This question is answered a couple of sentences after the bit you’ve quoted: “One of them was contacted but didn’t have time to give feedback, and was incorrectly credited in the acknowledgements, which we will change in future editions: this was an honest mistake.”
Matis
Karma: 666
Another falsehood to add to the list of corrections the Bulletin needs to make to the article. In the article, Torres writes,
And in the acknowledgments section, he lists 30 scientists and an entire research group as having been consulted on “climate change” or “climate science.” I wrote to all the scientists MacAskill thanked for providing “feedback and advice,” and the responses were surprising.
However, one of those scientists, Peter Watson, has recently tweeted that Torres did not contact him about the Bulletin article. Torres responds to this claim with an irrelevant question.
As you can see below, Peter Watson is indeed one of the climate scientists who was thanked. If Watson is correct, then the Bulletin needs to correct Torres’s claim to have contacted all the climate scientists who were acknowledged in the book.
[edit: I originally wrote and highlighted”Andrew Watson” instead of Peter Watson. Peter Watson, as you can see below, is also acknowledged]
I think that anonymity encouraged/enabled the negligence and was for that reason and to that extent bad. That’s different from trying to harass Torres. Any malice or negligent defamation has been towards Cremer and Kemp.
I was just saying that a major reason Throwaway151 could reasonably desire anonymity is Torres’s verifiable track record (see other comments on this post) of harassment. So anonymity is less evidence of ill intent than it would otherwise be. Of course, if Throwaway151 has in fact harassed Torres on Twitter as Torres claims, that is terrible. (I maintain that nothing Throwaway151 has done on the Forum constitutes harassment of Torres.)
Related small point: I think you mean “years worth of Torres’s menacing behavior”, not “years worth of Torres’s falsehoods”. As far as I can tell there aren’t actually any lies in that thread, just unnerving behavior.
Tobias, I think you are absolutely correct. But I will note that this is a well-worn pattern:
Given a long list of tweets and articles that make it quite obvious that Torres is deliberately and repeatedly construing everything ever written or said by longtermists in order to make them appear maximally sinister and dangerous and racist, Torres protests that they have never actually written the sentence “Toby Ord is a white supremacist”.
Rather, Torres is using the scholarly definition of white supremacy, not the every day definition. In this way there’s always plausible deniability that Torres is waging a relentless campaign to portray (e.g.) the founders of Giving What We Can as racists. It’s a classic motte-and-bailey.
Please note also that this “throwaway” account was created just this month.
My prior is that the reason Throwaway151 posted under a new anonymous account is not that they want to harass you. Rather, it’s that there is public evidence that you yourself harass (evidence: your exchanges with Peter Boghossian) those who you perceive to be your enemies. Anonymity is not ideal but it’s understandable given your history, in my opinion, even if you’ve admitted to and apologized for some of this past conduct.
Again, it goes without saying that none of this would justify Throwaway151 harassing you in turn, but I see no evidence that that has happened.
If by “share misleading and out-of-context screenshots about someone” you are referring to the screenshots posted above, I disagree strongly with this characterization. From what I can tell, the screenshots are not misleading, and the additional context you provided doesn’t change what I take away from the screenshots: you have a history of online interactions with perceived enemies that are reasonably construed as menacing and upsetting.
In addition, the screenshot Halstead shared strongly adds to this impression.
It is available, there is just a typo such that there is a period included at the end of the hyperlink. Just take off the period.
Are you, as a community, okay with people creating anonymous Twitter accounts and anonymous EA Forum accounts to share misleading and out-of-context screenshots about someone?
I am confident I speak for the community when I say: no, absolutely not. If you are being harassed on Twitter, by Throwaway151 or by anyone else, that is wrong and unacceptable. I’d be especially angry and concerned if Twitter harassment is coming from EAs, and I emphatically condemn any such behavior.
Harassment on social media should warrant being banned from this website, especially when the harasser continues to conceal their identity.
I agree, and I expect the moderation team to take action if they have sufficient compelling evidence that this is in fact what has happened.
To recall, what you tweeted was this: “We had already finished a penultimate draft of the paper. I was removed. Forcibly. So much for academic freedom”
Did you or did you not, at the time, have definite evidence of being “removed forcibly” after the penultimate draft? It strains credulity that you could have been “misremembering” that this happened.
(a) To be honest, I doubt that there could be a “context” that would make your email look anything other than menacing and stalkerish. But I would be happy to hear what that context is. That is a pretty serious charges and I don’t want to update on misleading or selective evidence.
You are defending yourself against something I did not accuse you of.
I claimed that what you do is insinuation. This indeed implies precisely what you have just claimed: that you never directly write “X is a white supremacist” or “X is a racist”.
You constantly retreat to the alleged fact that you have never said these things explicitly, which is why I was careful with my words.
It’s not a “wild accusation”, it’s a reasonable characterization of very many tweets and articles of yours about figures in longtermism and EA. Have a nice day.
