I direct the AI:Futures and Responsibility Programme (https://www.ai-far.org/) at the University of Cambridge, which works on AI strategy, safety and governance. I also work on global catastrophic risks with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and AI strategy/policy with the Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
Sean_o_h
Karma: 3,569
A note of caution about recent AI risk coverage
I’m not taking a position on the question of whether Nick should stay on as Director, and as noted in the post I’m on record as having been unhappy with his apology (which remains my position)*, but for balance and completeness I’d like to provide a perspective on the importance of Nick’s leadership, at least in the past.
I worked closely with Nick at FHI from 2011 to 2015. While I’ve not been at FHI much in recent years (due to busyness elsewhere) I remember the FHI of that time being a truly unique-in-academia place; devoted to letting and helping brilliant people think about important challenges in unusual ways. That was in very large part down to Nick—he is visionary, and remarkably stubborn and difficult—with the benefits and drawbacks this comes with. It is difficult to understate the degree of pressure in academia to pull you away from doing something unique and visionary and to instead do more generic things, put time into impressing committees, keeping everyone happy etc**. - It’s that stubbornness (combined with the vision) in my view that allowed FHI to come into being and thrive (at least for a time). It is (in my view) the same stubbornness and difficultness that contributes to other issues noted in in the post.
Whether Nick was the right leader at that time isn’t a question to me—FHI couldn’t have happened under anyone else. And the great work done by multiple people there (not just Nick), and a fairly remarkable range of fhi alumni post-fhi, must stand to that vision. Whether a different leader would be able to keep the positive aspects of the vision—and fight for them—while also being able to address the problems—maybe, I don’t know.
One model FHI might consider is a meaningful, and properly empowered, co-directorship model. I felt I had a good relationship with Nick at the time, and was able to regularly shut down ideas I thought foolish or unnecessarily annoying to the university (although it was stressful). I was also able to put time into maintaining university relationships for FHI, which seemed to keep things on the rails. But that required me being pretty stubborn too, and it seems like others may have had less success in this regard later on (although I know little of the details). It may be possible to make such a model work, with a properly empowered fellow director (e.g. an exec director / research director model).
* I am not taking a position on issues raised in the post such as whether Nick’s brand is too damaged, etc. This may be the case. For whatever it’s worth I never saw/heard racist views during my time at FHI (if I had, I would have left). I do recall initiatives, enthusiastically initiated by Nick, to engage and support scholars from under-represented regions like South America, and to encourage intellectual hubs outside of Europe/North America.
** I’ve spent a lot of time trying to navigate these things in academia, and have the scar tissue to show for it.- 's comment on Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report by (21 Apr 2024 10:54 UTC; 156 points)
- 's comment on Nick Bostrom should step down as Director of FHI by (5 Mar 2023 0:42 UTC; 140 points)
- 's comment on Nick Bostrom should step down as Director of FHI by (4 Mar 2023 17:51 UTC; 30 points)
- 's comment on Nick Bostrom should step down as Director of FHI by (5 Mar 2023 11:22 UTC; 4 points)
Thanks Habryka. My reason for commenting is that a one-sided story is being told here about the administrative/faculty relationship stuff, both by FHI and in the discussion here, and I feel it to be misleading in its incompleteness. It appears Carrick and I disagree and I respect his views, but I think many people who worked at FHI felt it to be severely administratively mismanaged for a long time. I felt presenting that perspective was important for trying to draw the right lessons.
I agree with the general point that maintaining independence under this kind of pressure is extremely hard, that there are difficult tradeoffs to make. I believe Nick made many of the right decisions in maintaining integrity and independence, and sometimes incurred costly penalties to do so that likely contributed to the administrative/bureaucratic tensions with the faculty. However, I think part of what is happening here is that some quite different things from working-inside-fhi-perspective are being conflated under broad ‘heading’ (intellectual integrity/independence) which sometimes overlapped, but often relatively minimally, and can be usefully disaggregated—intellectual vision and integrity; following administrative process for your hosting organisation; bureaucratic relationship management.
Pick your battles. If you’re going to be ‘weird’ along one dimension, it often makes sense to try to be ‘easy’ along others. The really important dimension was the intellectual independence. During my time FHI constantly incurred heavy costs for being uncooperative on many administrative and bureaucratic matters that I believe did not affect the intellectual element, or only minimally, often resulting in using up far more of FHI’s own team’s time than otherwise.
