Either you believe these problems are much more common in the EA community than other communities and this poses a risk to the kids or you don’t.
If you do believe we are much worse than average, and this would put the kids at risk, asking how you should do movement building to highschoolers is probably the wrong question. You just shouldn’t do that movement building.
Probably however you don’t believe that the EA movement is much worse than average, (because there is basically no evidence for this), and don’t believe that your community building would actually put the kids in any significant danger. If this is the case, this is the crux of the matter. It’s important to acknowledge their concerns and show you’re not being dismissive, both as a matter of politeness and honesty and as a rhetorical matter. That was the purpose of the first bullet points. But you also need to explain the actual reason for your view. They are intelligent people capable of making their own decisions in light of the evidence, and they deserve the right to evaluate the facts and come to their own conclusions. Relative frequency estimates aren’t ‘trivializing’, they are the most important fact for their decision making.
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.
What should I tell them? “I promise this is not an issue in our local community”?
I’ve been extremely excited to prepare this event. I would get to teach Denmark’s brightest high schoolers about hierarchies of evidence, help them conduct their own cost-effectiveness analyses, and hopefully inspire a new generation to take action to make the world a better place.
Now I have to worry about whether it would be more appropriate to send the organizers a heads up informing them about the article and give them a chance to reconsider working with us.
I frankly feel unequipped to deal with something like this.
You’re venting, but I’ll try to answer helpfully. The right thing to say is surely:
Sexual assault is very bad.
If anyone is aware of any specific incident, they should contact the CEA team or their local law enforcement.
We try to prevent it, and expel those who commit it (including some of the people in this story).
It occurs in every community.
There is little reason to think the EA community in general is much more or less problematic here than other movements (unless you think polyamory and drugs are risk factors).
It is impossible for any large decentralized movement to reduce the rate to zero.
One of the major examples in the story is about someone who basically noone regards as an EA (and does not call himself an EA).
You shouldn’t take journalists with an agenda to push at face value, especially as they tend to highlight the most extreme and unrepresentative examples.
The EA movement has a bunch of critics who are willing to use dishonest means to attack it because it threatens their moral superiority.
This sounds like a lot to deal with. But at the end of the day, this is basically a common issue that has occurred for most movements. For an extreme example, rape accusations against their leaders didn’t stop both Republican and Democrat parties repeatedly uniting behind and getting the accused men elected President.
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.
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.
For what it’s worth, if people want to see what Adam Rutherford himself thinks of this, he has been fairly forthright in his response on his twitter see:
Yes, he’s been very forthright in his opinion of Bostrom! But on the broader issue he has not been straightforward on Twitter, but rather has been intentionally vague (as many would in his position).
As far as I can see, there are three main issues:
Are their racial IQ differences?
Bostrom and Rutherford agree yes.
Are these differences caused by genes?
Bostrom thinks maybe yes, Rutherford thinks probably no (though it can’t be fully ruled out).
Whether and how it is appropriate or harmful to discuss the topic.
Clear disagreement between Nick and Adam.
They disagree about 3), and this is what Nick’s most sophisticated critics criticize him for, like you in this post.
But I think most readers don’t realize they agree on 1). If you look at the headlines, there are a bunch saying ‘racist Oxford professor thinks Blacks are less intelligent than whites/asians’. For the majority of normal people, 1) is very suprising. Rutherford is strategic in not revealing that he also aligns with 1), thus utilizing emotive language to critique Nick instead of clearly articulating what they disagree and agree with.
Rutherford says he is distributing a copy of his book to Bostrom. As far as I can see, the logical conclusion for Nick (if he reads it) is to update to increase his credence that 1) is true. After all, if even an anti-racist biologist ally thinks there are racial IQ gaps, that seems like strong evidence it is true.
I also find the focus on mental illness inappropriate.
This seems like a very bad policy. The risks posed by people with dangerous personality traits has been an EA topic for a while. And we have just had the biggest crisis in the history of EA and it seems one of the contributing factors was people not sharing red flags about the person involved’s personality. If someone had shared concerns that Sam exhibited dangerous personality disorders a month ago, would CEA have also attempted to suppress that?
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 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.
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.
This issue has clearly caused a lot of division in the community which is sad. I think the differences between the two sides do not have to be as great as they appear.
You mention Adam Rutherford as a good source, and I agree he has done some good work. I think it’s interesting to note that he probably actually agrees with Bostrom on many things here! Here is a quote from Adam’s book (p166);
When it comes to looking at IQ scores around the world and between different populations, the picture is far from clear, but there are some undeniable differences. The most up-to-date meta-analysis suggest that countries in sub-Saharan Africa are likely to score in the eighties,* as compared to US IQ standards, though these results are not universally accepted. This, obviously, is significantly lower. Interpreting these results is not easy at all, and while it is not possible to fully exclude genertic factors, these seem unlikely owing to the immense genetic diversity that is now well established across that continent.
