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Aaron Gertler 🔸Nov 24 20226

(I'm a moderator, but I'm speaking personally here.)

These all are in the same reference class in my mind.

Like you, I see "sociopath" as lossier than the others, but I think I care less about brevity (vs. precision) than you do.

Brevity is crucial in cases where the same thing is discussed repeatedly, but I think people are different enough that we lose a lot by rounding off to terms like "sociopath".

I also think it helps w/community legibility to share details on behavior. "Don't engage with X, they have a personality disorder" tells me nothing if I have no context. "Don't engage with X, they have bad intentions and lie frequently [insert links]" tells me something.

And if I know that X is a bad actor already, and I have context on their habitual lying, comments like "X is a binge drinker" still add nothing (and worsen the overall tone/quality of discourse).

By observing their behavior over the course of a few years, and e.g. seeing whether they have used anti-psychotic medication in the past, I come to the conclusion that it's the case that there are some periods in which interfacing with Torres will reliably go bad, and in which their behavior will be erratic, and some other periods in which they will probably be pretty sane.

I can imagine this being valuable sometimes, and I appreciate the general point. I also liked the LW example — seems like you were being a good moderator there! (It helps that at least one of the people you messaged was open about their condition.)

To add my own example: I read a lot of Freddie Deboer, and he's been very open about his struggles with bipolar disorder. If Freddie suddenly made a bunch of weird comments on the Forum, I might reach out to him the same way you did to your users.

*****

But I think watching someone this closely is only merited if there's an important reason to engage with them. This applies in the case of the LW users you mention (I assume you saw them as valuable contributors to the LW community). I also think it applies to someone like Donald Trump, who had so much power and influence that it made sense for psychologists to speculate about his condition. (Same goes for all U.S. presidents.)

I don't think Torres is a valuable contributor or a figure of towering influence. To the extent that we care about their behavior, it's about their arguments (and how others receive them). And the best way to address their arguments is by (a) presenting facts, and (b) cataloguing their long history of dishonesty.

*****

I also don't want to lose sight of the various negative things that come along with psychologizing, which trade off against brevity and predictive value:

It opens up space for insults and ad hominem attacks.
It distracts from discussion of ideas and arguments (e.g. when "has a personality disorder" replaces "consistently lies and makes bad-faith arguments").
It's a turn-off to readers.
- If someone visits the Forum, sees speculation on the mental conditions of the community's critics, and finds that deeply unappealing... that's the kind of user I want to attract.
  - However, I also want the kinds of users that are drawn to thoughtful discussions of Forum norms. So I appreciate Habryka's comment!
- I care about politeness and friendliness because I see them as ways to keep our focus on ideas rather than people.

See in context

A Letter to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

by [anonymous]

Nov 23 20223 min read 58

347

Building effective altruismBulletin of the Atomic ScientistsEffective altruism in the media

Frontpage

Tldr: This is a letter I wrote to the Climate Contributing Editor of the Bulletin Atomic Scientists, Dawn Stover, about Emile Torres' latest piece criticising EA. In short:

In advance of the publication of the article, Ms Stover reached out to us to check on what Torres calls their most "disturbing" claim viz. that Will MacAskill lied about getting advice from five climate experts.
We showed them that this was false.
The Bulletin published the claim anyway, and then tweeted it.
In my opinion, this is outrageous, so I have asked them to issue a correction and an apology.

Update: The Bulletin has declined to correct the piece or issue an apology. They say that the editor's note provides 'balance' for the reader. They haven't explained how their false tweet remains acceptable. By these standards, media outlets don't have to correct false claims in articles, they just have to include editor's notes contradicting the false claims. There are apparently no constraints on what media outlets are permitted to tweet.

Dear Ms Stover,

I have long admired the work of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. However, I am extremely disappointed by your publication of the latest piece by Emile Torres.

I knew long ago that Torres would publish a piece critical of What We Owe the Future, and on me following my report on climate change. However, I am surprised that the Bulletin has chosen to publish this particular piece in its current form. There are many things wrong with the piece, but the most important is that it accuses Will MacAskill and his research assistants of research misconduct. Specifically, Torres contends that five of the climate experts we listed in the acknowledgements for the book were not actually consulted.

Ms Stover: you contacted us about this claim in advance of the article’s publication, and we informed you that it was not true. Overall, we consulted around 106 experts in the research process for What We Owe The Future. Torres suggests that five experts were never consulted at all, but this is not true — as Will stated in his earlier email to you, four of those five experts were consulted. I am happy to provide evidence for this. The article would have readers think that we made up the citations out of thin air. One of them was contacted but didn’t have time to give feedback, and was incorrectly credited in the acknowledgements, which we will change in future editions: this was an honest mistake. The Bulletin also went on to tweet the false claim that multiple people hadn’t been consulted at all.

The acknowledgements are also clear that we are not claiming that those listed checked and agreed with every claim in the book. Immediately after the acknowledgements of subject-matter experts, Will writes: “These advisers don’t necessarily agree with the claims I make in the book, and all errors in the book are my responsibility alone.”

To accuse someone of research misconduct is a very serious allegation. After you check it and find out that it is false, it is extremely poor form to let the claim go out anyway and then to tweet it. The Bulletin should issue a correction to the article, and to the false claim they put out in a tweet.

