All of anonymousEA's Comments + Replies
To clear up my identity, I am not Seán and do not know him. I go by Rubi in real life, although it is a nickname rather than my given name. I did not mean for my account to be an anonymous throwaway, and I intend to keep on using this account on the EA Forum. I can understand how that would not be obvious as this was my first post, but that is coincidental. The original post generated a lot of controversy, which is why I saw it and decided to comment.
...You spoke to 20+ reviewers, half of which were sought out to disagree with you, and not a single one could
I am anonymous because vocally disagreeing with the status quo would probably destroy any prospects of getting hired or funded by EA orgs (see my heavily downvoted comment about my experiences somewhere at the bottom of this thread).
This clearly doesn't apply to Rubi, so what's up?
There are many reasons for people to use pseudonyms on the Forum, and we allow it with few restrictions. It's also fine to have multiple accounts.
...To clarify, that's not to say Rubi is necessarily Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh. I have no idea and I don't know Seán.
However, this situation is
Personally I read this as a straightforward accusation of dishonesty - something I would expect moderators to object to if the comment was critical (rather than supportive) of EA orthodoxy.
As a moderator, I wouldn't object to this comment no matter who made it. I see it as a criticism of someone's work, not an accusation that the person was dishonest.
If someone wrote a paper critiquing the differential technology paradigm and spoke to lots of reviewers about it — including many who were known to be pro-DT — but didn't cite any pro-DT arguments, it would be...
Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh here. Since I have been named specifically, I would like to make it clear that when I write here, I do so under Sean_o_h, and have only ever done so. I am not Rubi, and I don't know who Rubi is. I ask that the moderators check IP addresses, and reach out to me for any information that can help confirm this.
I am on leave and have not read the rest of this discussion, or the current paper (which I imagine is greatly improved from the draft I saw), so I will not participate further in this discussion at this time.
It's also not the claim being made:
...minority opinion which happens to reinforce existing power relations and is mainly advocated by billionaires and those funded by [them]...
It is basic background knowledge that degrowth literature exists (which John knows), it is not basic background knowledge that we "know" that we could implement degrowth without major humanitarian consequences as degrowth has never been demonstrated at global scale. The opposite is not true either (so you might characterize Halstead as over-confident).
Degrowth is not a strategy we could clearly implement to tackle climate challenge (we do not know whether it is politically or techno-economically feasible and one can plausibly be quite skeptical) and ...
"Direct" vs "indirect" x-risk is a crude categorization, as most risks will cause hazards via a variety of pathways.
I think you switched the two by accident
Otherwise an excellent comment even if I disagree with most of it, have an updoot
I think this conflates the criticism of the idea of unitary and unstoppable technological progress with opposition to any and all technological progress.
Suggesting that a future without industrialization is morally tolerable does not imply opposition to "any and all" technological progress, but the amount of space left is very small. I don't think they're taking an opinion on the value of better fishhooks.
We could also on occasion say "yes we get this wrong and we still have much to learn" and not treat every critique as an attack.
Strong upvote for this if nothing else.
(the rest is also brilliant though, thank you so much for speaking up!)
Which alternatives to EV have what problems for what uses in what contexts?
Why do those problems make them worse than EV, a tool that requires the use of numerical probabilities for poorly-defined events often with no precedent or useful data?
What makes all alternatives to EV less preferable to the way in which EV is usually used in existential risk scholarship today, where subjectively-generated probabilities are asserted by "thought leaders" with no methodology and no justification, about events that are not rigorously defined nor separable, which are then fed into idealized economic models, policy documents, and press packs?
I really don't see the link between reducing air travel and the fact that COVID killed millions of people and necessitated lockdown measures.
I'm going to disengage now. Repeatedly mischaracterizing opposing views and deploying non-sequiturs for rhetorical reasons do not indicate to me that this will be a productive conversation.
See my reply to Will above. It's a fair point that it's not very helpful to spectators (besides indicating that the claim referred to should perhaps not be taken at face value) but my intention was to reply to Halstead rather than the audience.
