Thanks for this post. There’s a lot I agree with here. I’m in especially vigorous agreement with your points regarding hero worship and seeing newcomers as a source of fresh ideas/arguments instead of condescending them.
There are also some points I disagree with. And in the spirit of not considering any arguments above criticism, and disagreement being critical for finding the best answers, I hope you won’t mind if I lay my disagreements out. To save time, I’ll focus on the differences between your view and mine. So if I don’t mention a point you made, you can default to assuming I agree with it.
First, I’m broadly skeptical of the social psychology research you cite. Whenever I read about a study that claims women are more analytical than men, or women are better leaders than men, I imagine whether I would hear about it if the experiment found the opposite result.
I recommend this blog post on the lack of ideological diversity in social psychology. Social psychologists are overwhelmingly liberal, and many openly admit to discriminating against conservatives in hiring. Here is a good post by a Mexican social psychologist that discusses how this plays out. There’s also the issue of publication bias at the journal level. I know someone who served on the selection committee of a (minor & unimportant, so perhaps not representative) psychology journal. The committee had an explicit philosophy of only publishing papers they liked, and espousing “problematic” views was a strike against a paper. Anyway, I think to some degree the field functions as a liberal echo chamber on controversial issues.
There’s really an entire can of worms here—social psychology is currently experiencing a major reproducibility crisis—but I don’t want to get too deep in to it, because to defend my position fully, I’d want to share evidence for positions that make people uncomfortable. Suffice to say that there’s a third layer of publication bias at the level of your Facebook feed, and I could show you a different set of research-backed thinkpieces that point to different conclusions. (Suggestion: if you wouldn’t want someone on the EA Forum to make arguments for the position not X, maybe avoid making arguments for the position X. Otherwise you put commenters in an impossible bind.)
But for me this point is really the elephant in the room:
some people in broader society now respond to correctable offenses with a mob mentality and too much readiness for ostracization, but just because some people have swung too far past the mark doesn’t mean we should default to a status quo that falls so short of it.
I would like to see a much deeper examination here. Insofar as I feel resistant to diversity efforts, this feels like most of what I’m trying to resist. If I was confident that pro-diversity people in EA won’t spiral towards this, I’d be much more supportive. Relevant fable.
All else equal, increased diversity sounds great, but my issue is I see a pattern of other pro-diversity movements sacrificing all other values in the name of trying to increase diversity. Take a statement like this one:
Some of the most talented and resolute people in this community are here because they are deeply emotionally compelled to help others as much as possible, and we’re currently missing out on many such people by being so cold and calculating. There are ways to be warm and calculating! I can think of a few people in the community who manage this well.
Being warm and calculating sounds great, but what if there’s actually a tradeoff here? Just taking myself as an example, I know that as I’ve become aware of how much suffering exists in the grand scheme of things, I’ve begun to worry less about random homeless people I see and stuff like that. Even if there’s some hack I can use to empathize with homeless people while retaining a global perspective, that hack would require effort on my part—effort I could put towards goals that seem more important.
this particular individual — who is probably a troll in general — was banned from the groups where he repeatedly and unrelentingly said such things, though it’s concerning there was any question about whether this was acceptable behavior.
Again, I think there’s a real tradeoff between “free speech” and sensitivity. I view the moderation of online communities as an unsolved problem. I think we benefit from navigating moderation tradeoffs thoughtfully rather than reactively.
Reminding people off the forum to upvote this post, in order to deal with possible hostility, is also a minor red flag from my perspective. This resembles something Gleb Tsipursky once did.
None of this seems very bad in the grand scheme of things, especially not compared to what I’ve seen from other champions of diversity—I just thought it’d be useful to give concrete examples.
Anyway, here are some ideas of mine, if anyone cares:
Phrase guidelines as neutrally as possible, e.g. “don’t be a jerk” instead of “don’t be a sexist”. The nice thing about “don’t be a jerk” is it at admits the possibility that someone could violate the guideline by e.g. loudly calling out a minor instance of sexism in a way that generates a lot of drama and does more harm than good. Rules should exist to serve everyone, and they should be made difficult to weaponize. If most agree your rules are legitimate, that also makes them easier to enforce.
Team-building activities, icebreakers, group singalongs, synchronous movement, sports/group exercise, and so on. The ideal activity is easy for anyone to do and creates a shared EA tribal identity just strong enough to supersede the race/gender/etc. identities we have by default. Kinda like how students at the same university will all cheer for the same sports team.
Following the example of the animal-focused EAs: Work towards achieving critical mass of underrepresented groups. Especially if you can saturate particular venues (e.g. a specific EA meetup group). I know that as a white male, I sometimes get uncomfortable in situations where I am the only white person or the only man in a group, even though I know perfectly well that no one is discriminating against me. I think it’s a natural response to have when you’re in the minority, so in a certain sense there’s just a chicken-and-egg problem. Furthermore, injecting high-caliber underrepresented people into EA will help dismantle stereotypes and increase the number of one-on-one conversations people have, which I think are critical for change.
Take a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to helping EA men with women. Again, I think having more women is playing a big role for animal-focused EAs. More women means the average man has more female friends, better understands how women think, and empathizes with the situations women encounter more readily. In this podcast, Christine Peterson discusses the value of finding a life partner for productivity and mental health. In the same way that CFAR makes EAs more productive through lifehacking, I could imagine someone working covertly to make EAs more productive through solving their dating problems.
Invite the best thinkers who have heterodox views on diversity to attend “diversity in EA” events, in order to get a diverse perspective on diversity and stay aware of tradeoffs. Understand their views in enough depth to market diversity initiatives to the movement at large without getting written off.
When hiring a Diversity & Inclusion Officer, find someone who’s good at managing tradeoffs rather than the person who’s most passionate about the role.
Again, I appreciate the effort you put in to this post, and I support you working towards these goals in a thoughtful way. Also, I welcome PMs from you or anyone else reading this comment—I spent several hours on it, but I’m sure there is stuff I could have put better and I’d love to get feedback.
Maybe it’s worth pointing out that the OP doesn’t ask us to do anything other than “stand with the Asian diaspora”, which doesn’t seem very hard. (I’m reminded of that relationship cliche where one partner tells the other partner about a problem they have, and their partner responds by trying to solve the problem, when all that was really desired was a sympathetic ear.)
I stand with the Asian diaspora. Even if the shooting was not motivated by anti-Asian prejudice, it was still wrong. I’m not Asian, but I’ve had many Asian friends and colleagues over the course of my life, people I respect and care about. I hope they and everyone else in the diaspora are able to pull through this.