River

Karma: 672

River 23 Aug 2024 2:49 UTC
−16 points
2 ∶ 14
on: The case for contributing to the 2024 US election with your time & money
I think CEA should take this post down, and generally not permit discussion of particular candidates for political office. There are several reasons for this:
(1) a lot of what is said about Trump here is a very, um, partisan narrative, which half the country completely rejects. That half of the country includes many people who could contribute a lot to EA, and who we should want to feel welcome in EA. Having posts like this makes such people feel decidedly unwelcome.
(2) There is a roughly 50% chance Trump will be president for the next four years. If we want his administration to give any consideration to EA ideas, this is not a good foot to start off on. If EA becomes aligned with one political party, then EA ideas will be categorically rejected by the other without regard to their merits. And since each party will be in power roughly half the time, that is giving up half the potential impact of EA policy ideas. That effect makes posts like this significantly negative in expectation for our ability to influence policy.
(3) If CEA is perceived as endorsing candidates for political office, that could raise questions about their tax exempt status.

River 29 Jun 2024 20:01 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
But the Civil Rights Act of 1964 just outlaws explicit discrimination against people on the basis of their race or gender, and creates some bureaucracy to enforce this.
You might think this from reading the text, but that is not how it has been interpreted. Title VII has also been interpreted to address disparate impacts, which are not explicit discrimination. (it also outlaws discrimination on religion and national origin in most sections, and only outlaws sex discrimination in Title VII, not in any other part of the act.)

River 26 Jun 2024 0:44 UTC
9 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Responses to Manifest are not about Manifest
To your first point, fair. I think the crux is just very object level assessments of the individual speakers and the ideas they hold, and I don’t want to go down that road here.

To your second point, your argument seems to imply that it is ok to exercise influence by calling people “racist” anywhere you can. That seems to imply that literally nothing would be “cancel culture” to you, which is not where you started a couple of comments ago.

River 25 Jun 2024 23:35 UTC
19 points
2 ∶ 2
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Responses to Manifest are not about Manifest
I think it’s fine to have a narrower idea of what views should be platformed within your own community than in society at large. Different communities have different purposes, and different purposes will point to different sets of ideas and speakers to be platformed. That is as it should be. I want to suggest two other possible cruxes which do seem somewhat cruxy to me:
1. deplatforming these particular speakers is not what the ideals of EA dictate. The core thing that EA is about is creating an intellectually open space to explore strange fringe ideas about how to make the world better, and these speakers fit that purpose.
2. Manifest is not an EA event. That is part of what attracted me to it. It belongs to the forecasting community, which is a distinct thing, even if the membership is overlapping. So when EAs try to deplatform speakers at Manifest, they are reaching out beyond their own community and trying to dictate what can be said in someone elses community, which sure makes it look a lot more like your idea of cancel culture.

River 20 Jun 2024 18:19 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: glenra’s comment on: My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
Thank you for your explanation. One thing that stands out to me is that “human biodiversity” is a phrase that uses the language of science, yet you seem less interested in the scientific questions and much more interested in the policy questions. To continue with your example of Asians in the NBA, that seems to point at any number of purely factual scientific questions that could be explored. Are Asians generally lacking in some relevant physical characteristic, such as height, agility, or reflex speed? Are they better at something else, creating higher opportunity costs for them, and if so, what and why? Yet your seem to focus less on these scientific factual sorts of questions, and more on how we should respond to the observed difference on a policy level. Am I correct in reading that HBD is more a policy stance than an area of science?

River 20 Jun 2024 17:51 UTC
0 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
I think the problem with making the hypo more concrete in the ways you suggest is that then whether the hypo represents reality becomes highly contestable, and we devolve into object level debates. To take one example, despite being very pro-immigration myself, I find your suggestion that deportation of non-citizens somehow violates fundamental human rights to be absolutely ridiculous. If you set up a hypothetical about Alice wanting to deport non-citizen Bobs, you won’t convince me of anything. I’m guessing a lot of the disagreement here is less about event norms and more about people in the EA community being intolerant of those they disagree with politically. One reason for choosing such an abstract hypothetical was to try to separate out the two.

River 20 Jun 2024 10:14 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: glenra’s comment on: My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
Can you tell us what you mean by HBD? Like give definition? Is it just the idea that there sometimes are statistical, genetic differences between groups, such as racial groups?