One anecdote. When I arrived at FHI in 2011, there was a head of admin at philosophy (basically running the faculty) called Tom (I think). His name was mud at FHI; the petty administrative tyrant who was thwarting everything FHI wanted to do. So I went and got to know him. Turns out the issue was fixed by my having a once a month meeting with him to talk through what we wanted to do, and figure out how to do it. Nearly everything we wanted to to do could be done, but sometimes following a process that FHI hadn’t been following, or looping in someone who needed to be aware. Not doing this had been causing him huge administrative hassle and extra workload. After that, he was regularly working overtime to help us on deadline occasions. On one occasion, he was (I’m sure) the only admin in Oxford working on Easter Monday, using the Oxford ‘authority’ to help us sort out a visa problem for a researcher’s wife unexpectedly stuck at an airport and panicking. A lot of that kind of thing. (*note, I expect that later in FHI’s time frictions were sufficiently entrenched to prevent these kinds of positive feedbacks)
I don’t particularly wish to have a referendum on my integrity, or a debate over whether CSER and CFI have been good or not. On the former, people can read my comment, your criticism, and make their own mind up how much to ‘trust’ me, or ask others who worked at FHI; the latter is a separate conversation where I am somewhat constrained in what I can say.
But briefly, for the same reasons that I think it’s important not to take the wrong lessons: I don’t agree that CSER and CFI have been bad for the world. They are also quite different than what my own visions for them would have been (in some ways good no doubt, in some ways bad perhaps). If you are to draw the direct comparison, I think it’s worth noting that Nick and I were in very different positions that afforded different freedoms. I took up the role at CSER somewhat reluctantly at Nick’s encouragement. I was too junior to play the kind of role that Nick played at FHI from Cambridge’s perspective (nowhere near being a professor), and there was already a senior board in place of professors mostly uninvolved with this field, and with quite different perspectives to mine. The founder whose perspectives most aligned with my own took a hands off role, for what I think are sound reasons. The extent to which this might come to limit my own intellectual and strategic relevance became apparent to me in 2015, and I spoke to Nick about resigning and doing something else; he persuaded me that staying and providing what intellectual and strategic direction I could appeared the highest value thing I could do. In hindsight, had my goal been to realise my own intellectual and strategic vision I would have been better served to continue direct academic work longer, progress to professor, and start something smaller a little later. In practice, my role required executing a shared vision in which my influence was one of many; or at CFI developing one of several distinct programmes.
With that said, I’m entirely confident that you are right that there were intellectual and strategic decisions I made that were the wrong ones, and where I judged the tradeoffs incorrectly. I’m also confident that had I been in Nick’s position, there are correct decisions that he made that I would not have had the intellectual courage to make or stick with in the face of opposition. And as I noted in a previous comment, I think elements of Nick’s personality in terms of stubborn-ness and uncompromising-ness on the way he wanted to do things contributed both to the intellectual independence and the administrative/bureaucratic problems; I just wish they could have been more selectively applied. (I also don’t think Nick made all the right intellectual and strategic decisions, but that, again, is a different discussion).
Re: incompetence in terms of faculty relationship, I believe the comment is correct and I stand by it. But it is of course only one part of the story (one i wanted not to be lost). And how strongly I hold that may be coloured by my own feelings. FHI was something that was important to me too, and that I put years of hard work into supporting. Even as late as 2022 I was working with Oxford to try to find solutions. I feel that there were many unforced errors, and I am frustrated.
(With apologies, I’m leaving for research meetings in China tomorrow, so will likely not have time to reply for a few weeks).
And I guess I should just say directly. I do wish it were possible to raise (specific) critical points on matter like faculty relations where I have some direct insight and discuss these, without immediate escalation to counterclaims that my career’s work has been bad for the world, that I am not to be trusted, and and that my influence is somehow responsible for attacks on people’s intellectual integrity. It’s very stressful and upsetting.
I suffer from (mild) social anxiety. That is not uncommon. This kind of very forceful interaction is valuable for some people but is difficult and costly for others to engage with. I am going to engage less with EA forum/LW as a result of this and a few similar interactions, and I am especially going to be more hesitant to be critical of EA/LW sacred cows. I imagine, given what you have said about my takes, that this will be positive from your perspective. So be it. But you might also consider the effect it will have on others who might be psychologically similar, and whose takes you might consider more valuable.
Addendum: There’s a saying that “no matter what side of an argument you’re on, you’ll always find someone on your side who you wish was on the other side”.
