Scott Alexander

Karma: 2,913

Scott Alexander 1 Sep 2023 2:35 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Omnizoid’s comment on: Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong
I thought we already agreed the demon case showed that FDT wins in real life, since FDT agents will consistently end up with more utility than other agents.
Eliezer’s argument is that you can become the kind of entity that is programmed to do X, by choosing to do X. This is in some ways a claim about demons (they are good enough to predict even the choices you made with “your free will”). But it sounds like we’re in fact positing that demons are that good—I don’t know how to explain how they have 999,999/million success rate otherwise—so I think he is right.
I don’t think the demon being wrong one in a million times changes much. 999,999 of the people created by the demon will be some kind of FDT decision theorist with great precommitment skills. If you’re the one who isn’t, you can observe that you’re the demon’s rare mistake and avoid cutting off your legs, but this just means you won the lottery—it’s not a generally winning strategy.
Decision theories are intended as theories of what is rational for you to do. So it describes what choices are wise and which choices are foolish.
I don’t understand why you think that the choices that get you more utility with no drawbacks are foolish, and the choices that cost you utility for no reason are wise.
On the Newcomb’s Problem post, Eliezer explicitly said that he doesn’t care why other people are doing decision theory, he would like to figure out a way to get more utility. Then he did that. I think if you disagree with his goal, you should be arguing “decision theory should be about looking good, not about getting utility” (so we can all laugh at you) rather than saying “Eliezer is confidently and egregiously wrong” and hiding the fact that one of your main arguments is that he said we should try to get utility instead of failing all the time and then came up with a strategy that successfully does that.

Scott Alexander 30 Aug 2023 3:24 UTC
6 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Omnizoid’s comment on: Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong
I think rather than say that Eliezer is wrong about decision theory, you should say that Eliezer’s goal is to come up with a decision theory that helps him get utility, and your goal is something else, and you have both come up with very nice decision theories for achieving your goal.
(what is your goal?)
My opinion on your response to the demon question is “The demon would never create you in the first place, so who cares what you think?” That is, I think your formulation of the problem includes a paradox—we assume the demon is always right, but also, that you’re in a perfect position to betray it and it can’t stop you. What would actually happen is the demon would create a bunch of people with amputation fetishes, plus me and Eliezer who it knows wouldn’t betray it, and it would never put you in the position of getting to make the choice in real life (as opposed to in an FDT algorithmic way) in the first place. The reason you find the demon example more compelling than the Newcomb example is that it starts by making an assumption that undermines the whole problem—that is, that the demon has failed its omniscience check and created you who are destined to betray it. If your problem setup contains an implicit contradiction, you can prove anything.
I don’t think this is as degenerate a case as “a demon will torture everyone who believes FDT”. If that were true, and I expected to encounter that demon, I would simply try not to believe FDT (insofar as I can voluntarily change my beliefs). While you can always be screwed over by weird demons, I think decision theory is about what to choose in cases where you have all of the available knowledge and also a choice in the matter, and I think the leg demon fits that situation.

Scott Alexander 29 Aug 2023 18:22 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Omnizoid’s comment on: Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong
I guess any omniscient demon reading this to assess my ability to precommit will have learned I can’t even precommit effectively to not having long back-and-forth discussions, let alone cutting my legs off. But I’m still interested in where you’re coming from here since I don’t think I’ve heard your exact position before.
Have you read https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality ? Do you agree that this is our crux?
Would you endorse the statement “Eliezer, using his decision theory, will usually end out with more utility than me over a long life of encountering the sorts of weird demonic situations decision theorists analyze, I just think he is less formally-rational” ?
Or do you expect that you will, over the long run, get more utility than him?