River 19 Jun 2024 18:32 UTC
13 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Stewart’s comment on: My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
Bob can attend or not attend for whatever reasons he wishes. I’m not trying to judge that at all. The question seems to be whether Bob can reasonably ask the organizers to deplatform or uninvite or ban Alice. In your scenario, I think the answer is “yes”, though I would frame that as being about Alice’s likely future criminal behavior, not directly about the belief that precipitates that behavior.

River 19 Jun 2024 18:13 UTC
14 points
8 ∶ 2
in reply to: Ben Stewart’s comment on: My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
In this case, I think the “physically attack and maim” part makes it much more than just a belief. So far as I am aware, nobody thinks anyone under discussion in relation to Manifest was ever likely to physically attack anybody.

River 19 Jun 2024 15:45 UTC
38 points
19 ∶ 9
in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
I think this concept of an “exclusionary belief” is incoherent. If Alice is a speaker at an event, and holds belief X, and Bob is very put off by belief X and is therefor less interested in attending, that is never just about X. That is always an interaction between Bob and X, it is a function of both. And for any X, there will exist a Bob. There are many anti-nuclear and green energy activists who would not attend a conference with a speaker who has advocated nuclear energy as a necessary part of the transition away from fossil fuels. There are surely researchers who do gain of function research, or who view it as essential to protecting against future pandemics, who would not attend a conference with a speaker advocating against gain of function research. I can certainly think of people in the world, on both sides of the political spectrum, who, had they been invited to Manifest, that would have given me pause. The question is how should we respond when we find ourselves in Bob’s shoes? And I think we should definitely not demand that Alice be deplatformed. Asking for someone else to be deplatformed, because of our own feelings about them or their beliefs, is controlling behavior. It is a heckler’s veto, and therefor contrary to ideals of free expression and intellectual inquiry. Ultimately each of us is responsible for our own feelings. Each of us can weigh the features of an event that we like against the features we dislike and decide for ourselves whether it is worth our time and energy and money to attend. Either choice is fine. But nobody owes us an event with any particular speakers or ideas included or excluded, and to act as though they do is just poor, controlling behavior.

River 18 Jun 2024 15:23 UTC
13 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Maniano’s comment on: My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
Thank you for clarifying. I would regard Nathan’s first pair of examples as racist and eugenic, but importantly not his second pair. My experience at Summer Camp and Manifest was that I did not hear anything like the first pair or anything more extreme. (I did not attend Less Online or the Curtis Yarvin party so I cannot speak to what happened there). I think I understand why you did not include many concrete examples, but the accusation of racism without concrete examples mostly comes off as name-calling to me. The “HBD” label also comes off to me as name-calling, as I only ever hear it used by people attacking it, and they don’t ever seem to say much more than “racist” in their own definitions of it. I haven’t really seen people say “yes, I believe in HBD and here is what I mean by that”, but maybe I’m just not reading the right people. If you could point me at such a person that might be useful. But now it seems you are claiming to have heard significantly more extreme things than I did. And I’m curious why that is.

River 18 Jun 2024 14:30 UTC
26 points
7 ∶ 2
in reply to: Barry Cotter’s comment on: My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
I don’t think EA should be a political project at all. The value in EA is to be an intellectual space where weird ideas about how to improve the world can be explored. That is where it has excelled in the past and has the potential to excel even more in the future. When it comes time to do politics, that should be entirely outside the EA brand/umbrella. That should be done under cause-specific brands and umbrellas that can incorporate both the relevant components of EA and non-EAs who share the relevant policy goals.

River 17 Jun 2024 21:37 UTC
35 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Maniano’s comment on: My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
I was at that session. My memory is that the presenter was very clear that the nazis killed other groups for eugenic reasons, and the jews for dysgenic reasons, both of which are generally regarded as part of the holocaust. The distinction was a bit of history nerding, not an attempt to minimize the nazis crimes, or to deny that the nazis were eugenicists.

River 25 May 2024 2:56 UTC
2 points
2 ∶ 1
on: Survey: bioethicists’ views on bioethical issues
Thanks for gathering the data. Enough of these results are just batshit crazy that it further cements my view that bioethicists, as a group, should not be given any say in the questions they purport to be experts on. I’ll point to two that I don’t think anyone else has highlighted yet. 42% apparently believe that in a perfectly just society, blindness would not be a disadvantage. Not being able to drive a car isn’t a disadvantage? Because no technology currently exists that would allow the blind to do that. And 66% think that a person’s life being worth living is somehow not a reason to bring them into existence? If not that, then what would be a reason to bring someone into existence? That may not be a sufficient reason to bring someone into existence, but if you don’t think it is a necessary one then there is something deeply wrong with your morals. I do not understand at all what would cause someone to give this answer.