There is a seam running through Torres’s work that challenges xrisk/longtermism/EA on the grounds of the limitations of being led and formulated by a mostly elite, developed-world community.
Like many people in longtermism/xrisk, I think there is a valid concern here. xrisk/longtermism/EA all started in a combination of elite british universities + US communities e.g. bay. They had to start somewhere. I am of the view that they shouldn’t stay that way.
I think it’s valid to ask whether there are assumptions embedded within these frameworks at this stage that should be challenged, and to posit that these would be challenged most effectively by people with a very different background and perspective. I think it’s valid to argue that thinking, planning for, and efforts to shape the long-term future should not be driven by a community that is overwhelmingly from one particular background and that doesn’t draw on and incorporate the perspectives of a community that reflects more of global societies and cultures. Work by such a community would likely miss important values and considerations, might reflect founder-effect biases, and would lack legitimacy and buy-in when it came to implementation. I think it’s valid to expect it to engage with frameworks beyond utilitarianism, and I’m pleased to see GPI, The Precipice, amongst others do this.
As both xrisk and longtermism grow and mature, a core part of the project should be, in my view, and likely will be, expanding beyond this starting point. Such efforts are underway. They take a long time. And I would like to see people, both internal and external to the community, challenge the community on this where needed .
However, for someone on this side of the argument, I am deeply frustrated by Torres’s approach. It salts the earth for engagement with people who disagree with this view and actively works against finding common ground. It alienates people from diverse backgrounds outside xrisk/longtermism from engaging with xrisk/longtermism, and thus makes the project harder. And it strengthens the views of those who disagree with the case I’ve put, especially when they perceive those they disagree with acting in bad faith. The book ends with the claim “More than anything, I want this mini-book to help rehabilitate “longtermism,” and hence Existential Risk Studies.” I do not believe this hostile, polemical approach serves that aim; rather I worry that it is undermining it.
A quick point of clarification that Phil Torres was never staff at CSER; he was a visitor for a couple of months a few years ago. He has unfortunately misrepresented himself as working at CSER on various media (unclear if deliberate or not). (And FWIW he has made similar allusions, albeit thinly veiled, about me).
[disclaimer: acting director of CSER, but writing in personal capacity]. I’d also like to add my strongest endorsement of Carrick—as ASB says, a rare and remarkable combination of intellectual brilliance, drive, and tremendous compassion. It was a privilege to work with him at Oxford for a few years. It would be wonderful to see more people like Carrick succeeding in politics; I believe it would make for a better world.
I would strongly caution against doing so. Even if it turns out to be seemingly justified in this instance (and I offer no view either way whether it is or not), I cannot think of a more effective way of discouraging victims/whistleblowers from coming forward (in other cases in this community) in future situations.
I note the rider says it’s not directed at regular forum users/people necessarily familiar with longtermism.
The Torres critiques are getting attention in non-longtermist contexts, especially with people not very familiar with the source material being critiqued. I expect to find myself linking to this post regularly when discussing with academic colleagues who have come across the Torres critiques; several sections (the “missing context/selective quotations” section in particular) demonstrate effectively places in which the critiques are not representing the source material entirely fairly.
Strong +1 re: ‘hero’ work culture. especially for ops staff. This was one of the things that bothered me while there and contributed to my moving on—an (admittedly very nice) attitude of praising (especially admin/management) people who were working stupidly hard/long, rather than actually investing in fixing a clearly dysfunctional situation. And while it might not have been possible to fix later on due to embedded animosity/frustration on both sides ⇒ hiring freeze etc, it certainly was early on when I was there.
The admin load issue was not just about the faculty. And the breakdown of relationship with the faculty was really was not one-sided, at least when I was there (and I think I succeeded in semi-rescuing some of the key relationships (oxford martin school, faculty of philosophy) while I was there, at least temporarily).
There has been a relationship and active discussions between people in the relevant parts of the UN , and researchers at Xrisk orgs (FHI, CSER, FLI and others) including myself and (as noted above) Toby Ord for 5+ years. I believe the SG’s taken an active interest. I’m not sure what is appropriate for me to say on a public forum, but I’d be happy to discuss offline.
Balanced against that, whatever you think about the events described, this is likely to have been a very difficult experience to go through in such a public way from their perspective—one of them described it in this thread as “the worst thing to ever happen to me”. That may have affected their ability to respond promptly.
Stated more eloquently than I could have, SYA.
