I am worried.
The last month or so has been very emotional for a lot of people in the community, culminating in the Slate Star Codex controversy of the past two weeks. On one side, we've had multiple posts talking about the risks of an incipient new Cultural Revolution; on the other, we've had someone accuse a widely-admired writer associated with the movement of abetting some pretty abhorrent worldviews. At least one prominent member of an EA org I know, someone I deeply respect, deleted their Forum account this week. I expect there are more I don't know about.
Both groups feel like they and their sacred values are under attack. Both groups are increasingly commenting anonymously or from throwaway accounts, and seeing their comments mass-downvoted and attacked. It's hard not to believe we're at risk of moving in a much more unpleasant direction.
I'm not going to pretend I don't have my own sympathies here. I've definitely been feeling a lot more tribal than usual lately, and it's impaired my judgement at a couple of points. But I think it's important to remember that we are all EAs here. We're here because we endorse, in one form or another, radical goodwill towards the rest of the world. I have never been among a group of people at once more dedicated to the wellbeing of others and the pursuit of the true. I admire you all so much.
Many people here feel their membership in EA is a natural outgrowth of their other beliefs. Those other beliefs can differ quite a lot from person to person. But I implore all of you to see the common good in each other. There are many people in EA who hold beliefs and political opinions significantly different from mine. But with very few exceptions they have proven among the most open, honest and charitable proponents of those views I've ever encountered. We can have the conversations we need to have to get through this.
The Forum is probably not the place to have those conversations. Too many people are too worried about their words being used against them to speak too openly under their own names – an indictment of our broader culture if ever there was one. But you can reach out to each other! Schedule calls! Now is a bad time to not be able to have in-person conferences, but it's not impossible to make up the difference if we try.
(And on the Forum, please try to be charitable, even if your conversation partner is falling short of the standards you would set yourself. Strive to raise the tone of the conversation, not just to match it. I have sometimes failed in this recently.)
I'll start. If I say something on the Forum you disagree with, and you don't think it's productive to discuss it in comments, please feel free to reach out to me by private message, or schedule a call with me here.
Our epistemic norms are precious. So are our norms of compassion, justice, and universal goodwill. We need both to achieve the lofty goals we've set ourselves, and we need each other.
I'm not sure what contrast you are trying to make here:
The first two are motivated by concern over the rise of bullying and its ability to intimidate people from communicating honestly about important issues, and discuss what we should do in response. The third article is... an example of this bad behaviour?
For the symmetry argument you want to make, it seems like you would need a right-wing version of the third post - like an article condemning the community for not doing enough to distance itself from communists and failing to constantly re-iterate its support for the police. Then it would make sense to point out that, despite the conflict, both sides were earnestly motivated by a desire to make the world a better place and avoid bad outcomes, and we should all remember this and respect each other.
But to my knowledge, no such article exists, partly because there are very few right-wing EAs. Rather, the conflict is between the core EA movement of largely centre-left people who endorse traditional enlightenment values of debate, empiricism and universalism, vs the rise of extreme-left 'woke' culture, which frequently rejects such ideals. Accusing the moderate left of being crypto-fascists is one of the standard rhetorical moves the far-left uses against the centre-left, and one they are very vulnerable to.
Note that I removed the link to the attack article because I think it is probably a violation of implicit forum norms to promote content with more than 100 net downvotes. If it hadn't been linked in this article I would not have come across it, which is probably desirable from the perspective of the moderators and the community.
Edit: the OP was edited between when I opened the page and starting writing this comment, and when I hit publish; at the request of the author I have updated the quote to reflect his edits, though I think this makes the comment a little harder to understand.
What current controversy are you saying might make moderate pro-SJ EAs more wary of SSC?