Scott Alexander 29 Aug 2023 5:34 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Omnizoid’s comment on: Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong
Sorry if I misunderstood your point. I agree this is the strongest objection against FDT. I think there is some sense in which I can become the kind of agent who cuts off their legs (ie by choosing to cut off my legs), but I admit this is poorly specified.
I think there’s a stronger case for, right now, having heard about FDT for the first time, deciding I will follow FDT in the future. Various gods and demons can observe this and condition on my decision, so when the actual future comes around, they will treat me as an FDT-following agent rather than a non-FDT-following agent. Even though future-created-me isn’t exactly in a position to influence the (long-since gone) demon, current me is in a position to make this decision for future relevant situations, and should decide to follow FDT in general. Part of this decision I’ve made involves being the kind of person who would take the FDT option in hypothetical scenarios.
Then there’s the additional question of whether to defect against the demons/gods later, and say “Haha, back in August 2023 I resolved to become an FDT agent, and I fooled you into believing me, but now that I’ve been created I’m just going to not cut off my legs after all”. I think of this as—suppose every past being created by the demon has cut off its legs, ie the demon has a 100% predictive success rate over millions of cases. So the demon would surely predict if I would do this. That means I should (now) try really hard not to do this. Cf. Parfit’s Hitchhiker. Can I bind my future self like this? I think empirically yes—I think I have enough honor that if I tell hypothetical demon gods now that I’m going to do various things, I can actually do them when the time comes. This will be “irrational” in some sense, but I’ll still end up with more utility than everyone else.
Is there some sense in which, if I decide not to cut off my legs, I would wink out of existence? I admit feeling a superstitious temptation to believe this (a non-superstitious justification might be wondering if I’m the real me, or a version of me in the omniscient demon’s simulation to predict what I would do). I think the literal answer is no but that it’s practically useful to keep my superstitious belief in this to allow myself to do the irrational thing that gets me more utility. But this is a weird enough sidetrack that I’m really not sure I’m still in normal Eliezer-approved-decision-theory-land at all.
I think an easier question is whether you should program an AI to always keep its pre-emptive bargains with gods and demons; here the answer is just straightforwardly yes. You don’t have to assume that your actions alter your algorithm, you can just alter the algorithm directly. I think this is what Eliezer is most interested in, though I’m not sure.

Scott Alexander 28 Aug 2023 22:07 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong
Were there bright people who said they had checked his work, understood it, agreed with him, and were trying to build on it? Or just people who weren’t yet sure he was wrong?

Scott Alexander 28 Aug 2023 22:06 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Omnizoid’s comment on: Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong
I don’t want to get into a long back-and-forth here, but for the record I still think you’re misunderstanding what I flippantly described as “other Everett branches” and missing the entire motivation behind Counterfactual Mugging. It is definitely not supposed to directly make sense in the exact situation you’re in. I think this is part of why a variant of it is called “updateless”, because it makes a principled refusal to update on which world you find yourself in in order to (more flippant not-quite-right description) program the type of AIs that would weird games played against omniscient entities.
If the demon would only create me conditional on me cutting off my legs after I existed, and it was the specific class of omniscient entity that FDT is motivated by winning games with, then I would endorse cutting off my legs in that situation.
(as a not-exactly-right-but-maybe-helpful intuition pump, consider that if the demon isn’t omniscient—but simply reads the EA Forum—or more strictly can predict the text that will appear on the EA Forum years in the future—it would now plan to create me but not you, and I with my decision theory would be better off than you with yours. And surely omniscience is a stronger case than just reads-the-EA-Forum!)
If this sounds completely stupid to you, and you haven’t yet read the LW posts on Counterfactual Mugging. I would recommend starting there; otherwise, consider finding a competent and motivated FDT proponent (ie not me) and trying to do some kind of double-crux or debate with them, I’d be interested in seeing the results.

Scott Alexander 28 Aug 2023 19:50 UTC
12 points
5 ∶ 5
on: Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong
I won’t comment on the overall advisability of this piece, but I think you’re confused about the decision theory (I’m about ten years behind state of the art here, and only barely understood it ten years ago, so I might be wrong).
The blackmail situation seems analogous to the Counterfactual Mugging, which was created to highlight how Eliezer’s decision theories sometimes (my flippant summary) suggest you make locally bad decisions in order to benefit versions of you in different Everett branches. Schwartz objecting “But look how locally bad this decision is!” isn’t telling Eliezer anything he doesn’t already know, and isn’t engaging with the reasoning. I think I would pay Omega in Counterfactual Mugging; I agree Schwartz’s case is harder, but provisionally I think it unintentionally adds a layer of Pascal’s Wager + torture vs. dust specks by making the numbers so extreme, which are two totally unrelated reasoning vortices.
I think the “should you procreate to make your father procreate?” question only works if your father’s cognitive algorithms are perfectly correlated with yours, which no real father’s are. To make the example fair, it should be more like “You were created by Omega, a god who transcends time. It resolved to created you if and only if It predicted that you would procreate, and It is able to predict everything perfectly. Now should you procreate?” I would also accept “You were created by a clone of yourself in the exact same situation, down to the atom, that you find yourself in now, including worrying about being created by a clone of yourself and so on. Should you procreate?” In both of these, the question seems much more open than with a normal human father.
If Eliezer’s decision theories make no sense and are ignoring easy disproofs, then everyone else who finds them compelling (or at least not obviously wrong) after long study, including people like Wei Dai, Abram Demski, Scott Garrabrant, Benya Fallenstein, etc, is also bizarrely and inexplicably wrong. This is starting to sound less like “Eliezer is a uniquely bad reasoner” and more like “there’s something in the water supply here that makes extremely bright people with math PhDs make simple dumb mistakes that any rando can notice.”