I also have concerns about the nature of Torres’ background work for article — they seemingly sent every person that was acknowledged for the book a misleading email, telling them that we lied in the acknowledgements, and making some reviewers quite uncomfortable.

To reiterate, I am very disappointed by the journalistic standards demonstrated in this article. I will be publishing something separately about Torres’ (as usual) misrepresented substantive claims, but the most serious allegation of research misconduct needs to be retracted and we need an apology.

(Also, a more minor point: it's not true that I am Head of Applied Research at Founders Pledge. I left that role in 2019.)

John

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Neel NandaNov 24 2022112

Downvoted. I appreciate you a lot for writing this letter, and am sorry you/Will were slandered in this way! But I would like to see less of this content on the EA Forum. I think Torres' has a clear history of writing very bad faith and outrage inducing hit pieces, and think that prominently discussing these or really paying any attention on the EA forum easily sucks in time and emotional energy with little reward. So seeing this post with a lot of comments and at 300+ karma feels sad to me!

My personal take is that the correct policy for the typical EA is to not bother reading their criticisms, given their history of quote mining and misrepresentation, and would have rather never heard about this article.

All that said, I want to reiterate that I'm very glad you wrote this letter, sorry you went through this, and that this has conveyed the useful information to take the bulletin's editorial standards less seriously!

[anonymous]Nov 25 202259

Yeah I can see that perspective. The aim here was more to point out malfeasance on the part of the Bulletin rather than Torres. I would have expected a lot better from the Bulletin

Neel NandaNov 25 20221

Fair point! My guess is that the emotional energy tradeoff isn't worth it, but do agree that this is more useful information than most hit piece discussions give

Milli🔸Jan 27 202321

I disagree. This was only the second time I've heard about Torres and it caused me to warn my contacts in Hannover about him who had not heard of him. They have since then come into contact with his writing.

WilliamKielyNov 27 202217

Perhaps posts should have agreement karma like comments do, so we can signal that we agree with John's post without making it more prominent on the Forum (which as you said is generally a waste of EAs' attention).

Neel NandaNov 27 20222

I would be pro this! Though in practice I expect this to not solve the problem - I think the standard reaction is to feel outraged /righteously indignant and upvote this kind of post in a show of support/solidarity

MaxRaNov 27 20226

I'd have guessed it's not outrage or indignation but instead feeling 1) sorry for how frustrating it must be to deal with Torres and dishonest criticism in general, and 2) gratitude for pushing back against it.

WilliamKielyNov 27 20226

That was my reaction. Also I had assumed that John had probably sent this post to the Bulletin and that it would help him get the desired retraction/appology if this post had more karma, so I was tempted to upvote the post to support with that.

(But despite the temptation I originally abstained from voting due to not wanting to promote more Torres-related content, then strong-downvoted after reading Neel's comment and seeing another front-page post responding to (IMO problematic) journalism (Rob Wiblin's post responding to Matt Yglesias' re SBF and risk neutrality) that also wasn't the sort of content I want to fill up the Forum.)

WilliamKielyNov 27 20224

I didn't disagreement-karma your comment, but do want to note that I think it would likely help to at least partially solve the problem.

E.g. (Largely due to your original comment, but also in part due to feeling similarly to you independently first) I strong-downvoted the OP despite strongly agreeing with it and feeling very grateful to John for doing such a thorough job dealing with and responding to Torres and bad journalism related to EA.

I don't always downvote in cases like this--I usuually just abstain from voting--but if there was an agreement button on posts I think I'd be a lot more willing to downvote posts that I think should get less attention (despite my agreement with them, their high writing quality, etc).

I'd like this for the sake of my own posts as well. That is, it has sometimes been the case that I've been averse to posting things due to not wanting to take up EA's time/attention with unimportant things. Giving others an additional way to leave me positive feedback (agreement karma) without having to upvote my post would be nice. As an author it would also help me feel better about my content getting downvoted or having low karma.

Neel NandaNov 27 20222

Actually that's a fair point, I somewhat retract my above comment.

I think that in general, if I agree vote a comment I also up vote it. But I do vibe with the idea that I'd be more comfortable downvoting posts like this if I could also agree vote.

MatisNov 24 202284

Another falsehood to add to the list of corrections the Bulletin needs to make to the article. In the article, Torres writes,

And in the acknowledgments section, he lists 30 scientists and an entire research group as having been consulted on “climate change” or “climate science.” I wrote to all the scientists MacAskill thanked for providing “feedback and advice,” and the responses were surprising.

However, one of those scientists, Peter Watson, has recently tweeted that Torres did not contact him about the Bulletin article. Torres responds to this claim with an irrelevant question.

As you can see below, Peter Watson is indeed one of the climate scientists who was thanked. If Watson is correct, then the Bulletin needs to correct Torres's claim to have contacted all the climate scientists who were acknowledged in the book.

[edit: I originally wrote and highlighted"Andrew Watson" instead of Peter Watson. Peter Watson, as you can see below, is also acknowledged]

Peter WildefordNov 24 202247

This is so ironic.

[anonymous]Nov 24 202211

that is peter watson not andrew watson. both were contacted and provided feedback

MatisNov 24 20223

Oops, thanks. Fixed it to say "Peter Watson". Fortunately Peter Watson is also in the screencap, so I'm leaving that as is.