I’d also add that, were I to be offering advice to K & E, I’d probably advise taking more time. Reacting aggressively or defensively is all too human when facing the hurricane of a community’s public opinion—and that is probably not in anyone’s best interest. Taking the time to sit with the issues, and later respond more reflectively as you describe, seems advisable.
Deleting this because on re-reading I think I’m just repeating myself, but in a more annoyed way. Thanks for checking with other people, I’ll leave it at that.
Thank you. I’m grateful you checked with other people. Yes, I do think there is some history rewriting and mythologising going on here compared to my own memory of how things were, and this bothers me because I think the truth does matter.There is a very real sense in which Nick had a pretty sweet setup at Oxford, in terms of having the power and influence to do an unusual thing. And there were a bunch of people around him working insanely hard to help make that happen. I also do think there is a degree to which, yes, Nick blew it. I don’t really want to dwell on this because it feels a bit like bad-mouthing FHI at its funeral. And it’s not the whole story. But it is a source of some frustration to me, because I did not have that position of power and influence in trying to do somewhat similar things, and have spent years banging my head against various walls, and I would have liked to see the FHI story go well. That is not to say i would have made all the right decisions had I had that power and influence (I’m sure I would not), or that I did make all the right decisions in the situations I was in. But I still think I am within my rights to have a view as someone who was actually there for 4 years doing the thing.As well as all the good stuff, Nick was unusually pedantic and stubborn about a huge range of things, many of them (to my lights) relatively unimportant, from expensive cups to fonts to refusing to follow processes that would not realistically have impeded FHI’s intellectual activities to follow. And so many things would get framed as a battle to be won against the Faculty/University, where a bit of cooperation would have gone a long way. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. It sucked up huge amounts of FHI time, huge amounts of Faculty time, and huge amounts of social capital, which made it harder to stand ground/get cooperation on the stuff that mattered. And it compounded over time. You don’t trust me, but do some digging and I think you’ll find it. There were two sides to this thing.All of this I am saying based on a lot of context and experience at FHI. Rather than question or challenge me on my original point, your immediate reaction was two multi-paragraph posts seemingly aimed at publicly discrediting me in every way—repeatedly saying that you don’t consider me trustworthy; that my career’s work has been bad for the world and therefore my takes shouldn’t be listened to; that I am some sort of malign intellectual influence who is somehow responsible for intellectual attacks on other people*. To me this doesn’t look like truth-seeking behaviour. It looks more like an effort to discredit a person who challenged the favoured narrative.Evenafterbeing told by someone who actually was at FHI that I was a big part of making it work, your response seems to imply that if you did some digging into my time at FHI, you would find that actually my influence turned out to be negative and harmful. Well do that digging, see if that’s what you find. I worked damn hard there, took personal risks, and did good work. You want to claim that’s false, you can show some evidence.*And no, I don’t think these things are equivalently harsh. I criticised Nick for bureaucratic mistakes. Nobody respects Nick primarily for his administrative/bureaucratic relationship skills. They respect him for other things, which I have praised on other occasions. Your personal go at me targeted pretty much every aspect of why people might respect me or consider me worth listening to. That is fundamentally different.
Having worked there and interfaced with the Faculty for 4 years, yes, I would expect garden variety incompetence on Bostrom’s part in terms of managing the relationship was a big part; I would predict the single biggest contributer to the eventual outcome.
Thank you for all your work, and I’m excited for your ongoing and future projects Will, they sound very valuable! But I hope and trust you will be giving equal attention to your well-being in the near-term. These challenges will need your skills, thoughtfulness and compassion for decades to come. Thank you for being so frank—I know you won’t be alone in having found this last year challenging mental health-wise, and it can help to hear others be open about it.
I appreciate that these kinds of moderation decisions can be difficult, but I also don’t agree with the warning to Halstead. And if it is to be given, then I am uncomfortable that Halstead has been singled out—it would seem consistent to apply the same warning to me, as I supported Halstead’s claims, and added my own, both without providing evidence.
Hmm. interesting. This goes strongly against my intuitions. In case of interest I’d be happy to give you 5:1 odds that this Fermi estimate is at least an order of magnitude too severe (for a small stake of up to £500 on my end, £100 on yours). Resolved in your favour if 1 year from now the fatalities are >1/670 (or 11.6M based on current world population); in my favour if <1/670.
(Happy to discuss/modify/clarify terms of above.)
Edit: We have since amended the terms to 10:1 (50GBP of Justin’s to 500GBP of mine).