Scott Alexander 23 Aug 2023 21:46 UTC
26 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Select examples of adverse selection in longtermist grantmaking
Thanks for writing this.
I understand why you can’t go public with applicant-related information, but is there a reason grantmakers shouldn’t have a private Slack channel where they can ask things like “Please PM me if any of you have any thoughts on John Smith, I’m evaluating a grant request for him now”?

Scott Alexander 22 Jul 2023 19:52 UTC
31 points
4 ∶ 1
on: EA Survey 2022: How People Get Involved in EA
Okay, so GWWC, LW, and GiveWell, what are we going to do to reverse the trend?
Seriously, should we be thinking of this as “these sites are actually getting less effective at recruiting EAs” or as “there are so many more recruitment pipelines now that it makes sense that each one would drop in relative importance” or as “any site will naturally do better in its early years as it picks the low-hanging fruit in converting its target population, then do worse later”?

Scott Alexander 11 Jun 2023 9:37 UTC
33 points
13 ∶ 0
in reply to: Justin Sandefur’s comment on: How economists got Africa’s AIDS epidemic wrong
The first point seems to be saying that we should factor in the chance that a program works into cost-effectiveness analysis. Isn’t this already a part of all such analyses? If it isn’t, I’m very surprised by that and think it would be a much more important topic for an essay than anything about PEPFAR in particular.
The second point, that people should consider whether a project is politically feasible, is well taken. It sounds like the lesson here is “if you find yourself in a situation where you have to recommend either project A or B, and both are good, but A is better than B, but if you do activism for A it still won’t happen, but if you do activism for B your input will push it over the edge into happening, do activism for B.” I agree with this as far as it goes, but there seem like some important caveats:
- You shouldn’t lie, for the normal reasons against lying. It sounds like some of these economists were just publishing reports or articles saying that antimalarials were better than PEPFAR, and I think if that was what they found, then publishing that in reports is correct regardless of the politics. Then when they put on their activist hats they can support whatever is most effective to support.
- It’s a really hard problem to know whether to pursue less ambitious vs. more ambitious goals. If you’re a socialist, should you spend your time fighting for a $1 minimum wage increase, for Medicare For All, or for completely dismantling capitalism and replacing it with workers’ communes? I don’t think there’s an obvious answer, even though the first is clearly more likely to succeed than the second two. In retrospect it’s clear that PEPFAR worked politically, and if you say that more cost-effective options wouldn’t have worked politically at that time then I believe you, but I don’t want to conclude that therefore less ambitious political projects are always better than more ambitious ones, and I don’t know how else to apply the lesson from this story more generally.

Scott Alexander 6 Mar 2023 21:20 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: PatrickL’s comment on: Scoring forecasts from the 2016 “Expert Survey on Progress in AI”
Update: I think Bing passes the high school essay bar, based on the section “B- Essays No More” at https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/i-hope-you-werent-getting-too-comfortable

Scott Alexander 4 Mar 2023 17:10 UTC
15 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Predictive Performance on Metaculus vs. Manifold Markets
I find this interesting, but also somewhat hard to identify any meaningful patterns. For example, one could expect red points to be clustered at the top for Manifold, indicating that more forecasts equal better performance. But we don’t see that here. The comparison may be somewhat limited anyway: In the eyes of the Metaculus community prediction, all forecasts are created equal. On Manifold, however, users can invest different amounts of money. A single user can therefore in principle have an outsized influence on the overall market price if they are willing to spend enough. I’d be interested to see more on how accuracy on Manifold changes with the number of traders and overall trading volume. Who knows, maybe Manifold would be ahead if they had a similar number of forecasters to Metaculus?
Does this mean that if you controlled for number of forecasters, you still think Metaculus would beat Manifold? If not, do you have any opinion on this question (sorry if I missed it).