Johanna EschmentNov 24 202222

I agree with the overall statement that the Bulletin should not have published this article as it is and definitely should have not tweeted what it did. Yes, they owe you an apology but I also don't understand some of the claims in this letter and think that these (maybe?) exaggerated claims undermine your good arguments and the rightful question for an apology.

First, concerning this paragraph:

I also have concerns about the nature of Torres’ background work for article — they seemingly sent every person that was acknowledged for the book a misleading email, telling them that we lied in the acknowledgements, and making some reviewers quite uncomfortable.

Where does this information come from? The twitter thread you link to does not claim that Torres' made the author of the thread uncomfortable, only that he choose to ignore the email. Furthermore, the mail Torres wrote to him does not claim that you lied in the acknowledgments.

Second, the Bulletin did add an annotation to the article, correcting the claim from Torres that several researchers were not consulted. Yes, the article still suggests heavily that they weren't and even with this annotation you get the impression that MacAskill was at least negligent in his research, but accusing the Bulletin of just lying regarding this, is also not true.

[anonymous]Nov 24 202261

On your first question, several people Torres contacted reached out to us to tell us that they had a weird email from Torres, which made some of them uncomfortable. In some of the emails Torres repeated the false claim that we had essentially fabricated the acknowledgements.

Second, they annotated the article, but then tweeted the false claim! The claim should not be allowed to stay in the piece once they have checked it and found out that it is false. It's basic journalism. If they think we lied to them about consulting the experts, then they should say so explicitly. If they think the claim is false it is obvious that they should remove since it is an accusation of research misconduct.

trevor1Nov 23 20229

On what other occasions has a major news outlet knowingly published misinformation about EA? Is there a database for this? Misinformation at this caliber needs to be archived so that it can be made accessible to misinformation and disinformation analysts, there are likely to be trends here that are worth pointing out, but there's a wide variety of causes for this sort of thing so there's probably trends that only a very small number of people know how to spot. There's a lot of problems that can be handled entirely with generalists but this isn't one of them.

MichaelNov 23 202211

Good idea on creating a database. One misleading article (with community members' rebuttal) here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Fm4vAtKoH4nBCzsoQ/linkpost-a-response-to-rebecca-ackermann-s-inside-effective

freedomandutilityNov 23 202224

As a community we should have easily accessible, respectful and good-faith responses to all prominent articles criticising EA.

adekczNov 24 20229

It is current CEA policy to mostly ignore critical bad faith content, see 2nd faq in https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zgHWeMBPnCMvdoZvz/ea-will-likely-get-more-attention-soon . I would love to see more thourought explanation of that position though.

Making this account""Nov 24 20225

I don't think anyone should expect a lot of explanations or a new policy. It is an extremely difficult environment right now and there's nothing to say or add that can help a lot. There's literally new articles coming out every day.

Unfortunately, Will and CEA has been pinned to this, for essentially trying to get a donor.

Matt and Kelsey are piling on a bit here and that's unfair:

I find it easier to draw the conclusion that the threadbare, limited management of pre-2019 CEA was involved in this, if anything.

Jonathan MannhartNov 24 202226

For what it's worth, I don't think Matt and Kelsey are "piling on" in an unfair way here. This thread was about wealth signals & EAG food. I don't think it's bad faith criticism comparable to Torres.

In the case of the FTX disaster, people in the thread were speculating that obvious non-frugal behaviour might have been one of the only good signals/red flags regarding SBF prior the public scandal. I think that's somewhat fair and at least a reasonable hypothesis. CEA spending lots of money on things like food at conferences are also less frugal behaviour compared to the past. I think "being sceptical" is not unreasonable (coupled with the obvious mistakes made regarding trust put in SBF by CEA).

(This doesn't mean that CEA decisionmaking is obviously flawed in a big way, at all. I don't think they're saying that. I think they're updating something like from CEA making 99.9% correct decisions to 98% correct decisions, non-frugality likely being one of them. We all just have very high standards here!)

LinchNov 24 202255

I think they're updating something like from CEA making 99.9% correct decisions to 98% correct decisions

Nitpick, but I doubt many who seriously thought about CEA (or any org's) decisions think their decisions are correct to the tune of 98 to 99.9%. This includes people at CEA.

It's just very hard to make accurate decisions in a complex world.

Making this account""Nov 24 20228

I think what you said is fair. Writing as a collaboration.

I sort of want to peel the curtain back for onlookers here, since apparently few in EA is doing this before or after.

Basically, a journalist's role, including and maybe especially EA journalists, is basically the OG “epistemic” immune system, as rationalists would say. They are an institution, specifically supposed to ferret out problems, including subtle things like smells.

I spoke to a very respected reporter at EAG, ~~who I met for the first time ever, and within the first 60 seconds~~ and within 5 minutes he was warning me about a “broken stair”, someone I had a positive opinion of, had a history of issues. There was limited direct benefit to him for doing this and some risk. Reporters get credibility and live and die by this, it’s what they do.

Dylan Matthews gets a lot of credit for saying something like this:

Now, we know, Kelsey and Matt know, and everyone else knows, it’s a bit of a mess up that neither of them seemed to be in a position to make the statement, “Hey, SBF has a penthouse, uses a private jet. Maybe we shouldn’t let Will hang it all on the Corolla, because it might make EA and Will look stupid”. It’s non-positive, and maybe even slightly implausible they didn’t know.