Happy to have a go; the “in/out of context” is a large part of the problem here. (Note that I don’t think I agree with Beckstead’s argument for reasons given towards the end).
(1) The thesis (198 pages of it!) is about shaping the far future, and operates on staggering timescales. Some of it like this quote is written in the first person, which has the effect of putting it in the present-day context, but these are at their heart philosophical arguments abstracted from time and space. This is a thing philosophers do.
If I were to apply the argument to the 12th century world, I might claim that saving a person in what is now modern day Turkey would have greater ripple effects than saving a person in war-ravaged Britain. The former was lightyears further ahead in science and technology, chock full of incredible muslim scholar-engineers like Al Jazari (seriously; read about this guy). I might be wrong of course; the future is unpredictable and these ripples might be wiped out in the next century by a Mongol Horde (as for the most part did happen); but wrong on different grounds.
And earlier in the thesis Beckstead provides a whole heap of caveats (in addition to ‘all other things being equal’, including that his argument explicitly does not address issues “such as whose responsibility that is, how much the current generation should be required to sacrifice for the sake of future generations, how shaping the far future stacks up against special obligations or issues of justice”; these are all “good questions” but out of scope.)
If Beckstead further developed the ‘it is better to save lives in rich countries’ argument in the thesis, explicitly embedding it within the modern context and making practical recommendations that would exacerbate the legacy of harm of postcolonial inequality, then Torres might have a point. He does not. It’s a paragraph on one page of a 198 page PhD thesis. Reading the paragraph in the context of the overall thesis gives a very different impression than the deliberately leading context that Torres places the paragraph in.
(2) Now consider the further claims that Torres has repeatedly made—that this paragraph taints the entire field in white supremacy; and that any person or organisation who praised the thesis is endorsing white supremacy. This is an even more extreme version of the same set of moves. I have found nothing—nothing -anywhere in the EA or longtermist literature building on and progressing this argument.
(3) The same can be seen, but in a more extreme fashion, for the Mogensen paper. Again, an abstract philosophical argument. Here Mogensen (in a very simplified version) observes that over three dimensions—the world—total utilitarianism says you should spread your resources over all people in that space. But if you introduce a 4th dimension—time, then the same axiology says you should spread your resources over space and time, and the majority of that obligation lies in the future. It’s an abstract philosophical argument. Torres reads in white supremacy, and invites the reader to read in white supremacy.
(4) The problem here is that no body of scholarship can realistically withstand this level of hostile scrutiny and leading analysis. And no field can realistically withstand the level of hostile analysis where one paragraph in a PhD thesis taken out of context is used to damn an entire field. I don’t think I personally agree with the argument on its own terms—it’s hard to prove definitively but I would have a concern that inequality has often been argued to be a driver of systemic instability, and that if so, any intervention that increases inequality might contribute to negative ‘ripple effects’ regardless of what countries were rich and poor at a given time. And I think the paragraph itself could reasonably be characterised as ‘thoughtless’, given the author is a white western person writing in C21, even if the argument is not explicitly in this context.
However the extreme criticism presented in Torres’s piece stands in stark contrast to the much more serious racism that goes unchallenged in so much of scholarship and modern life. Any good-faith actor will in the first instance pursue these, rather than reading the worst ills possible into a paragraph of a PhD thesis. I’ve run out of time, but will illustrate this shortly with a prominent example of what I consider to be much more significant racism from Torres’s own work.
[disclaimer: I am co-Director at CSER. While much of what I will write intersects with professional responsibilities, it is primarily written from a personal perspective, as this is a deeply personal matter for me. Apologies in advance if that’s confusing, this is a distressing and difficult topic for me, and I may come back and edit. I may also delete my comment, for professional or personal/emotional reasons].
I am sympathetic to Halstead’s position here, and feel I need to write my own perspective. Clearly to the extent that CSER has—whether directly or indirectly—served to legitimise such attacks by Torres on colleagues in the field, I bear a portion of responsibility as someone in a leadership position. I do not feel it would be right or appropriate for me to speak for all colleagues, but I would like to emphasise that individually I do not, in any way, condone this conduct, and I apologise for it, and for any failings on my individual part that may have contributed.
My personal impression supports the case Halstead makes. Comments about my ‘whiteness’, and insinuations regarding my ‘real’ reasons for objecting to positions taken by Torres only came after I objected publicly to Torres’s characterisations of Halstead, Olle Hagstrom, Nick Beckstead, Toby Ord and others. I have been informed by Torres that I owe him an apology for not siding with him [edit: to emphasise, this is my personal subjective impression/interpretation based on communications with me].