Scott Alexander 3 Mar 2023 22:11 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: PatrickL’s comment on: Scoring forecasts from the 2016 “Expert Survey on Progress in AI”
Thank you. I misremebered the transcription question. I now agree with all of your resolutions, with the most remaining uncertainty on translation.

Scott Alexander 3 Mar 2023 9:38 UTC
32 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Scoring forecasts from the 2016 “Expert Survey on Progress in AI”
Thank you for doing this! I was working on a similar project and mostly came up with the same headline finding as you: the experts seemed well-calibrated. I did decide a few of the milestones a little differently, and would like to hear why you chose the way you did so I can decide whether or not to change mine.
- Zach Stein-Perlman from AI Impacts said that he thought “efficiently sort very large lists” and “write good Python code” were false, because the questions said it had to be done in a certain way by a certain type of neural net, and that wasn’t how it was done.
- I was planning to count “transcribe as well as humans” as false, based on https://interactiveaimag.org/columns/is-ai-at-human-parity-yet-a-case-study-on-speech-recognition/ . Maybe the top labs could achieve this with a year of work, but I think the question specifies they need to do as well as the best human transcriptionists, and right now they don’t seem close.
- I counted “translate as well as bilingual humans” as true based on a few quick tests of ChatGPT; I’m curious if you have some specific source for why it’s false.
- I don’t think AI has won at Starcraft. The last word I’ve heard from this was https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/301325-deepminds-starcraft-ii-ai-can-now-defeat-99-8-percent-of-human-players , where AlphaStar could beat 99.8% of humans but not the absolute champions. I haven’t seen any further progress on this since 2019. Again, it’s possible that a year of concerted effort could change this, but that seems speculative. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/uakohx/why_cant_we_make_a_perfect_ai_for_starcraft/
- I’m surprised you judged “high marks for a high school essay” as false; this seems like a central use case for ChatGPT and Bing/GPT4.
- I was planning to judge “concisely explain game play” as true, based on https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2022/11/22/metas-ai-gamer-beat-humans-in-diplomacy-using-strategy-and-negotiation/, which is testing basically this skill. Also, I was able to play a partial game of chess with ChatGPT where it explained all its moves—before it started hallucinating and making moves which were impossible. Still, it seemed to have the “explanation” skill down pat! I imagine if you asked it to explain why a chess engine made a given move, it would give a pretty plausible answer.
Beyond those quibbles—I was also looking at https://aiimpacts.org/2022-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai/#Data (the dataset itself; the summary doesn’t include the milestones). This new version seems like total garbage. The experts continue to predict several of the milestones are five years out, including milestones that were achieved by ChatGPT (ie a few months after the survey) and at least one milestone that had already clearly been achieved by the time the survey was released! Unless there’s some reason to think the new crop of experts is worse than the old one, this makes me think they only did okay last time by luck/coincidence, and actually they have no idea what they’re doing.
(I don’t think it works to say that the period 2017-2022.5 was predictable, but the period 2022.5-2023 wasn’t, because part of what the 2017 experts were right about was ChatGPT, which came out in late 2022.)

Scott Alexander 24 Feb 2023 9:10 UTC
17 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ofer’s comment on: Manifund Impact Market / Mini-Grants Round On Forecasting
Thanks for asking. One reason we decided to start with forecasting was because we think it has comparatively low risks compared to other fields like AI or biotech.
If this goes well and we move on to a more generic round, we’ll include our thoughts on this, which will probably include a commitment not to oracular-fund projects that seem like they were risky when proposed, and maybe to ban some extremely risky projects from the market entirely. I realize we didn’t explicitly say that here, which is because this is a simplified test round and we think the forecasting focus makes risks pretty unlikely.
In the unlikely event that someone proposes a forecasting project < $20,000 which we think carries significant risk, we’re prepared to take those steps this time too.