Kelsey’s story, which most EAs know, relied on EA communication norms to get that level of candor, is probably partially motivated, and people in journalism know this.

Making this account""Nov 24 20223

Moving to this thread about catering:

As someone who isn’t vegan, declares they aren't vegan, and thinks it’s not helpful to animal welfare that this is a norm, I think it is disgusting if SBF harvested veganism to his ends.

However, we still don’t know how substantive most of these stories are. (To be clear, SBF seems to be just trying to talk his way out of things at this point and his credibility should be zero). However, things like the “hack”, turned out to be literally the Bahamas ordering him to seize money, showed that stories are noisy.

Overall, this Twitter thread about FTX catering, then moving to EAG’s food, then moving to CEA’s conduct, is a stretch and I find it a bit performative.

SiebeRozendalNov 24 20222

Especially when they are high profile or to a relevant audience

SamiMNov 24 20221

as Will stated in his earlier email to you, four of those five experts were consulted. I am happy to provide evidence for this.

Minor nitpick: Was one of them not consulted, or can evidence not be provided?

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

MatisNov 24 202222

This question is answered a couple of sentences after the bit you've quoted: "One of them was contacted but didn’t have time to give feedback, and was incorrectly credited in the acknowledgements, which we will change in future editions: this was an honest mistake."

SamiMNov 24 20221

lol, my bad. Thanks.

SabsNov 24 2022-67

Fellas, just don't engage w/ Phil Torres, the guy has a personality disorder. If you want good-faith criticism of EA this ain't it. The guy has tweeted about how everyone would be better off dead and engages in chronic self-destructive behaviour like binge drinking, giving all his money to random strangers, etc, etc. All the "I hate you don't leave me" stuff w/ his ex-gf is also classic personality disorder stuff. He's a screwed up guy. Don't give him the benefit of the doubt! Don't engage!

(edit: or, if you do engage, for once this is a great time to play the man not the ball and actually point out why his criticisms can't be taken seriously because they come from such an obviously messed-up bad-faith actor)

LizkaNov 24 2022Moderator Comment35

Writing as a moderator. I think this comment is unnecessarily harsh and insulting, and also deadnames and misgenders Torres. It clearly violates Forum norms.

We generally assume that deadnaming or misgendering is an honest mistake, but given that the discussion around this post has been referring to Torres by their preferred name and pronouns, I find this less plausible.

I also find the focus on mental illness inappropriate.

Please correct the name and pronouns in this comment. I'll be discussing with the rest of the moderation about potential further action.

NunoSempereNov 24 202238

unnecessarily harsh and insulting
...
I also find the focus on mental illness inappropriate.

And yet it transmits information. Sabs also has recently be making a number of harsh and sharp statements, some of which have been downvoted but which I nonetheless have found valuable. I'd encourage the moderators to be lenient.

SabsNov 24 202219

I love how "the community's second biggest funder turns out to be a scam artist" does not even prompt the slightest reconsideration of the value of people being able to call out bad actors when they see them, nope, we're just going to double-down on this absurd and comical set of community politeness norms that do little but enable savvy predators to exploit EA as a movement and individual EAs as people.

And fwiw, there were a number of other conclusions I could have very easily drawn about Torres and signs of mental illness I could have pointed out, but I very carefully did not since I thought those might be upsetting. This was the toned-down version of my original post.

pseudonymNov 24 202249

Do you know that they have a personality disorder? I don't see how pushing back on internet strangers making claims about others' mental state is an "absurd and comical set of community politeness norm."

I agree that Torres is clearly acting in bad faith, and I think many EAs already know this. But even if they didn't, the justification for them being a bad faith actor is NOT because of your assumption of their personality disorder or mental illness, nor their personal problems with their ex-partner. So yes, this "transmits information", but not anything that's relevant to how we should respond. We should choose not engage because they act in bad faith, not because you think they have a mental illness. We should think they act in bad faith because of the quality of their writing and choice of argument, not because they have problems with their ex-partner. And in this specific case, it's very easy to show they act in bad faith without resorting to those kinds of claims.

You should also know, that by making this statement, you have in fact given them more fodder to use against EA.

I have strongly downvoted your original comment.

Habryka [Deactivated]Nov 24 202242

Man, this sure is a dicy topic, but I do think it's pretty likely that Torres has a personality disorder, and that modeling these kinds of things is often important.

A while ago we had a conversation on the forum on whether Elon Musk might be (at least somewhat) autistic. A number of people pushed back on this as ungrounded speculation and as irrelevant in a way that seemed highly confused to me, since like, being autistic has huge effects on how you make decisions and how you relate to the world, and Musk has been a relevant player in many EA-adjacent cause areas for quite a while.

I do think there is some trickiness in talking about this kind of stuff, but talking about someone's internal mental makeup can often be really important. Indeed, lots of people were saying to me in-person that they were modeling SBF as a sociopath, and implying that they would not feel comfortable giving that description in public, since that's rude. I think in this case that diagnosis sure would have been really helpful and I think our norms against bringing up this kind of stuff harmed us quite a bit.

To be clear I am not advocating for a culture of psychologizing everyone. I think that's terrible, and a lot of the worse interactions I've had with people external to the community have been people who have tried to dismiss various risks from artificial intelligence through various psychologizing lenses like "these people are power-obsessed, which is why they think an AI will want to dominate everyone", which... are really not helpful and seem just straightforwardly very wrong to me, while also being very hard to respond to.

