I am opposed to any norm that asks different behavior of men than women.
River
Karma: 517
Is it true that other successful institutions generally have norms against dating within them? (I don’t want to use the term “sleeping around”, which feels derogatory in this particular context). My company only prohibits dating people in your chain of command, and I am certainly aware of relationships within the company that have not caused any objections or issues that I know of. Though my company is tens of thousands of people, with thousands in my building, so maybe it doesn’t qualify as tight-nit. I also haven’t perceived any of my friend groups as having a norm against dating. Family seems obviously different, because there is that incest norm, and that impossibility of stepping away on the off chance that things go really badly. Though again, maybe you have a family with different dynamics—to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never met a cousin’s spouse’s anything. Anyway, point is, I don’t think it’s actually true that the rest of society operates this way.
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.
“predatory polyamorous rationalists” is pretty bigoted. What would we think if someone referred to “predatory gays”?
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.
Are you familiar with any concerns about nonlinear not raised in Ben’s post? Ben seems particularly concerned that nonlinear creates an epistemic environment where he wouldn’t know if there was more. If there is, that seems pretty central to confirming Ben’s concerns.
Thank you for sharing Minh, I think this is one of the most important updates.
If our goal is (as I think it should be) only to figure out whether we want to interact with any of these people in the future, and not to exact retribution for past wrongs against third parties, then we don’t need to know exactly what happened between nonlinear and Alice and Chloe. That’s good, since we probably never will. What does seem to be the case is this. (1) Everybody involved agrees that something went badly wrong in the relationships between Kat/Emerson and Alice/Chloe, though they may dramatically disagree about what. (2) Kat/Emerson have changed their behavior in a way that prevents a repeat. Your testimony is good evidence for 2. And given that, I don’t think I will update much on whether I want to interact with them in the future. So thank you for your testimony.
(disclaimers: my past interactions with Kat have been positive but not extensive. I don’t believe I have interacted with Emerson. And I was not asked to comment by anyone involved.)
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.
Suppose, hypothetically, that every individual EA would be just as effective, do just as much good, without an EA community as with one. In that case, how many resources should CEA and other EA orgs devote to community building? My answer is exactly 0. That implies that the EA community is a means to an end, the end of making EAs more effective.
That said, I wouldn’t necessarily generalize to other communities. And I agree that assessing a particular case of alleged wrongdoing should not depend on the perceived value of the accused’s contributions to EA causes, and I do not read CEA’s language as implying otherwise.
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.
You think that dating a coworker or whatever without sleeping with them is less likely to cause problems than the reverse? That does not ring true to me at all. It does ring of Christian purity culture, which I would not have expected to encounter in EA.
I do not like this. One of the fundamental premises of EA is to be neutral about who we are helping—people here, people there, people now, people later, all get weighted the same. Specifically setting out to help only Muslims therefor seems non-EA. If Muslims want to do it, I guess they have that right, but EA shouldn’t be touching it.
I think even with just the behaviours that Nonlinear has publicly confirmed, there is cause for major concern.
Lets look at one specific claim that you pointed to—whether there was a legal contract agreed beforehand specifying a salary. Unless I’ve missed something, I don’t believe nonlinear has publicly commented on this. All I’m saying is don’t let your confidence exceed the strength of the evidence.
The emotion of guilt is usually what leads to accountability and behaviour change. See e.g. this video with clinical psychologist June Tangney, co-author of the book Shame and Guilt.
It is certainly one emotion that can. But your video just talks about guilt and shame, it doesn’t talk about other emotions. I would expect all emotions have the potential to change behavior under the right circumstances—otherwise, they wouldn’t serve an evolutionary purpose. I can think of instances where I’ve altered my behavior after social drama out of fear of getting hurt again, rather than guilt or shame. So when I look at someone else, I don’t need to settle on a particular explanation of why they’ve changed their behavior to accept evidence that they have.
Even if we assume that all of the allegations are true (which seems unwarranted when the evidence is hearsay from two anonymous sources), you seem to think that remorse is the only mental state that could cause people to change their behavior. Why do you think that?
