Seems like a cheap applause light unless you accompany it the equivalent stories about how the optimal number of almost any bad thing is not zero.
temporalis
Karma: 348
Everyone that was accused of assault was banned from the club. Members that engaged in more minor offenses were warned, and kicked out if they didn’t change. To my knowledge, no innocent people were kicked out by mistake (false accusations are rare). I think this made the community a much more pleasant place.
I often see suggestions like this, so I think it’s worth taking a minute to explain why this is a terrible idea. There is a reason both political parties abandoned this policy.
The idea that false accusations are rare is somewhat dubious. It’s a commonly quoted idea, but when you dig down into the citations, the claim often relies on some dubious statistics (like simply assuming all accusations not proven false are true). For more details you can see here.
Even if those statistics were correct, they are based on data from a previous time period, one where defendants were treated with considerably more due process. As such, there was much less incentive to create a false report. As society regresses back towards a witchhunt/lynching model, where an accusation is taken as sufficient proof of guilt, the incentive to make false accusations significantly increases. (I am curious how you can be so confident that no innocent people were kicked out by mistake if you really were following a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy!)
So this policy is self-undermining. If you accept accusations as sufficient proof, strategic accusations will be made more often. We know many people, and the EA movement as a whole, have enemies; literally adopting such a policy would make us trivial to destroy. We often ask people to accept huge personal sacrifices and dedicate large fractions of their life to EA; no reasonable person would be willing to invest in the movement if they knew they were a hair-trigger away from exile at all time.
We use a spreadsheet that tracks racial and gender diversity and representativeness across cause areas. Along the way, we adjust our invites based on who has accepted so far to ensure a breadth of topics and expertise from a range of fields as well as racial and gender diversity across speakers. To be clear, we don’t invite people to be speakers solely because of their race, gender, or cause area. We invite people we think will have interesting and useful things to say and have these systems to feature qualified people from underrepresented groups and subject matter experts from various fields.
This feels like a preemptive defense against a strawman of the criticism. I don’t think anyone would suggest you’re inviting people based solely on their race—that you’re just mailing invitations to people selected totally at random among all their co-racialists.
Presumably it is the case that, on the margin, you accepted some people because of their race or gender? That there are some people who were accepted who would have been rejected, if they had been otherwise as good a candidate (aptitude, alignment, interest, etc.) but of another race. And there are some people who were rejected who would have been accepted, if they had been otherwise as good a candidate (aptitude, alignment, interest, etc.) but of another race.
No, saying that we should do X rather than Y does not mean you disrespect Y. It could just be you respect X even more, or disagree “respect” is the right framing, or think that X is required for Y.
In any case I think Cinera’s argument that Bostrom’s behavior was actually a positive update is somewhat credible.
I think it’s pretty outrageous to suggest that the OP is allowed to make this argument in the post, by calling it ‘discredited’ and a ‘disqualifying views’, but commenters are not allowed to object. If you want to criticize someone for bringing an irrelevant issue into it, you should direct your ire at the OP.
That’s mentioning the term, not using it.
Part of the goal is to persuade them to act more safely, and it’s easier to do this if they are able to explain their perspective. Also, it allows others to evaluate their arguments. We can’t adopt a rule that “people accused of doing something dangerous can’t defend themselves” because sometimes after evaluating the arguments they are in the right—e.g. nuclear power, GMOs.
I agreed with you a few months ago; it does seem like FHI has suffered significant mismanagement, though as Sean suggests maybe a strong co-director would work also.
However, after recent events I think the case for him staying on is actually stronger, because it is important to set a precedent that we support people genuinely thinking for themselves and do not give in to bullying. I don’t see how we can hope to build an inclusive community of original thinkers if everyone has a Sword of Damocles hanging over their head, knowing they might be denounced and fired if that became politically expedient. For more details on this I recommend Cinera’s excellent post.
I also think you have significantly overstated your case in various places. For example, while CEA did condemn him, their statement was widely criticized and they ended up issuing a partial apology for it. You mention funding, but don’t provide any evidence this will prevent FHI from fundraising; any funder that wants to promote a diverse and inclusive group of intellectuals producing novel work will have to accept that they will sometimes strongly disagree with grantees. Similarly, freedom of speech is a major concern for the english government right now, and it is currently passing a law to help combat cancel culture and defend academic freedom against pressure from university administrators.
Finally, I’m not sure what you’re referring to by ‘discredited race science’. As I discussed with Habiba, Bostrom’s views are not very different from those of scientifically informed leading anti-racism campaigners. They simply use slightly different wording.
Combining these two views, I think the best approach might be for him to step down or take on a strong co-director after a sufficiently long period has passed to make it clear he wasn’t just giving in to pressure.
selection people having to be in a sufficiently positive frame of mind to take surveys (what exactly is the inverse selection effect you imagine from Westerners
In the west I think being willing to spend time to fill in a survey in return for $1.00 is probably a negative selection effect. Happy people are too busy being awesome.
I feel happy you wrote this.
I worry that this is not very incentive compatible however. It would presumably create strong incentives for men to identify as only EA-adjacent, not work for EA orgs, not publicly donate to effective charities, so as to exempt themselves from the rule.
It also seems like it could worsen selection pressures. If more well behaved males abide by such a rule, this would make things easier for less moral guys by reducing competition.
https://slate.com/culture/1996/07/more-sex-is-safer-sex.html
Traditionally this incentive issue has been partially solved by stigmatizing those who violate the norm, but that doesn’t work as well if the violators are not part of the community. The other part of the traditional solution is the stigmatization of women who accept such approaches, because each one who does so imposes negative externalities on other women by encouraging cadish behavior.
Most functional institutions outside of EA, from companies to friend groups to extended families[1], have developed norms against sleeping around within the group.
Yes, although historically groups like villages, churches and ethnic groups have been keen to encourage members to date and marry each other.
I don’t understand what rule you think I broke. This was a link to a public website that she herself shared on the thread; it does not fall into any of the categories in the linked website. This is someone who is making serious allegations about EA, and looking to be paid for it—she should not be able to demand others users delete any record of what she has done.
The closest reference I can see in the rules is this:
If information was accessible at the time of posting but isn’t anymore, we might encode it
But then you should have encoded it, not deleted it and edited my screenshots.
No worries comrade, glad to help.
I understand the desire to for quantification and transparency, but my guess is this particular quantity is relatively far down the list of parameters to publicly estimate, especially given the methodological difficulty. If you thought it was particularly pressing maybe you could have a go at it? Or perhaps there is some existing economic literature on the subject. I suppose the level burden of proof applied in court cases is a starting point.
Probably worth tabooing ‘poly’ here. As far as I can tell, basically every critic of poly is referring to relationships that are at open to new participants, and every defender of poly wants to defend those relationships also.
If you want you can come up with a new definition:
open_poly: a person in a relationship with someone else who is still open to more relationships.
The debate then becomes whether it is fine to be open_poly, or if there are significant costs and hence open_poly people should cease to be open. I think basically every critic of poly would be satisfied if the existing relationships continued but ceased accepting new members.
And based on your comment it seems like you basically think that open_poly does bring significant incremental risk vs a counterfactual of non-open.
I think you’re mainly correct about individual EAs (though there are exceptions). People’s general policy is not to explicitly deny it, it’s just to ignore it, and shun those who mention it with a vague accusation of racism. But on a systematic level we clearly do deny it. For example, disparate impact tests, which punish firms for discrimination, assume equal levels of aptitude by race. Racial IQ gaps is not an acceptable defense in US civil rights lawsuits, nor in the court of public opinion if your group is accused of lacking diversity!