This sounds like you are suggesting (correct me if I’m wrong) that many or most withdrawn and ‘no-further-action’ accusations are actually false, which is not a fair conclusion to draw from the information you presented.
It is logical that people would be more likely to withdraw, and the police less likely to investigate, accusations that seem less compelling. If any of these cases are false, the 2.1% is an under-estimate; if they are false at a higher rate than cases accuser and police followed through with, the 2.1% is a significant underestimate.
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.
I just want to add that I can’t think of anyone denying (1) - that there are actual observed differences in IQ tests between races.
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!
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.
Error
Either you believe these problems are much more common in the EA community than other communities and this poses a risk to the kids or you don’t.
If you do believe we are much worse than average, and this would put the kids at risk, asking how you should do movement building to highschoolers is probably the wrong question. You just shouldn’t do that movement building.
Probably however you don’t believe that the EA movement is much worse than average, (because there is basically no evidence for this), and don’t believe that your community building would actually put the kids in any significant danger. If this is the case, this is the crux of the matter. It’s important to acknowledge their concerns and show you’re not being dismissive, both as a matter of politeness and honesty and as a rhetorical matter. That was the purpose of the first bullet points. But you also need to explain the actual reason for your view. They are intelligent people capable of making their own decisions in light of the evidence, and they deserve the right to evaluate the facts and come to their own conclusions. Relative frequency estimates aren’t ‘trivializing’, they are the most important fact for their decision making.
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.
Error
You’re venting, but I’ll try to answer helpfully. The right thing to say is surely:
Sexual assault is very bad.
If anyone is aware of any specific incident, they should contact the CEA team or their local law enforcement.
We try to prevent it, and expel those who commit it (including some of the people in this story).
It occurs in every community.
There is little reason to think the EA community in general is much more or less problematic here than other movements (unless you think polyamory and drugs are risk factors).
It is impossible for any large decentralized movement to reduce the rate to zero.
One of the major examples in the story is about someone who basically noone regards as an EA (and does not call himself an EA).
You shouldn’t take journalists with an agenda to push at face value, especially as they tend to highlight the most extreme and unrepresentative examples.
The EA movement has a bunch of critics who are willing to use dishonest means to attack it because it threatens their moral superiority.
This sounds like a lot to deal with. But at the end of the day, this is basically a common issue that has occurred for most movements. For an extreme example, rape accusations against their leaders didn’t stop both Republican and Democrat parties repeatedly uniting behind and getting the accused men elected President.
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.
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.
Thanks for your reply. :)
Yes, he’s been very forthright in his opinion of Bostrom! But on the broader issue he has not been straightforward on Twitter, but rather has been intentionally vague (as many would in his position).
As far as I can see, there are three main issues:
Are their racial IQ differences?
Bostrom and Rutherford agree yes.
Are these differences caused by genes?
Bostrom thinks maybe yes, Rutherford thinks probably no (though it can’t be fully ruled out).
Whether and how it is appropriate or harmful to discuss the topic.
Clear disagreement between Nick and Adam.
They disagree about 3), and this is what Nick’s most sophisticated critics criticize him for, like you in this post.
But I think most readers don’t realize they agree on 1). If you look at the headlines, there are a bunch saying ‘racist Oxford professor thinks Blacks are less intelligent than whites/asians’. For the majority of normal people, 1) is very suprising. Rutherford is strategic in not revealing that he also aligns with 1), thus utilizing emotive language to critique Nick instead of clearly articulating what they disagree and agree with.
Rutherford says he is distributing a copy of his book to Bostrom. As far as I can see, the logical conclusion for Nick (if he reads it) is to update to increase his credence that 1) is true. After all, if even an anti-racist biologist ally thinks there are racial IQ gaps, that seems like strong evidence it is true.
This seems like a very bad policy. The risks posed by people with dangerous personality traits has been an EA topic for a while. And we have just had the biggest crisis in the history of EA and it seems one of the contributing factors was people not sharing red flags about the person involved’s personality. If someone had shared concerns that Sam exhibited dangerous personality disorders a month ago, would CEA have also attempted to suppress that?
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 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.
Yes, although historically groups like villages, churches and ethnic groups have been keen to encourage members to date and marry each other.
Error
Thank you for this very sensitive post Habiba.
This issue has clearly caused a lot of division in the community which is sad. I think the differences between the two sides do not have to be as great as they appear.
You mention Adam Rutherford as a good source, and I agree he has done some good work. I think it’s interesting to note that he probably actually agrees with Bostrom on many things here! Here is a quote from Adam’s book (p166);
It is logical that people would be more likely to withdraw, and the police less likely to investigate, accusations that seem less compelling. If any of these cases are false, the 2.1% is an under-estimate; if they are false at a higher rate than cases accuser and police followed through with, the 2.1% is a significant underestimate.
That’s mentioning the term, not using it.
Someone should make a prediction market on how true the core claim (that FLI offered a grant to a pro-nazi publication) will turn out to be.
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.
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.
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!
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.