I don't currently have a great proposal for norms for discussing this kind of stuff, especially as an attack (I feel less bad about the Elon autism discussion, since like, Elon identifies at least partially as autistic and I don't think he would see it as an insult). Seems hard. My current guess is that it must be OK to at some point, after engaging extensively with someone's object-level arguments, to bring up more psychologizing explanations and intuitions, but that it currently should come pretty late, after the object-level has been responded to and relatively thoroughly explored. I think this is the case with Torres, but not the case with many other people.

Aaron Gertler 🔸Nov 24 202213

I'm highly dubious of this case.

What does "personality disorder" tell you that "habitual liar with a grudge" doesn't?

What does "sociopath" tell you that "habitual liar who casually exploits other people" doesn't? (Or "un-lawful oathbreaker"?)

What prediction would you make about Torres based on psychologizing that you wouldn't be able to make using the information that led you to psychologize in the first place?

Habryka [Deactivated]Nov 24 202218

What does "sociopath" tell you that "habitual liar who casually exploits other people" doesn't? (Or "un-lawful oathbreaker"?)

These all are in the same reference class in my mind, so I don't really know what you are referring to. Of these "sociopath" is the shortest, though relatedly also the lossiest (like, it sure is a frequently misused concept, but also, my guess is its vaguely mapping to something real in the world, despite me despising like 90% of the times that it is used).

What prediction would you make about Torres based on psychologizing that you wouldn't be able to make using the information that led you to psychologize in the first place?

For example, let's assume that (I do not have strong evidence for it, but it seems at least vaguely plausible to me) that Torres suffers from psychotic episodes. By observing their behavior over the course of a few years, and e.g. seeing whether they have used anti-psychotic medication in the past, I come to the conclusion that it's the case that there are some periods in which interfacing with Torres will reliably go bad, and in which their behavior will be erratic, and some other periods in which they will probably be pretty sane.

This seems really helpful to me! If I am now engaging with Torres online or in-person, I might find myself having a surprisingly good and calm conversation, but if the person often has psychotic episodes, then we should expect the behavior during the good times to generalize less well to their behavior during bad times.

Again, this is all a hypothetical, I don't think I have much of any evidence to suggest that Torres has psychotic episodes, but I do think that considering the hypothesis and thinking about it can pay off pretty well.

As another concrete example, there were 2-3 commenters over the years on LW whose behavior was best explained by realizing that they are bipolar, and when they were in a manic episode, they would write very differently and engage very differently than if they were in a depressive episode (or in no episode at all). One thing that actually helped a good amount in two of those cases was sending a message being like "Hey, btw, I think you are having a manic episode (I saw on your blog that you said you were bipolar). I would suggest maybe taking a step back from commenting until you are in a better place", and that (surprisingly) actually went quite well, and I think prevented the person causing a decent amount of self-harm.

Aaron Gertler 🔸Nov 24 20226

(I'm a moderator, but I'm speaking personally here.)

These all are in the same reference class in my mind.

Like you, I see "sociopath" as lossier than the others, but I think I care less about brevity (vs. precision) than you do.

Brevity is crucial in cases where the same thing is discussed repeatedly, but I think people are different enough that we lose a lot by rounding off to terms like "sociopath".

And if I know that X is a bad actor already, and I have context on their habitual lying, comments like "X is a binge drinker" still add nothing (and worsen the overall tone/quality of discourse).

By observing their behavior over the course of a few years, and e.g. seeing whether they have used anti-psychotic medication in the past, I come to the conclusion that it's the case that there are some periods in which interfacing with Torres will reliably go bad, and in which their behavior will be erratic, and some other periods in which they will probably be pretty sane.

*****

I also don't want to lose sight of the various negative things that come along with psychologizing, which trade off against brevity and predictive value:

It opens up space for insults and ad hominem attacks.
It distracts from discussion of ideas and arguments (e.g. when "has a personality disorder" replaces "consistently lies and makes bad-faith arguments").
It's a turn-off to readers.
- If someone visits the Forum, sees speculation on the mental conditions of the community's critics, and finds that deeply unappealing... that's the kind of user I want to attract.
  - However, I also want the kinds of users that are drawn to thoughtful discussions of Forum norms. So I appreciate Habryka's comment!
- I care about politeness and friendliness because I see them as ways to keep our focus on ideas rather than people.

Habryka [Deactivated]Nov 25 20227

Many points here, many of which I agree with. Here is one that I disagree with:

I don't think Torres is a valuable contributor or a figure of towering influence. To the extent that we care about their behavior, it's about their arguments (and how others receive them). And the best way to address their arguments is by (a) presenting facts, and (b) cataloguing their long history of dishonesty.

I definitely have personally changed my relationship to Torres after thinking more about their history of behavior in other contexts, and the underlying psychology that might explain those behaviors. For example, I have updated the degree to which I expect Torres to take much higher-variance actions like becoming paranoid, or accusing others of major crimes, or potentially even attacking someone physically (I wish I did not have to track the risk of physical violence, but alas, I sure am tracking the likelihood that people will try to attack others physically after the whole Ziz situation).