Scott Alexander 6 Feb 2023 6:33 UTC
136 points
19 ∶ 5
on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
In 2018, I collected data about several types of sexual harassment on the SSC survey, which I will report here to help inform the discussion. I’m going to simplify by assuming that only cis women are victims and only cis men are perpetrators, even though that’s bad and wrong.
Women who identified as EA were less likely report lifetime sexual harassed at work than other women, 18% vs. 20%. They were also less likely to report being sexually harassed outside of work, 57% vs. 61%.
Men who identified as EA were less likely to admit to sexually harassing people at work (2.1% vs. 2.9%) or outside of work (16.2% vs. 16.5%)
The sample was 270 non-EA women, 99 EA women, 4940 non-EA men, and 683 EA men. None of these results were statistically significant, although all of them trended in the direction of EAs experiencing less sexual harassment.
This doesn’t prove that EA environments have less harassment than the average environment, since it could be that EAs are biased to have less sexual harassment for other reasons, and whatever additional harassment they get in EA isn’t enough to make up for it; the vast majority of EAs have the vast majority of interactions in non-EA environments. I tried to sort of get around this by limiting my analysis to people living in California, on the grounds that they were more likely to be plugged into EA communities and jobs. Conditional on being a woman in California, being EA did make someone more likely to experience sexual harassment, consistently, as measured in many different ways. But Californian EAs were also younger, much more bisexual, and much more polyamorous than Californian non-EAs; adjusting for sexuality and polyamory didn’t remove the gap, but age was harder to adjust for and I didn’t try. EAs who said they were working at charitable jobs that they explicitly calculated were effective had lower harassment rates than the average person, but those working at charitable jobs that they didn’t expliclitly calculate were higher. All of these subgroup analyses were very small sample size.
Overall I am not sure that anything can be concluded from these results either way.
I would urge everyone thinking about this question to read my original discussion of the sexual harassment survey results. It mostly focuses on professions but I think the overall conclusion is extremely relevant here too. You can also find the link to the data there in case you want to double-check my results.
What links here?
- Ian Turner's comment on EA’s weirdness makes it unusually susceptible to bad behavior by OutsideView (7 Feb 2023 6:42 UTC; 13 points)

Scott Alexander 16 Dec 2022 11:22 UTC
24 points
7 ∶ 1
on: Cryptocurrency is not all bad. We should stay away from it anyway.
Minor object-level objection: you say we should predict that crypto exchanges like FTX to fail, but I tried to calculate the risk of this in the second part of my post, and the average FTX-sized exchange fails only very rarely.
I don’t think this is our main point of disagreement though. My main point of disagreement is about how actionable this is and what real effects it can have.
I think that the main way EA is “affiliated with” crypto is that it has accepted successful crypto investors’ money. Of people who have donated the most to EA, I think about 5-7 of the top ten names made their money in something crypto-related (even counting all the FTX people as one donor). Some of those people (example: Vitalik Buterin) are well-liked, honest, and haven’t done anything to embarrass us. I think it would be practically bad to stop accepting their people, and morally bad (as a betrayal) to denounce them and writing them out of the movement based on guilt by association. (CoI note: I have benefited from non-FTX crypto money)
I see you’re not recommending that EA stop taking crypto money. But then I’m not sure what you do want, other than what’s already happening:
- You recommend EA not invest in crypto, but I don’t think the movement is really doing this, and if they are I would expect that to be for normal economic reasons like diversification (and in general I expect Open Phil’s investment managers to know more than us) .
- You recommend that organizations not put crypto people on their board, but I don’t know of this happening except when those people have already been EAs before getting into crypto (I think SBF was on CEA’s board before he got into crypto, although I could be wrong). If it was happening in other cases, I would assume it was because of standard practices around very big donors getting on the board, and not because EAs love crypto so much that they invite random crypto leaders to join company boards. If you know of examples to the contrary I would be interested in hearing them.
- You recommend not boasting about ties to crypto insiders. I haven’t seen this happen except with SBF, where I think the boasting was along the lines of “look how well this person earning to give paid off”. I agree that people should do less of that in the future.
Although the point of “don’t invite random crypto scammers to serve on your board and become the public face of EA for no reason” is obviously correct, I don’t know of anyone actually doing this, and so I worry that the real effect of posts like this will be to slowly make crypto so toxic in this community that EA leaders feel pressured to refuse crypto donations for PR reasons, and then we lose > half of our potential money. I’m especially worried about some kind of purity spiral, where after crypto is toxified, the next level is people arguing that Facebook has also been a pretty evil company at various points and so maybe we shouldn’t accept Dustin’s money either. I don’t see a good Schelling fence here and would prefer not to start down that slope. I think we should avoid associating with (including taking money from) anyone who seems likely to be an outright fraud or breaking the law, and maybe some extremely harmful industries like tobacco, but not try to more generally be the arbiters of which industries are vs. aren’t socially productive.

