Also worth noting that I’d mentioned our original collaboration to many people in the community prior to that tweet. This isn’t new information.
philosophytorres
Karma: −525
To be clear, everything they complain about was after I left the project (so far as I know). I was as surprised as anyone else to read Zoe’s EA Forum post—I hadn’t even seen a draft of it, and didn’t know she’d written it. Their complaints had nothing to do with me having worked on an early draft of the paper!
“-insinuating that various longtermists hold white supremacists views”
Give me one example of this. I have always explicitly maintained, along with Mitchell and Chaudhury, the following:
“Whiteness is remarkable in its ability to render itself invisible to those who possess and benefit from it. Many, if not most, of the (often liberal humanitarian) authors of ‘end of the world’ discourses seem unaware of its integral influence on their thinking, and would almost certainly be horrified at the thought of their work entrenching racialized injustices. We are not suggesting that these authors espouse explicit, intentional and/or extreme racist ideals, on which much public discussion by white people of racism tends to focus.7 Nor do we wish to homogenize or present as equivalent all of the viewpoints discussed in this paper, which display a range of expressions of whiteness and levels of awareness thereof.”
I have never once said “X is a white supremacist” or “X is a racist.” Not once. EA Forum moderators: ask people to support their wild accusations or delete these comments. Thanks.
EA Forum moderators take note: I believe the individual above is the same who created these two Twitter accounts just a few days ago, both of which were used to harass me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1569401706999595009. I have screenshots of many of our exchanges if you’d like. Harassment on social media should warrant being banned from this website, especially when the harasser continues to conceal their identity. Please act.
(EDIT: Please note also that this “throwaway” account was created just this month. 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? If so, I’ll make a note of it.)
(a) This is taken out of context. (b) My “prank” was intended to mimic precisely what these far-right trolls were doing. (c) I realized in retrospect that stooping to their level was no good. (d) I repeatedly, publicly, and honestly apologized for acting like them (in this one particular case; it was the only time I did anything like this). (e) I continue to apologies for the momentary lapse of judgment. I am sorry for it. I thought it would be funny to mimic them, but I think I was wrong. (f) Michael Shermer has been accused by many women of harassment, assault, and r*pe. I mentioned that in a Salon article, and he went ballistic. No one should trust what he says about me. This is not good epistemics.
Thank you for correcting the record, Zoe, and my apologies if I’d misremembered some of this. I am more than happy to update on the information provided. (Also consulting with a few others who were somewhat involved in this whole process, i.e., who knew what was going on from the inside, to see what they remember.)
“At this point, Torres had been banned from the EA Forum, they had called many people in the community white supremacists, racists, eugenicists and genocidal, and many people in the community had accused them of harassment.”
First of all, here I am.Second, could you provide a single example of me calling someone a “white supremacist” or a “racist”? Please, I’d love to see that. A single example: “X is a white supremacist,” or “X is a racist.”
Third, I have indeed connected Bostrom’s transhumanism with eugenics, because there is an obvious, demonstrable, straightforward connection. Want me to provide citations? There’s been a lot published in the technical literature on this issue.
Finally, as for genocidal, I’m making the very same point that Olle Haggstrom (Here Be Dragons) and Peter Singer (“Hinge of History”) have made. But you wouldn’t accuse either of them of calling you longtermists names, would you? Or maybe you would, in which case, add their names to the above.
No one has accused me of “harassment,” so far as I know; if someone has, provide evidence of the supposed harassment (there is no such evidence). To the contrary, I’ve accused John Halstead of defamation and harassment. I asked EA Forum moderators to fact-check Halstead’s outrageous claims; they refused. So much for intellectual honesty.
EA Forum moderators: please ask for evidence of these claims. If none is provided, delete this post immediately, or require the user to modify their claims to make them ACCURATE. Thanks.
So funny to me that this has “-14” right now. What are people downvoting—scholarship? Me having consulted relevant experts? Does anyone want to explain?
That I didn’t know about, Sean, nor did you mention it. If you look at my profile, it hasn’t been updated in years. (It says that I still write for Motherboard and live in Carrboro, which haven’t been the case for years.)
You repeatedly lied if your comments above. Unprofessional. I don’t know how you can keep your job while lying about a colleague like that. I will delete the LinkedIn profile immediately. I honestly didn’t even remember that I had it. Had you mentioned it earlier, of course I would have
Your malicious behavior here is unacceptable. I have been nothing but willing to apologize, concede points, reconsider ideas, and change my views in response to you. When you’ve been rude and hurtful to me, and I’ve asked for an apology, you’ve refused.
[Apologies for getting mad. But the truth is, being lied about is upsetting, and as a human being, it would be odd if I weren’t hurt.]