I also think in terms of public communication I am generally in favor of honesty, and if the honest reason why I am hesitant to engage with someone is because they have a history of unstable behavior that causes harm to themselves and people around them, then I think I want to be honest about that.

pseudonymNov 25 20223

I just want to say that there are a lot of reasons why interfacing with someone in one context can work out well but not generalize to other contexts, and just because "this person experiences psychotic episodes" can explain this well, it does not mean that your guess of psychosis is actually correct.

You can just say:
"A lot of people I know who have had positive interactions with them in one context turns out to have had very bad interactions in other contexts. They also have a pattern of what I would consider erratic and unpredictable behavior. For example, ___. So I would be careful about these positive experiences and not take that to mean they will always respond positively."

I don't think the LW analogy tracks. There's a difference between messaging someone (in private?) about a mental disorder they have publicly talked about and doing so with the intention of helping them, and speculating on someone's mental health based on their behavior, with no intention of helping them.

I basically second all of Aaron's comments about the harms of psychologizing - I can't trust that everyone will use this with good intentions, I think it risks spreading harmful misinformation about people, I think the information transmitted can be vague and open to different interpretations.

One thing I disagree with is the predictive value - I don't in fact think a bunch of nonexpert speculations on someone's psychiatric diagnosis adds to predictive power. I think (as you mentioned earlier) focusing on examining the facts that lead you to the conclusion is more useful. If this was a medical forum filled only with psychiatrists that'd be a different story. But the potential harm and misunderstanding of people using loaded psychiatric terms in different ways and different intentions just seems clearly worse than focusing on describing the facts.

pseudonymNov 25 20221

C'mon, I'm not making the claim that talking about someone's mental state is never helpful in every context. I'm just saying it's basically totally unnecessary in this specific case when deciding whether or not Émile Torres is a good faith actor.

Are you saying that before the message above you were sitting there unsure about whether or not Torres is a good faith actor, and then Sabs comes along with a claim that they have a personality disorder, and that they've had problems with their ex-partner, and THEN you believe that Torres is acting in bad faith? Are you saying in a first message trying to convince other forum readers whether or not Torres is acting in good faith, the best points to bring up is a unsubstantiated claim about their mental illness and some problems they've had in their personal life?

But lets say I was making this claim. My guess is I would still lean far closer in that direction than you - I basically think any claims about someone's mental health in a public, non-medical forum, is usually worse than just stating the pattern of actions they've taken, or your best guess for what they will do based on the pattern of behavior they have exhibited. Are you a psychiatrist? Are EA forum readers psychiatrists? Do you actually know what it means to have have borderline personality disorder? Do you know the difference between schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder and schizotypal personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and psychopathy? Do you know the diagnostic criteria for them? If you do, what's your best guess at the % of forum readers who will take your stated "diagnosis" and actually understand what you mean? In any case, the OP didn't even specify which personality disorder it is, so there's some innuendo here that "anyone with a personality disorder is not worth engaging with", which is pretty harmful.

FWIW, I'm not defending Émile Torres here, I find their work distasteful and intellectually dishonest. But that's separate to what I'm talking about here.

(Edit: some of these points have already been raised by Aaron, didn't see those replies when I was typing this)

Habryka [Deactivated]Nov 25 20224

C'mon, I'm not making the claim that talking about someone's mental state is never helpful in every context. I'm just saying it's ~totally unnecessary in this specific case when deciding whether or not Émile Torres is a good faith actor.

Just to be clear, I am genuinely uncertain what the right norms here are, and I did not intend this as harsh pushback on your comment. I do think the situation is less straightforward than you make it out to be, and there are pretty good arguments for allowing at least some level of talking and thinking and conversation about people's motivations and underlying psychological factors, though as I said, man it does sure seem like a mess.

Are you saying that before the message above you were sitting there unsure about whether or not Torres is a good faith actor, and then Sabs comes along with a claim that they have a personality disorder, and that they've had problems with their ex-partner, and THEN you believe that Torres is acting in bad faith? Are you saying in a first message trying to convince other forum readers whether or not Torres is acting in good faith, the best points to bring up is a unsubstantiated claim about their mental illness and some problems they've had in their personal life?

At some point I did discover Torres' Facebook profile as well as a number of other public pieces of documentation of their private life, and did discover a good chunk of the personal problems they have been going through, and yes, this did majorly change the way I relate to them. It was not this message from Sabs but a pretty similar message from someone on a private Slack that caused me to investigate this, and I think it was quite valuable for my model of this whole situation.

I agree that this would not be good as a "first message", but like, most forum readers at this point have probably had multiple conversations about Torres, and on the margin, someone bringing up that they might have some mental problems doesn't seem obviously bad to me (it also doesn't seem obviously good to me, as I said, though I do think a very similar message a few months ago turned out to be pretty useful for my personal model of the situation).

Are you a psychiatrist? Are EA forum readers psychiatrists? Do you actually know what it means to have have borderline personality disorder? Do you know the difference between schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder and schizotypal personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and psychopathy?

I am not a psychiatrist, and also furthermore, I do not believe in gating the use of valuable concepts behind professional boundaries. I have indeed researched various aspects of personality disorders quite a bit, and my best guess is that I have an understanding comparable, or probably slightly better than many psychiatrists, at least along the dimensions that are most relevant to my life and the EA community (based on having talked to some people with a psychology background about this).

