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I hope some interesting discussion comes out of this. I am mostly here to shamelessly promote my recent essay on the subject !
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Curated and popular this week
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AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like โthere are X of this animal...
โHow long have you been v*g*n?โ
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. Itโs a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if youโre out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we donโt always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted hereย to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including overย 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Recent opportunities to take action
I would hope that an event inviting someone with as controversial a record as Phil Torres would at least recommend some readings responding to his claims.
More generally, I think Torres's recent engagement with longtermism (particularly around spurious claims of white supremacy, but not only that) crosses the line from valuable criticism into toxic personal attack, and I'm sad to see EA groups inviting him as a speaker.
I think we would be happy to add some recommended readings which are critical of Phil , although the reading list is getting pretty long by this point (ha!)ย
I am pretty confident that events with speakers critical of EA are a net positive. ย I am surprised by those that think otherwise. Judging from those that have listed "going" on our Facebook event, the attendees will not be a group of people who are unexposed to the strongest arguments for long-termism (quite the opposite!). In order to make an impact inside longtermism, you likely need to be highly engaged, and highly engaged longtermists should be able to deal with rigorous debate.
I expect that one of the reason ย critical speakers are not often platformed by EA-Orgs is due to the critique (real or expected) from doing so. In a risk averse community, it's hard to find the people with the confidence to run events like these. Which I think this is a shame because there's huge value to be gained from it. I hope in the future we can start to move towards congratulating those who share criticism of EA or common ideas inside EA.ย
Regarding particular arguments Phil has made, I think the bar for "writing someone off" as no-longer worthy of being platformed should be extremely high. From speaking with Phil, it's clear he feels disappointed and perhaps even hurt from early attempts to silence him. I would love to say my experience from hosting this event has been quite the opposite.ย
I am, in general, in favour of inviting critical-of-EA speakers, even those whose critiques I think are unfair or ill-founded (and I agree that "of course we're favour of critiques as long as they're true" is not a viable policy). I think if you gave me a list of prominent EA critics I'd be in favour of most of them being invited as speakers.
But Phil Torres has repeatedly crossed lines that I think should not be crossed. It is not okay to accuse EAs of being white supremacists without credible evidence, or to repeatedly and knowingly misrepresent your opponents in order to gain rhetorical advantage. I can't speak directly to his personal behaviour towards members of this community, but it's my impression that there are some quite problematic patterns there, too.
The world contains bad actors. We should be careful about labelling those who disagree with us as such, mindful of how hard it is to account for our biases when doing so. But when we do have strong evidence that someone is such, ignoring it isn't virtuous, it's irresponsible.
(And yes, I appreciate that very similar arguments to mine could be โ and are โ made in contexts where I would find their use abhorrent. I think this is just an unfortunate feature of the way the world is.)
Sounds right to me. Also sounds right that, in the modern world, repeatedly accusing a movement of being tainted with white supremacy using extremely flimsy evidence, in a manner that clearly seems to be about wielding a useful rhetorical weapon rather than anything connected to truth-seeking, is above that bar.
Reflecting on the above, I think I sound more confident about my take here than I actually am. I do lean in the direction I describe here, but I can see why some reasonable people would disagree with me that what we've seen from Torres is sufficient to push him past the "actively engaging with critical arguments is good" and into "this is a bad actor we should just avoid associating with".
But I do think that in cases like this, where there's a credible (if not ironclad) case that someone is a bad actor, it's especially important that you provide opportunities for pushback in the form of counter-critical reading, debate partners, et cetera.