I think part of the difficulty here is that “wokism” seems to refer to a cluster of ideas and practices that seem to be a genuine cluster, but don’t have especially clear boundaries or a singular easy definition.
What I do notice is that none of the ideas you listed, at least at the level of abstraction at which you listed them, are things that anyone, woke or anti-woke or anywhere in between, will disagree with. But I’ll try to give some analysis of what I would understand to be woke in the general vicinity of these ideas. Note that I am not asserting any normative position myself, just trying to describe what I understand these words to mean.
I don’t think veganism really has much to do with wokism. Whatever you think about EA event catering, it just seems like an orthogonal issue.
I suspect everyone would prefer that EA spaces be welcoming of trans people, but there may be disagreement on what exactly that requires on a very concrete level, or how to trade it off against other values. Should we start meetings by having everyone go around and give their pronouns? Wokism might say yes, other people (including some trans people) might say no. Should we kick people out of EA spaces for using the “wrong” pronouns? Wokism might say yes, other might say no as that is a bad tradeoff against free speech and epistemic health.
I suspect everyone thinks reports of assault and harassment should be taken seriously. Does that mean that we believe all women? Wokism might say yes, others might so no. Does that mean that people accused should be confronted with the particular accusations against them, and allowed to present evidence in response? Wokism might say no, others might say yes, good epistemics requires that.
I’m honestly not sure what specifically you mean by “so-called ‘scientific’ racism” or “scourge”, and I’m not sure if that’s a road worth going down.
Again, I’m not asserting any position myself here, just trying to help clarify what I think people mean by “wokism”, in the hopes that the rest of you can have a productive conversation.
while it’s possible to get to the truth with enough effort
This comes off as naive. Usually you never know the truth no matter how much effort or investigation. If you think you do, you are probably doing more harm than good. (This applies to many areas, not just sexual misconduct.)
Why would you take the TIME article at face value on this?
It doesn’t even get the language right. I’m poly, and I have never once heard people talk about “joining a polycule” as the thing someone chooses to do. That’s not how it works. You choose to date someone. “Polycule” just describes the set of people who you are dating, who your partner(s) are dating, who their partner(s) are dating, and so on. Dating someone doesn’t imply anything about how you have to relate to your metamours, much less people farther distant in the polycule. Sometimes you may never even know the full extent of your polycule.
I don’t know of a single poly person who would approve of the dynamic that the TIME article seems to describe, or any reason to think it is an accurate description of how EA works. Of course you shouldn’t shame people into dating you. Of course you shouldn’t leverage professional power for sexual benefit. Of course it’s good to be an EA and buy bed nets whether you are poly or monogomous. Nobody that I know of, poly or monogomous, disagrees with this. The fact that you think poly people do is what shows your prejudice. I suggest you try getting to know a poly person, talk to a poly person about their relationship(s), before opening your mouth on the subject again.
I guess my fundamental question right now is what do we mean by intelligence? Like, with humans, we have a notion of IQ, because lots of very different cognitive abilities happen to be highly correlated in humans, and this allows us to summarize them all with one number. But different cognitive abilities aren’t correlated in the same way in AI. So what do we mean when we talk about an AI being much smarter than humans? How do we know there even are significantly higher levels of intelligence to go to, since nothing much more intelligent than humans has ever existed? I’m not sure why people seem to assume that possible levels of intelligence just keep going.
My other question, related to the first, is how do we know that more intelligence, whatever we mean by that, would be particularly useful? Some things aren’t computable. Some things aren’t solvable within the laws of physics. Some systems are chaotic. So how do we know that more intelligence would somehow translate into massively more power in domains that we care about?
There are different ways to read the signal that the lack of a statement gives. Someone could read it to mean that these two firms have rampant racism/sexism. Alternatively, someone could read it to mean that these two firms have the same low rates of racism/sexism as the other ten, and choose to focus their energies on software accounting rather than identity politics. A third possible reading is that the 10 firms put out statements precisely because they had more problems with racism/sexism, and therefor the two firms without the statements probably have the fewest racism/sexism problems. How you read the lack of a statement will depend a lot on your priors about the dynamics of racism/sexism in your particular place and time. But if you adopt the second or third readings, then the signal from the lack of a statement seems positive.
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.