I do indeed also know the difference between all the disorders that you listed, though not like in excruciating detail (with the exception of the difference between schizoid and schizotypal personality disorder), but I did do a quite substantial amount of reading in this space as I kept running across people in the community that were causing harm and seemed to be reasonably well-described by some well-documented psychological patterns (though like, I am overall not a huge fan of the ontology that psychiatry uses here, and think it has a number of pretty huge problems, of which the tendency to put things into discrete categories and the tendency to reify clusters of symptoms by giving them names that are just a summary of their symptoms that then later on get used as semantic stopsigns are the two foremost ones).

In any case, the OP didn't even specify which personality disorder it is, so there's some innuendo here that "anyone with a personality disorder is not worth engaging with", which is pretty harmful.

I agree this innuendo seems kinda bad to me, and I think attitudes of the type of "if you have any diagnosable mental problem you are not worth engaging with" are really bad and have all kinds of bad downstream effects on culture and people feeling safe, etc.

pseudonymNov 25 20221

Yeah fair enough, I could have acknowledged that more, apologies.

The part where you go into detail about how much psychiatry you know strengthens the point that immediately follows:

If you do, what's your best guess at the % of forum readers who will take your stated "diagnosis" and actually understand what you mean?

The point I am making is not just about whether or not it is appropriate for you to use psychiatric concepts, (and not at all about whether these concepts can only be used by psychiatrists), the point I am also making is that if we are to combine a complex set of behaviors into a 3 or 4 letter diagnosis, we better make sure the people you are talking to actually understand what you are talking about, and I think I probably have a very different model of common knowledge and how people interpret psychiatric diagnoses than you do, and I think in a smaller world where there's good common knowledge and everyone trusts each other to be using these in good faith / without malice, it can be more appropriate. But I doubt this is the case on this forum, especially not right now.

Habryka [Deactivated]Nov 25 20222

The point I am making is not just about whether or not it is appropriate for you to use psychiatric concepts, (and not at all about whether these concepts can only be used by psychiatrists), the point I am also making is that if we are to combine a complex set of behaviors into a 3 or 4 letter diagnosis, we better make sure the people you are talking to actually understand what you are talking about, and I think I probably have a very different model of common knowledge and how people interpret psychiatric diagnoses than you do, and I think in a smaller world where there's good common knowledge and everyone trusts each other to be using these in good faith / without malice, it can be more appropriate. But I doubt this is the case on this forum, especially not right now.

I both agree with you here that there is something particularly risky about using these kinds of concepts in public discussions, since people often have an actively wrong understanding of what different things actually mean, but I also feel like this is a pretty different standard than we apply in almost all other domains of discourse.

Like, if a bunch of people make posts that rely on advanced math or physics or chemistry knowledge, as many posts both here and on LW tend to do, I don't think I would tell people to stop that because most of the audience wouldn't understand what is going on. It seems indeed quite valuable for people with the relevant knowledge to say what they want to say, even if they can't bridge the full inferential distance to others.

I understand that part of the reason for additional hesitation here is that these concepts then also often get used to attack people, and these concepts are more loaded with connotations than other concepts, and misunderstandings are more prevalent, but I still think it's then important to at least recognize that we are losing some important communication here.

I personally try to avoid terms like "psychopath" as much as possible, because of a bunch of misunderstandings in the space, but other things like "bipolar" seem to have fewer misunderstandings and I think are pretty OK to use. "Autism" seems bad in some context, but I feel like is pretty okay to discuss in the forum context.

pseudonymNov 25 20224

but I also feel like this is a pretty different standard than we apply in almost all other domains of discourse.

I agree it's a different standard, but I don't think it's an unfairly different standard. I think the reason is that people won't see complicated maths/physics knowledge and misinterpret the meaning of a complex topic they don't understand.

For illustrative purposes (screenshot because the text version had some formatting issues not supported by the forum):

If someone stumbles across this and doesn't understand what a Lipschitz constant is, they will likely know they don't understand it, and search it up, or move on. There's basically no common usage of the term "the Banach space". There's a much lower likelihood of harm done by the author wrongly assuming this gap in technical knowledge.

On the other hand, saying someone has a personality disorder, saying they are psychotic, saying they have mental illnesses is much more prone to people thinking, "oh, I know what it means to be a psychopath, I've seen American Psycho". We should be much more careful about assuming knowledge in this space, given words like depression, borderline, psychotic, antisocial, paranoid, obsessive, autistic have meanings in the psychiatry world but also meanings in common parlance which mean pretty different things, the often-poor portrayal of mental disorders in the media, and the continued stigma around mental disorders. For these reasons, I'm less optimistic around the merits of using both bipolar and autistic when speculating about the actions of someone else on a public forum.

I still think it's then important to at least recognize that we are losing some important communication here.

I disagree, I think the benefit of saying [concerning set of actions + behaviors and my best guess for what their behavior might be going forward and why] instead of saying I think this person has [diagnosis] is not (for the vast majority of relevant scenarios) that we are losing information that is important, but we are losing speed and concision in communication. But given the risks and potential harm, I think in the vast majority of cases, losing speed and concision is worth it.