As well as the personal motivation, this mode of engagement reflects another aspect of this discourse I find deeply troubling: while I think there are valid arguments against longtermism, and alternative perspectives, it becomes impossible to discuss the issues, and in particular, the unfair characterisation of individuals, on the object level. Object level disagreement is met with an insinuation that this is the white supremacists closing ranks. I do believe there is a valid argument in some cases that one can be unaware of biases, and one can be unconsciously influenced by the ‘background radiation’ of a privileged society. Personally I have experienced this in unconscious, and sometimes deliberate, racism experienced as an Irish person living in Britain, and I have no doubt that non-white people have it much worse. However, this principle can also most certainly be overused uncharitably, or even ‘weaponised’ to shut down constructive intellectual engagement. And it is profoundly anti-intellectual to permit only those from outside a system of privilege to challenge scholarship.
There are other rhetorical moves I find deeply troubling. The common-society use of ‘white supremacy’ is something like “people who believe that white people are superior to other races and should dominate them; and are willing to act on that through violent means.”. Torres has typically not defined the term, but when challenged, he has explained that he is using the term in the more narrowly-used way used in critical race theory; of “of white people benefiting from and maintaining a system where the legacy of colonial privilege is maintained”. (note that he does define it in the mini-book, although as the ‘academic’ definition, which I think is overstatement). When challenged, Torres insults people for not automatically knowing he is using the more esoteric CRT definition rather than the common-use definition. This is not a reasonable position to take. And it is not reasonable to expect people not to be deeply hurt and offended by the language used.
Even accounting for the CRT definition, this is still an extremely serious and harmful accusation, and one that should not be made without extremely careful consideration and very strong evidence. In my own case, as someone from a culture overwhelmingly defined by the harms of colonialism, it is another way of shutting down any possible discussion; it is so violently upsetting that it renders me incapable of continuing to engage.
To the extent that scholars at CSER are still collaborating with Torres: I am not. I have spoken regarding my concerns to those who have let me know they are still collaborating with him, and have let them make their own choices. Most collaborations are the legacy of projects initiated during his visit 2 years ago (which I authorised, not knowing some of the more serious issue Halstead raises, but being aware of some more minor concerns). Papers take a long time to go through the academic system, and it would be a very unusual and hostile step to e.g. take an author’s name off a paper against their wishes. In some instances, people wished to engage with some aspects of Torres’ critique and collaborate with presenting them in a more constructive and less polemical way (e.g. see several examples of Beard+Torres). I have respected their choices. This may not be the case with all collaborations; at CSER’s current size I am not always aware of every paper being written. But I think it is fair to say my view on this style of engagement are well-known.
I have not taken the step of banning colleagues at CSER from collaborating with Torres. This would be an extremely unusual step in academia, running contrary to some fundamental principles of academic freedom. Further, I am concerned that such steps would reinforce another set of attack lines: Torres has already publicly claimed that he ‘has no doubt’ that employees at CSER that disagreed with me would be fired for it. I value having scope for intellectual disagreement greatly, and I would not want this perspective to take hold.
I do not claim that my decisions have been correct.
I do think there is significant value in engaging with critics. I admire engagement of the sort that Haydn has just undertaken. As a committed longtermist, to ‘turn the other cheek’ and engage in good faith with a steelmanned, charitable interpretation of a polemical and hostile document is something I find admirable in itself. And as noted elsewhere in this discussion, enough people have found some value in the challenge Torres has presented to ideas within longtermism (even where presented uncharitably) that it seems reasonable for some to engage with it. However at the same time, I do worry that beyond some point, engaging so charitably may legitimise a mode of discourse that I find distressingly hostile and inimical to kind and constructive, and open discourse.
These are challenging, and sometimes controversial topics. There will very often be issues on which reasonable people will disagree. There will sometimes be positions taken that others will be profoundly uncomfortable with. This is not unique to Xrisk or longtermism; the same is true of global development and animal rights. I believe it is of paramount importance that we be able to interact with each other as thinkers and doers in a kind, constructive and charitable way; and above all to adopt these principles when we critique each other. After all, when we are wrong, this is nearly always the most effective way to change minds. While not everyone will agree with me on this, this is the view I have always put forward in the centres I have been a part of.