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 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 ...
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.
I think Halstead knows what degrowth advocates claim about degrowth (that it won't have built-in humanitarian costs). And I think he disagrees with them, which isn't the same as not understanding their arguments.
Imagine people arguing whether to invade Iraq in the year following the 9/11 attacks. One of them points out that invading the country will involve enormous built-in humanitarian costs. Their interlocutor replies:
"Your characterization of an Iraq invasion as having "enormous humanitarian costs" "built in" is flatly untrue in a way that is obvious t...
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.
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).
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
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.