I think this might be a crux, and I'd be interested in a hypothetical example that illustrates this. If you can find an example where we are losing important, decision relevant information without explicitly making a best guess at a psychiatric diagnosis (compared to say, a lengthier discussion around how you came to the impression of a suspected diagnosis in the first place), I'll update accordingly-but otherwise I'm not really seeing how we are actually losing important communication. ^[1]

^{^}
The hypothetical example has to be suitable for discussion on the forum, and can't include a scenario where you think imminent harm was taking place and needed immediate action, and no one was responding to DMs or something.

jacquesthibsNov 24 202233

I think the information you are sharing is useful (some parts less so, I agree with pseudonym), just don't deadname/misgender them. EA is better than that.

NunoSempereNov 24 20225

reconsideration of the value of people being able to call out bad actors when they see them

I think you have a point, but I think community norms are slow to change. Incidentally, though, in the past people have called out bad people/behaviors e.g., here, here or here, though these tend to be very well researched, forceful pieces—and so you might expect such criticism to not often be produced, because of the effort involved.

Lukas_GloorNov 24 202212

At the very least, if someone points out that someone else likely has a personality disorder, I'd qualify it with something like "untreated" or "without a shred of insight." It's a lot less stigmatizing that way because it implies that getting treatment out of one's own accord and working on things mitigates a lot of the potential for damage. Also, while I'm not a fan of stigma around mental health anywhere, I think if there should be some stigma, then it makes sense to at least be more specific. (To be clear, I think there should be severe warnings around people with specific personality disorders in specific contexts, but to my ears, "stigma" goes somewhat beyond that and that's what I don't like.) Some personality disorders seem to leave behind no trail of destruction or animosity. And even among people with the same disorder you can notice vast differences based on other personality traits and just generally what sort of ideals or self-image someone has built up.

temporalisNov 24 202219

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?

temporalisJan 12 20233

would CEA have also attempted to suppress that?

Ironically the forum mods did not permit this comment to be visible for 4 (four) days until 28th Nov when the conversation had died down.

LizkaNov 24 2022Moderator Comment4

We’re issuing Sabs a 1-month ban for breaking the norms repeatedly in the comment above, despite our warning 10 days ago. Specifically, we think that Sabs violated the following norms:

The comment above is unnecessarily insulting and harsh.
It was not helpful for good discourse. I don’t believe that speculating about mental illness in this way is appropriate unless there’s a good and stated reason for it.
The comment deadnamed and misgendered Torres, and was not corrected after I pointed this out.^[1]

On the point brought up by some Forum users, that the comment is informative: extremely critical content — including fairly vague negative impressions of someone — can be very useful to surface. But I think it’s very important for us to uphold the Forum’s norms about kindness, civility, staying on topic, and honesty, especially when the typical reader might be predisposed to suspending them because of past experiences with someone involved.

There was some discussion about this two years ago (again relating to Torres). Some relevant excerpts from Aaron’s comments from this thread:

One complication in this situation is that [Torres] doesn’t have a good reputation among the Forum’s users, some of whom have had unpleasant personal interactions with [them] (myself included, several times over). But I don’t want our norms about personal accusations to depend on how popular or pleasant the targets are. If you were accusing me of calling you a Nazi, I’d hope you would link to evidence, and I want the same standard to hold for [Torres].

And

To the extent that someone’s problematic interpersonal behavior is being discussed on the Forum, I still believe we should try to actually show evidence. Many Forum readers are new to the community, or otherwise aren’t privy to drama within the field of longtermist research. If someone wants to warn the entire community that someone is behaving badly, the most effective warnings will include evidence. [...]
Imagine showing a random person from outside the EA community* (say, someone familiar with Twitter) [this comment] and [this comment], as well as the karma scores. That person might conclude “[commenter] was right and [Torres] was wrong”. They might also conclude “[Commenter] is a popular member of the ingroup and [Torres] is getting cancelled for wrongthink”.

And

While some users contribute more value to Forum discussion than others [...], I associate the pattern of “giving ‘valued’ users more leeway to bend rules/norms” with many bad consequences in many different settings.

^{^}
I think my original comment might have been unnecessarily ungenerous — it’s sometimes genuinely hard to track name and pronoun changes, and I should have more readily assumed that this was an honest mistake in Sabs’s original comment. However, the fact that they haven’t edited their original comment since I pointed the error out is concerning and makes the deadnaming and misgendering seem much more deliberate.

particlemaniaNov 24 202216

I want to point out to you that regardless of whether Torres is worth engaging with or not, misgendering them like this signals lack of cooperativeness to the several queer and trans* 'EAs' who have nothing to do with the issue (which is fine, as long as you really intend to be uncooperative with them, in which case doing so helps them get accurate maps of who is worth working with for the future lightcone and who is not).

Peter WildefordNov 24 202228

not fine IMO

particlemaniaNov 24 20220

Sorry, not fine what?

MWStoryNov 25 20223

I assume Peter means it’s not fine to signal the lack of cooperativeness you describe above

Habryka [Deactivated]Nov 24 20228

I thought when we had that discussion last time the gender preferences for Torres were super confusing, and it's pretty plausible they are OK being referred to by"he/him"?

I am in favor of respecting people's pronouns (within reason) and am against deadnaming (as long as its not used to avoid past misdoings, which doesn't seem to be the case this time), so I think the deadnaming seems bad either way, but I just remember the pronoun situation being a bit more confusing.

[anonymous]Nov 24 202211

Torres is now fully they/them I think

Habryka [Deactivated]Nov 24 20224

Cool, makes sense. It does look like at least their FB profile is updated and doesn't like "he/him" pronouns anymore.

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