Scott Alexander 2 Dec 2022 23:10 UTC
104 points
25 ∶ 3
in reply to: ethai’s comment on: I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared.
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
I’m trying to figure out how much of a response to give, and how to balance saying what I believe vs. avoiding any chance to make people feel unwelcome, or inflicting an unpleasant politicized debate on people who don’t want to read it. This comment is a bad compromise between all these things and I apologize for it, but:
I think the Kathy situation is typical of how effective altruists respond to these issues and what their failure modes are. I think “everyone knows” (in Zvi’s sense of the term, where it’s such strong conventional wisdom that nobody ever checks if it’s true ) that the typical response to rape accusations is to challenge and victim-blame survivors. And that although this may be true in some times and places, the typical response in this community is the one which, in fact, actually happened—immediate belief by anyone who didn’t know the situation, and a culture of fear preventing those who did know the situation from speaking out. I think it’s useful to acknowledge and push back against that culture of fear.
(this is also why I stressed the existence of the amazing Community Safety team—I think “everyone knows” that EA doesn’t do anything to hold men accountable for harm, whereas in fact it tries incredibly hard to do this and I’m super impressed by everyone involved)
I acknowledge that makes it sound like we have opposing cultural goals—you want to increase the degree to which people feel comfortable expressing out that EA’s culture might be harmful to women, I want to increase the degree to which people feel comfortable pushing back against claims to that effect which aren’t true. I think there is some subtle complicated sense in which we might not actually have opposing cultural goals, but I agree to a first-order approximation they sure do seem different. And I realize this is an annoyingly stereotypical situation - I, as a cis man, coming into a thread like this and saying I’m worried about a false accusations and chilling effects. My only two defenses are, first, that I only got this way because of specific real and harmful false accusations, that I tried to do an extreme amount of homework on them before calling false, and that I only ever bring up in the context of defending my decision there. And second, that I hope I’m possible to work with and feel safe around, despite my cultural goals, because I want to have a firm deontological commitment to promoting true things and opposing false things, in a way that doesn’t refer to my broader cultural goals at any point.
What links here?
- Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims by Kat Woods (12 Dec 2023 13:15 UTC; 151 points)
- Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims by KatWoods (LessWrong; 12 Dec 2023 13:16 UTC; 104 points)

