriate and associated with handling things badly.
But outside those steps, what would it mean to “handle” my polyamorous relationships? What would “resolving polyamory” look like”? Are we talking about statements from formal organizations about which relationship styles are permissible? Informal social sanction aimed not at misconduct but at anyone in a nontraditional relationship? Why is that something that the ‘community’ should do?
I basically feel the same confusion and dissatisfaction that Josh is expressing here. This is a very big mistake. It doesn’t feel to me like a misunderstanding that would be likely to happen in the normal course of business without several underlying things having gone quite wrong. I don’t feel like I understand how those things went wrong, and so I don’t feel sure they’ve been fixed.
I’m not totally sure what I think the correct market behavior based on knowable information was, but it seems very hard to make the case that a large crash on Feb 20th is evidence of the markets moving “in tandem with rational expectations”.
Almost everyone I knew was concerned with the pandemic going global and dramatically disrupting our lives much sooner than Feb 20th. On January 26th, a post on the EA Forum, “Concerning the Recent 2019-Novel Coronavirus Outbreak”, made the case we should be worried. By a few weeks later than that, everyone I know was already bracing for covid to hit the US. Looking back at my house Discord server, we had the “if we have to go weeks without leaving the house, is there anything we’d run out of? Let’s buy it now” conversation February 6th (which is also when my Vox article about Covid published, in which I quote a source saying“Instead of deriding people’s fears about the Wuhan coronavirus, I would advise officials and reporters to focus more on the high likelihood that things will get worse and the not-so-small possibility that they will get much worse.”)
The late January SlateStarCodex open threads also typically contained 10-20 comments discussing the virus, linking prediction markets, debating the odds of more than 500k deaths and how people in various places should expect disruptions to their daily life. (“‘If everyone involved massively bungles absolutely everything, this would be pretty-bad-but-not-apocalyptic.’, a commentator argued on January 29th.)
In late January/early February, I think attitudes were that the virus was a big deal but still more likely than not to be successfully contained, though people should prepare just in case. I think people with our knowledge state wouldn’t’ve bet confidently on a failure of containment on January 30th (some did, but it wasn’t the median community stance), but the markets would have started moving in that direction steadily from very early in February.
I think financial markets not responding until Feb 20th was a clear case of markets doing substantially worse than the people around me.
I felt a lot of this when I was first getting involved in effective altruism. Two of the things that I think are most important and valuable in the EA mindset—being aware of tradeoffs, and having an acute sense of how much needs to get done in the world and how much is being lost for a lack of resources to fix it—can also make for a pretty intense flavor of guilt and obligation. These days I think of these core elements of an EA mindset as being pieces of mental technology that really would ideally be installed gradually alongside other pieces of mental technology which can support them and mitigate their worst effects and make them part of a full and flourishing life.
Those other pieces of technology, at least for me, are something like:
a conviction that I should, in fact, be aspiring to a full and flourishing life; that any plan which doesn’t viscerally feel like it’ll be a good, satisfying, aspirational life to lead is not ultimately a viable plan; that I may find sources of strength and flourishing outside where I imagined, and that it’d fine if I have to be creative or look harder to find them, but that I cannot and will not make life plans that don’t entail having a good life.
a deep comfort with my own values, some of which are altruistic and some of which are selfish, and with my own failings as a person; the ability to look at myself and see a lot of shortcomings and muddled thinking and mistakes and ways I’ve hurt people and to nonetheless feel love and pride for myself. For me, at least, the reason it hurt to notice I had selfish values was very close to the reason it hurt to notice I’d made a mistake or handled a situation poorly; I had a lot of my self-esteem and my conviction I deserved to be happy and to be loved tied up in high expectations of myself. But of course it’s very damaging to your altruistic endeavors, and to your personal growth, to be unwilling to look at yourself the way you truly are, or to love yourself only for things you won’t always live up to, so I’m actually much stronger and better once I deeply internalized that I am flawed, and that I am selfish, and that I am incoherent and muddled in many ways, and that this is also true of all other humans and we all remain deserving of good lives all the same.
a sense that I am better and a better EA when I’m stronger and happier; that depression and burnout genuinely sap my productivity and my creativity and affect my epistemics; that miserably dragging myself across the finish line actually produces worse results than living a life I take pride in and enjoy deeply; an appreciation for just how much I’m capable of when I’m happy and love my life and love the people around me and love the work I do and don’t have to fight with myself to focus or prioritize.
a healthier relationship to my own motivational system: I used to do a lot of what I think of as ‘dragging my brain across sharp rocks’ to get stuff done. The stuff was aversive; I didn’t want to do it; I hated doing it; I forced myself to do it anyway. This changed how I related to all kinds of tasks, even one that didn’t have to be aversive. I thought of ‘intrinsic motivation’ as basically willpower, the willingness to make myself hurt to get things done. It was hard to imagine doing things out of an uncomplicated, not-internally-coercive interest in making them happen. It took me a long time, and I had the luxury of a home environment and job that made it possible, but I flat-out don’t do that anymore. I do things when I want to do them; when it would take internal coercion and ‘dragging my brain over rocks’ to do things, I don’t do them. (I allow myself to make myself start a thing for a few seconds, to see if it just needed activation energy, but I don’t force myself through things that require ongoing internal making-myself). And it turns out that once I have some trust that doing things won’t be unpleasant and aversive, I do plenty of things, and it’s more achievable to add new things.
For me, this has taken a decade. I don’t think I was particularly good at it, I don’t know that I made all the right tradeoffs in doing it, and I hope it’s faster and better for other people. But I do want people to know that there’s a way of living your values that doesn’t feel fueled by guilt, that it’s possible to be an EA and have a life you just love, and that you should absolutely be aiming to be your strongest and best self rather than the version of yourself who sacrificed the most.