In my view, it would be condescending if I was referring to most people, but not in this case. My point is that someone who has written about climate issues more than once in the past and who is considered something of an authority on climate issues within EA can be expected to have basic background knowledge on climate topics.
If we are going to have a hierarchical culture led by "thought leaders", I think we should at least hold them to a certain standard.
I don't see a dichotomy between "ignoring the source of an argument and their potential biases" and downvoting a multi-paragraph comment on the grounds that it used less-than-charitable language about Silicone Valley billionaires.
Based on your final line I'm not sure we disagree?
It seems that you fundamentally misunderstand degrowth. For an introduction I suggest this:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-environ-102017-025941
If you (or someone else) wants to defend degrowth on the Forum, it would probably be more useful to actually make degrowth arguments, rather than linking to a polemic that isn't even trying to make an objective assessment.
As a moderator, I agree with David that this comment doesn't abide by community norms.
It's not a serious offense, because "oh dear" is a mild comment that isn't especially detrimental to a conversation on its own. But if a reply implies that a post or comment is representative of some bad trend, or that the author should feel bad/embarrassed about what they wrote, and doesn't actually say why, it adds a lot more heat than light.
obvious to anyone who has read any degrowth literature, e.g. Kallis or Hickel.
...is a non-argument that's both condescending and helps only a tiny fraction of people reading your comment.
ok, see my comment below on covid and degrowth. It is difficult to see how we could reach a sustainable state via degrowth without shrinking the population by several billion and by reducing everyone's living standards to pre-industrial levels, i.e. most people living on <$2 per day.
Again, I'm really not sure where these downvotes are coming from. I'm engaging with criticism and presenting what information I can present as clearly as possible.
If people downvote comments on the basis of perceived ingroup affiliation rather than content then I think that might make OP's point for them...
The "content" here is that you refer to the funders you dislike with slurs like "techbro". It's reasonable to update negatively in response to that evidence.
Priors should matter! For example, early rationalists were (rightfully) criticized for being too open to arguments from white nationalists, believing they should only look at the argument itself rather than the source. It isn't good epistemics to ignore the source of an argument and their potential biases (though it isn't good epistemics to dismiss them out of hand either based on that, of course).
I think that the dismissive and insulting language is at best unhelpful - and signaling your affiliations by being insulting to people you see as the outgroup seems like a bad strategy for engaging in conversation.
My apologies, specific evidence was not presented with respect to...
- ...the quasi-censorship/emotional blackmail point because I think it's up to the people involved to provide as much detail as they are personally comfortable with. All I can morally do is signal to those out of the loop that there are serious problems and hope that somebody with the right to name names does so. I can see why this may seem conspiratorial without further context. All I can suggest is that you keep an ear to the ground. I'm anonymous for a reason.
- ...the funding issue because
Personally I more or less agreed with you and I don't think you were as insensitive as people suggested. I work in machine learning yet I feel shining a light on the biases and the oversized control of people in the tech industry is warranted and important.
I think it's because you're making strong claims without presenting any supporting evidence. I don't know what reading lists you're referring to; I have doubts about not asking questions being an 'unspoken condition' about getting access to funding; and I have no idea what you're conspiratorially alluding to regarding 'quasi-censorship' and 'emotional blackmail'.
Thank you both from the bottom of my heart for writing this. I share many (but not all) of your views, but I don’t express them publicly because if I do my career will be over.
What you call the Techno-Utopian Approach is, for all intents and purposes, hegemonic within this field.
Newcomers (who are typically undergraduates not yet in their twenties) have the TUA presented to them as fact, through reading lists that aim to be educational. In fact, they are extremely philosophically, scientifically, and politically biased; when I showed a non-EA friend of min...
I think it's plausible that it's hard to notice this issue if your personal aesthetic preferences happen to be aligned with TUA. I tried to write here a little questioning how important aesthetic preferences may be. I think it's plausible that people can unite around negative goals even if positive goals would divide them, for instance, but I'm not convinced.
Honestly, fair enough.