Scott Alexander 2 Dec 2022 21:21 UTC
209 points
71 ∶ 5
in reply to: ethai’s comment on: I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared.
Predictably, I disagree with this in the strongest possible terms.
If someone says false and horrible things to destroy other people’s reputation, the story is “someone said false and horrible things to destroy other people’s reputation”. Not “in some other situation this could have been true”. It might be true! But discussion around the false rumors isn’t the time to talk about that.
Suppose the shoe was on the other foot, and some man (Bob), made some kind of false and horrible rumor about a woman (Alice). Maybe he says that she only got a good position in her organization by sleeping her way to the top. If this was false, the story isn’t “we need to engage with the ways Bob felt harmed and make him feel valid.” It’s not “the Bob lied lens is harsh and unproductive”. It’s “we condemn these false and damaging rumors”. If the headline story is anything else, I don’t trust the community involved one bit, and I would be terrified to be associated with it.
I understand that sexual assault is especially scary, and that it may seem jarring to compare it to less serious accusations like Bob’s. But the original post says we need to express emotions more, and I wanted to try to convey an emotional sense of how scary this position feels to me. Sexual assault is really bad and we need strong norms about it. But we’ve been talking a lot about consequentialism vs. deontology lately, and where each of these is vs. isn’t appropriate. And I think saying “sexual assault is so bad, that for the greater good we need to focus on supporting accusations around it, even when they’re false and will destroy people’s lives” is exactly the bad kind of consequentialism that never works in real life. The specific reason it never works in real life is that once you’re known for throwing the occasional victim under the bus for the greater good, everyone is terrified of associating with you.
Perhaps I would feel differently if I knew of examples of the EA community publicly holding men accountable for harm to women.
This is surprising to me; I know of several cases of people being banned from EA events for harm to women. When I’ve tried to give grants to people, I have gotten unexpected emails from EA higher-ups involved in a monitoring system, who told me that one of those people secretly had a history of harming women and that I should reconsider the grant on that basis. I have personally, at some physical risk to myself, forced a somewhat-resistant person to leave one of my events because they had a history of harm to women (this was Giego C; I think it was clear-cut enough to be okay to name a name here; I know most orgs have already banned him, and if your org hasn’t then I recommend they do too—email me and I can explain why). I know of some other cases where men caused less severe cases of harm or discomfort to women, there were very long discussions by (mostly female members of) EA leadership about whether they should be allowed to continue in their roles, and after some kind of semi-formal proceeding, with the agreement of the victim, after an apology, it was decided that they should be allowed to continue in their roles, sometimes with extra supervision. There’s an entire EA Community Health Team with several employees and a mid-six-figure budget, and a substantial fraction of their job is holding men accountable for harm to women. If none of this existed, maybe I’d feel differently. But right now my experience of EA is that they try really hard to prevent harm to women, so hard that the current disagreement isn’t whether to ban some man accused of harming women, but whether it was okay for me to mention that a false accusation was false.
Again in honor of the original post saying we should be more open about our emotions: I’m sorry for bringing this up. I know everyone hates having to argue about these topics. Realistically I’m writing this because I’m triggered and doing it as a compulsion, and maybe you also wrote your post because you’re triggered and doing it as a compulsion, and maybe Maya wrote her post because she’s triggered and doing it as a compuIsion. This is a terrible topic where a lot of people have been hurt and have strong feelings, and I don’t know how to avoid this kind of cycle where we all argue about horrible things in circles. But I am geninely scared of living in a community where nobody can save good people from false accusations because some kind of mis-aimed concern about the greater good has created a culture of fear around ever speaking out. I have seen something like this happen to other communities I once loved and really don’t want it to happen here. I’m open to talking further by email if you want to continue this conversation in a way that would be awkward on a public forum.
What links here?
- Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims by Kat Woods (12 Dec 2023 13:15 UTC; 151 points)
- Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims by KatWoods (LessWrong; 12 Dec 2023 13:16 UTC; 104 points)

Scott Alexander 2 Dec 2022 20:52 UTC
98 points
32 ∶ 1
in reply to: Truck Driver Wannabe’s comment on: I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared.
EDIT: After some time to cool down, I’ve removed that sentence from the comment, and somewhat edited this comment which was originally defending it.
I do think the sentence was true. By that I mean that (this is just a guess, not something I know from specifically asking them) the main reason other people were unwilling to post the information they had, was because they were worried that someone would write a public essay saying “X doesn’t believe sexual assault victims” or “EA has a culture of doubting sexual assault victims”. And they all hoped someone else would go first to mention all the evidence that these particular rumors were untrue, so that that person could be the one to get flak over this for the rest of their life (which I have, so good prediction!), instead of them. I think there’s a culture of fear around these kinds of issues that it’s useful to bring to the foreground if we want to model them correctly.
But I think you’re gesturing at a point where if I appear to be implicitly criticizing Maya for bringing that up, fewer people will bring things like that up in the future, and even if this particular episode was false, many similar ones will be true, so her bringing it up is positive expected value, so I shouldn’t sound critical in any way that discourages future people from doing things like that.
Although it’s possible that the value gained by saying this true thing is higher than the value lost by potential chilling effects, I don’t want to claim to have an opinion on this, because in fact I wrote that comment feeling pretty triggered and upset, without any effective value calculations at all. Given that it did get heavily upvoted, I can see a stronger argument for the chilling effect part and will edit it out.