River 26 Feb 2024 17:57 UTC
23 points
10 ∶ 3
on: How much parenting harms productivity and how you can reduce it
The most important effect of parenting on productivity is left out here. A whole new person is created, meaning a whole additional person’s worth of productivity! And with only a two decade or so delay. Not to mention a whole additional person’s worth of happiness, and of combating demographic decline. So while it may be true that in the short term additional children decrease productivity, in the long term (which is what we as EAs should be caring most about) each additional child massively increases productivity.

River 14 Feb 2024 21:40 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Complexity of value but not disvalue implies more focus on s-risk. Moral uncertainty and preference utilitarianism also do.
I have two points regarding point 2. Firstly, what matters is the relationship between the expected happiness and the expected suffering, not the best happiness and the worst suffering. There is no particular reason that these relationships should be the same. It may be that the worst suffering outweighs the best happiness, and also that the expected happiness outweighs the expected suffering.

Secondly, why do you think people would skew towards the suffering dominating? My intuition is that the expected happiness will generally dominate. I’ve noticed there are a subset of EAs who seem to have an obsession with suffering, and the related position of anti-natalism, but I do not think EAs are representative of the broader population in this regard, and I do not think this subset of EAs are epistemically justified.

River 22 Dec 2023 2:00 UTC
30 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: Will Aldred’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
I think what this comes down to for me is: If Kat Woods’ Forum username was pseudonymous, would we have taken down Ben’s post? (Or otherwise removed all references to Kat by her real name?)
If the answer to this is “yes,” then I don’t think Alice+Chloe should be deanonymized.
I do not like the incentive structure that this would create if adopted. Kat did not get to look at this particular drama and decide whether she wanted it discussed under a real or pseudonymous username. Her decision point was when she created her forum account however many years ago, at a time when she had no idea that this kind of drama would erupt. If this position becomes policy, then it incentivizes every person, at the time that they create a forum account, to choose a pseudonym rather than use their real name, to avoid having any unforeseeable future drama publicly associated with their real name. I think this would be bad. People in a community can’t build trust if they don’t know the identities of the people they are building trust with.

River 22 Dec 2023 1:18 UTC
20 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ivy Mazzola’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
My understanding is that Kat and Emerson did in fact get their names on CEA’s blacklist to some extent.

Here is the bigger problem I see with your proposed solution. If an employer reviewing an application from Alice or Chloe believes their side of this, then the employer would not factor in the fact of their presence on CEA’s blacklist, since the employer, by hypothesis, thinks CEA was mistaken to put them there. If, on the other hand, an employer reviewing an application from Alice or Chloe believes Nonliner’s side of this, then the employer may justifiably look at the fact that CEA erred by having blacklisted Kat and Emerson and choose not to consult CEA in their hiring decisions at all, and therefor not discover that their applicant was Alice or Chloe. Either way, CEA blacklisting Alice and Chloe seems ineffective.

River 12 Dec 2023 18:48 UTC
55 points
15 ∶ 5
in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
This word “retaliation” seems to be doing a lot of work in your thinking, so I’d like to disect it a little bit. What exactly do you mean by “retaliation”? One could use retaliation to mean “any time Alice hurts Bob, and later Bob does something that hurts Alice, which he would not have done but for Alice’s initial hurtful action.” If that is your definition, then yes, sure, this is obvious retaliation. So what? Lots of things that are retaliation under this definition are fine, some are even optimal. Every time that a US military unit attacked a Japanese one during ww2 was retaliation for Pearl Harbor under this definition, yet clearly waging war on Japan was correct. I think when you use the word though, you mean it to carry some additional meaning. You seem to think that it is necessarily bad. And that requires a more constricted definition and an argument that nonlinear’s actions satisfy it.

River 12 Dec 2023 17:30 UTC
16 points
12 ∶ 11
in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I’m not sure I would have used Ben as the example had I been writing it, but I think I understand why they did, and I certainly don’t blame them for it. There is no drama where everyone is on the same side, so any real life example would antagonize some readers. Hypothetical examples are always weaker because the reader might think they are unrealistic. And Ben is in no position to complain about people sharing negative one-sided stories on the EA forum.