I wonder if Berkeley had a notably high rate of both no-shows and last-minute interest in attending because the FTX crisis two weeks prior probably changed a lot of peoples’ calculus about whether and in what ways they want to be engaged with the EA community/EA network. (Some in the direction of ‘actually I don’t want to attend; I have lost a lot of belief that EA is worthwhile’, and some in the direction of ‘I’ve been trying to make sense of this alone and would particularly benefit from attending discussions and talking with likeminded people’).
A fixed rate of no-shows is much easier to handle than an unprecedented rate, and a predictable surge in interest right before/right after the deadline is much easier to plan for than an unusual one. I’m curious how Berkeley compares to other recent EAGs that way.
I think Asterisk is deliberately trying to look different from Substack, Medium, news sites, etc., rather than doing so accidentally/ as a product of being unaware of how to look like those sites.
Review: What We Owe The Future
My best guess is:
- if you asked SBF “did you know that Kelsey was writing a story for Vox based on your conversation with her, sharing things you said to her in DMs?” the answer would be yes. Again, I sent an email explicitly saying I was writing about this, from my Vox account with a Vox Media Senior Reporter footer, which he responded to.
- if you asked SBF “is Kelsey going to publish specifically the parts of the conversation that are the most embarrassing/look bad”, the answer would be no.
- if you asked me “is SBF okay with this being published”, I think I would have said “I know he knows I’m writing about it and I’m pretty damn sure he knows how “on the record” works but he’s probably going to be mad about the tone and contents”.
I agree that it would be bizarre and absurd to believe, and disingenuous to claim, “Sam thought Kelsey would make him look extremely bad, and was okay with this”.
I believed that SBF thought not that the conversation was secret but that the coverage would be positive.
Some thoughts about this—
I genuinely thought SBF spoke to me with the knowledge I was a journalist covering him, knew we were on the record, and knew that an article quoting him was going to happen.*** The reasons I thought that were:
- I knew SBF was very familiar with how journalism works. At the start of our May interview I explained to him how on the record/off the record works, and he was (politely) impatient because he knew it because he does many interviews.
- I knew SBF had given on the record interviews to the New York Times and Washington Post in the last few days, so while it seemed to me like he clearly shouldn’t be talking to the press, it also seemed like he clearly was choosing to do so for some reason and not at random. Edited to add: additionally, it appears that immediately after our conversation concluded he called another journalist to talk on the record and say among other things that he’d told his lawyer to “go fuck himself” and that lawyers “don’t know what they’re talking about”. I agree it is incredibly bizarre that Sam was knowingly saying things like this on the record to journalists.
- Obviously SBF’s communications right now are going to be subpoenaed and presented in court. I can still get why he might not want them in the news, but that does seem like a significant constraint on how private he expected them to be. If we’d talked over Signal I’d feel differently.
- When I emailed him “hey! Writing about what you said happened and your plans now. Just wanted to confirm you still have access to your Twitter account and that isn’t a troll or something- Kelsey Piper, Vox Media”, it seemed possible to me that he would claim it was a troll, or decline to answer, or ask me to take the interview retroactively off the record (which by journalism norms I am not obliged to do, but I would probably have worked with him to at least some degree—there are complicated moral tradeoffs in both directions, at that point!). But he didn’t, which I thought was because he was okay with my writing a story about our conversation.
With all that said, I was less careful with SBF than I am with most people. With most people, if it seemed possible they were under seriously mind-altering substances, I’d hesitate to interview them. If I was not completely sure they understood they might appear in press, I would remind them, and maybe even at particularly salacious quotes ask “okay to quote you on that?” Not all journalists do that, but I don’t want to hurt people, and I don’t want to be untrustworthy to people.But in this case it felt to me like I had significant duties in the other direction—to get answers that made sense, if there were any, to the question of how this happened and (though as expected this did not have a thrilling answer) where the money was. A $10billion missing funds situation is just very very very different and much larger than most situations, and I think the right place on that tradeoff is also different.
I don’t think (as we all fret about these days) that the ends justify the means, or that it’s okay to break commitments of confidentiality as long as you have a good enough reason. I think I do believe that it’s okay to not be as proactive about commitments of confidentiality, not work as hard to remind people that they probably should want confidentiality when they seem perfectly happy to talk to you, when something happened to ten billion dollars.
I think it might be good if journalists had something like the Miranda warnings, where if you want to quote someone you have to first explicitly with established language warn them how journalism works and how to opt out, and if you failed to warn them then you don’t get to quote them. I think I would sign on to make that a norm of journalism. But it isn’t, and so I’m just balancing a lot of things that all seem important.
It seems possible that SBF thought that as a person involved in EA I wouldn’t hurt him, another person involved in EA. I don’t think that would be the right approach. It is not my job to protect EA, and that’s not what I do. It’s my job to try to make the world a better place through saying true things on topics that really really matter. I share values and priorities with many of you here, but my job comes with obligations and duties on top of those, and I think it’s overall good for the world that that’s so.
With all that said—I never intend to take a subject by surprise in publishing, and thought I had not done so. I wish that had happened differently, though I think I had serious professional obligations to write about this conversation.
*** This is edited. The original said ‘I genuinely thought SBF was comfortable with our interview being published and knew that was going to happen’, which is as written kind of absurd—obviously he didn’t want the mean stuff in print—so I’m trying to be clearer about what specifically I thought he understood and what specifically I thought he knew.
I think we added alt text to all screenshots in the piece and if we missed one let us know.
We’re aiming for a pretty high post volume, enough that I assumed we shouldn’t cross-post all posts, but if there were a ton of demand for that we could probably reconsider.