It would be very helpful at this point to hear more info about the timeline of the paper review process and Torres’s involvement from Cremer, Kemp. Or one of the many reviewers (though I wouldn’t begrudge reviewers wanting to steer clear of a messy issue like this)
There’s also the question of online harassment. People I trust say that Torres has engaged in menacing online behavior against EAs. I have not seen evidence of this.
But this is made plausible by the fact that Torres verifiably engaged in borderline-harassment or harassment, back when Torres was having a (very similar!) conversion-away-from + crusade-of-slander against New Atheism. The evidence for that can be found publicly (making multiple Twitter accounts to get around Peter Boghossian blocking him, emailing Peter Boghossian to menacingly say he is going to show up to his class). This past track record alone is good reason to not work with Torres, in my opinion.
There is a fairly clear m.o. and no reason to think it won’t keep happening.
I for one would not support a norm of second-degree shunning, i.e. shunning people who don’t shun Torres. I wouldn’t shun people who write papers with them. This may be too lenient of me, but I wouldn’t like that precedent.
That said, I definitely am in favor of shunning Torres and think you should too. Not because Torres has made harsh criticisms of EA that I consider incorrect, but because they repeatedly tell blatant lies while doing so (and just lies in general, about unrelated things). That’s what I think should be disqualifying.
I wonder if you are still friendly with Torres because you don’t know about (or don’t agree that there is) any cases of outright lying, as opposed to the kinds of insinuation and defamation that Torres’s very-recently-adopted ideological stance can (imo, in some cases) encourage.
I think “don’t lie” (and its corollary “don’t lie about people on social media and in popular articles”) is one of the most important community norms, which Torres is constantly, flagrantly violating.
I should be clear: my understanding is that if Torres was indeed involved, then it was not as an anonymous author or anything, and that knowing Torres was involved would explain some of why people might have been negative about the project.
(As would the probable fact that, if Torres was involved, earlier versions of the paper were more hostile in tone).
If Torres was an anonymous collaborator the whole time, then I wouldn’t really care if Cremer and Kemp never disclosed that fact. Because it wouldn’t be relevant for drawing conclusions from the alleged pushback that the project got.
I think this is muddying issues somewhat. The question of whether Torres’s involvement should have been disclosed is not about anonymity norms. (It’s not like Torres was trying to avoid Forum rules or anything in co-authoring the academic paper ‘Democratising Risk’.)
The question is whether the (alleged) involvement of Torres should have been disclosed as part of the recounting of the tale of the paper’s reception. Because Torres’s involvement was not disclosed, many people were trying to draw inferences about epistemics and community dynamics in EA while ignorant of a very important fact about why the project might have been getting negative feedback: i.e., that one of the co-authors was [harsh, but all demonstrably true via public evidence] a serial fabulist with a history of harassing and defaming those he disagrees with, and an obviously hostile agenda.
Upvoted in part for the “if it is accurate” qualification—we don’t know if in fact Torres was on the paper, given that our only info comes from an extremely unreliable source (Torres).
(Other admittedly speculative evidence is this tweet )
I think it would be good to get clarification from Cremer or Kemp about this, since as I have said it seems like a key piece of information.
“Your interpretation that they weren’t concerned with painting an accurate picture hinges on Torres’ involvement being key information about the situation.” I think this is true.
Here’s why I think it’s a key piece of information, I’m curious where you disagree:
The post was meant to give us important information about the epistemics and character of various reviewers in EA.
If some reviewers reacted overly-negatively to a paper by Torres Kemp and Cremer, that’s less troubling than if reviewers reacted negatively to a paper by Kemp and Cremer. Because it’s much more understandable (even if wrong) to react overly-negatively to a paper that is by someone who has revealed bad intentions, slandered your colleagues, and repeatedly lied.
It also makes some of their questions make more sense, like asking the authors “Do you hate longtermism”?
It seems if you believe (1) then that should affect your (2).
If, as you believe, Cremer and Kemp were deceptive about Torres’s authorship, shouldn’t that make you trust their reporting of the story less?
In the original Cremer post, we get Cremer and Kemp’s own interpretation/summary of a long and complicated process involving many personal conversations and emails and google doc comments.
Their summary is then presented as an important story, a wake-up call for EA culture, which was then debated at length in the comments, including replies from Cremer. All while Forum commenters lacked a pretty key piece of information about how to interpret the story.
If (1) is true then it seems like pretty strong evidence that Cremer and Kemp were not particularly concerned (to say the least!) with presenting an accurate picture of the paper’s reception.
Torres alleges that Cremer and Kemp were forced to remove them from the paper (which I don’t trust for obvious reasons), but even granting that, that doesn’t mean Cremer and Kemp were forced to never mention the fact that Torres was originally a co-author. I basically can’t believe they were “forced” to keep it a secret that Torres was ever involved.
Or even asked! That wouldn’t even make sense for supposedly-censorious “EA elites” to do. If I were a censorious EA elite I would want people to know about Torres’s involvement in the paper.
Oops, thanks. Fixed it to say “Peter Watson”. Fortunately Peter Watson is also in the screencap, so I’m leaving that as is.