Haydn, Michael Plant, etc. etc. I am happy to release screenshots of everything to show that Sean is lying. Over and over again, above, he lies. Here is proof of his lie about about me “misrepresenting [myself] as working at CSER on various media (unclear if deliberate or not).” I absolutely did no such thing! The only medium this was an issue on was FB, and I corrected it immediately (although there was some delay, for reasons I don’t understand) with an explicit apology (because, I say in the screenshot from 2019, I genuinely, honestly didn’t realize that it still says “works at”). Indeed, throughout our exchanges, I am repeatedly open and receptive to criticisms, constantly hedging, frequently apologizing, while Sean is, well, not exactly the interlocutor I’d hoped. Ask me about any of his silly, hurtful accusations above and I’ll address them with verifiable evidence. What is wrong with this community? https://c8df8822-f112-4676-8332-ad89713358e3.filesusr.com/ugd/d9aaad_d37202b3a9014315ba15d1220421d682.pdf (Check timestamps, please. I think one screenshot is out of order—apologies for that.)
How can someone lie this much about a colleague and still have a job?
(Sorry for cursing. The dishonest rancor of Sean is just pretty hard to deal with.)
I am trying to stay calm, but I am honestly pretty f*cking upset that you repeatedly lie in your comments above, Sean. See here for a screenshot: https://c8df8822-f112-4676-8332-ffffad89713358e3.filesusr.com/ugd/d9aaad_5494c7f6e8034730afb01cdbc9bd5a62.pdf. I won’t include your response, Sean, because I’m not a jerk like you.
Again, Sean, more intellectual dishonesty: “I have been informed by Torres that I owe him an apology for not siding with him.” I’m tempted to take screenshots and share them here. These are lies.
For whatever it’s worth, I show in a forthcoming, peer-reviewed philosophy paper that Ord’s view is, in fact, worse than Bostrom’s in multiple ways. I will, of course, happily share a link to he document once it’s published (although I know some folks at FHI have a copy right now).
“I argue that while many of the criticisms of Bostrom strike true, newer formulations of longtermism and existential risk – most prominently Ord’s The Precipice (but also Greaves, MacAskill, etc) – do not face the same challenges.”
“He has unfortunately misrepresented himself as working at CSER on various media (unclear if deliberate or not).” No, I haven’t, Sean, and you know this from our personal exchanges. I forgot to change the CSER affiliation on FB—and only FB—for a few months after leaving. As soon as you pointed it out, I changed it immediately. Your intellectual dishonesty here is really upsetting.
“He characterises various long-termists as white supremacists on the flimsiest grounds imaginable.” I would encourage you to contact, well, quite literally anyone who studies “white supremacy.” This is precisely what I did BEFORE making the criticisms I made. Literally every single scholar I spoke with—including some at Princeton—were shocked and appalled by that quote from Nick Beckstead, as well as some other quotes I provided to them (in context, of course). The “white supremacy” claim is not mine, John. I’m just relaying what anyone who studies the issue will tell you, if you were sufficiently curious to contact the relevant scholars. Furthermore, I have never once called you a “white supremacist.” That is an egregious and defamatory lie that you should taken back immediately (or you should provide, for all to see, evidence to the contrary).
Don’t work on “longtermist” issues, please! You are very right to feel the pull of suffering right now. See this for more: https://www.xriskology.com/mini-book.
[Responding to Alex HT above:]
I’ll try to find the time to respond to some of these comments. I would strongly disagree with most of them. For example, one that just happened to catch my eye was: “Longtermism does not say our current world is replete with suffering and death.”
So, the target of the critique is Bostromism, i.e., the systematic web of normative claims found in Bostrom’s work. (Just to clear one thing up, “longtermism” as espoused by “leading” longtermists today has been hugely influenced by Bostromism—this is a fact, I believe, about intellectual genealogy, which I’ll try to touch upon later.)
There are two main ingredients of Bostromism, I argue: total utilitarianism and transhumanism. The latter absolutely does indeed see our world the way many religious traditions have: wretched, full of suffering, something to ultimately be transcended (if not via the rapture or Parousia then via cyborgization and mind-uploading). This idea, this theme, is so prominent in transhumanist writings that I don’t know how anyone could deny it.
Hence, if transhumanism is an integral component of Bostromism (and it is), and if Bostromism is a version of longtermism (which it is, on pretty much any definition), then the millennialist view that our world is in some sort of “fallen state” is an integral component of Bostromism, since this millennialist view is central to the normative aspects of transhumanism.
Just read “Letter from Utopia.” It’s saturated in a profound longing to escape our present condition and enter some magically paradisiacal future world via the almost supernatural means of radical human enhancement. (Alternatively, you could write a religious scholar about transhumanism. Some have, in fact, written about the ideology. I doubt you’d find anyone who’d reject the claim that transhumanism is imbued with millennialist tendencies!)
One is here: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d9aaad_64ac5f0da7ea494ab48f54181b249ce4.pdf. And my critique of the radical utopianism and valuation of imaginary lives that undergirds the most prominent notion of “existential risk” today is here: https://c8df8822-f112-4676-8332-ad89713358e3.filesusr.com/ugd/d9aaad_33466a921b2646a7a02482acb89b07b8.pdf
No one knew I was involved, though. Honestly. All that happened after I’d moved on. I was as surprised as everyone else to read Zoe’s EA Forum post.