All of ChichikoBendeliani's Comments + Replies

Someone said this to me recently:

I think the pace of cancellations and attempted cancellations has been picking up steam and has gotten pretty damn fast very recently. It is possible I am not sufficiently familiar with base rates, but it does seem like the current pace is quite high, so either it has accelerated or people on the peripheries of our community are unusually likely to be targeted. In either case this is cause for concern.

Eg, REDACTED1's firing, REDACTED2 asked to resign his VP position (but he still gets to be faculty), petition to remove

There are 34 votes on this post, so at least I'm comforted slightly by the nonzero number of people who think it's not terrible.

Fixed, thank you!

I'm glad Singer has survived through stuff (and indeed, arguably his willingness to say true&controversial things is part of his appeal). For what it's worth, there's historical precedent for selective self-censorship of true views from our predecessors, cf Bentham's unpublished essay on homosexuality:

discussed the essay in the light of 18th-century legal opinion and quoted Bentham's manuscript notes that reveal his anxieties about expressing his views

The decline of Mohism seems like a good cautionary tale of a movement that tr... (read more)

FWIW, I don't think a cultural revolution is very likely, just likely enough (>1%) that we shouldn't only think about object-level considerations when deciding whether to sign a petition or speak out publicly in support of someone.

I also suspect history professors will not be able to answer this honestly and dispassionately in worlds where a cultural revolution is likely.

First of all, I sincerely apologize for any offense it may have caused. For what it's worth:

1. I obviously do not think we're living in a cultural revolution yet. The amount of harm caused by the 1960s cultural revolution to lives and livelihoods is severe, and the existing job losses and social disapproval caused by SJ actors is very minor in the grand scheme of things.

2. I do see how this comparison can be offensive. I'm not sure how else to disseminate my worries accurately without causing offense.

3. I personally think we're obvious... (read more)

I received this as a private message. It was unclear to me if it was initially intended as a comment, but I asked and they gave permission for me to do this:

I'm quite bothered by the implicit assumption that this is in fact a cultural revolution. I think the degree to which people will find supporting Hsu offensive is completely dwarfed by how offensive people will find offshoots of the Floyd protests as equivalent to the Cultural Revolution. As noted in https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4859, there are steel man versions of the Hsu complaint in p

I received this as a private message:

Hi, this is meant to be a reply to your reply to Anna. Please post it for me. [...]

Agreed that Anna seems to be misinterpreting you or not addressing your main point. The biggest question in my mind is whether EA will be on the wrong side of the revolution anyway, because we're an ideological competitor and a bundle of resources that can be expropriated. Even if that's the case though, maybe we still have to play the odds and just hope to fly under the radar somehow.

Seems like hiring some history professors as

I'd be very excited to know of historically successful examples of this.

First of all, thanks so much for your time for providing an insightful (and poetic!) comment.

It seems to me that the EA community's strength, goodness, and power lie almost entirely in our ability to reason well

Mostly agreed. I think "reasoning well" hides a lot of details though, eg. a lot of the time people reason poorly due to specific incentives than because of their general inability to reason.

Finding the real leverage points in the world is probably worth orders of magnitude in our impact.

Agreed

Our ability to think honestly and speak

I'm extremely skeptical of EAs' ability to coordinate to stop a Cultural Revolution. "Politics is the mind killer." Better to treat it like the weather and focus on the things that actually matter and we have a chance of affecting, and that our movement has a comparative advantage in (figuring out things about physical reality and plugging in holes in places left dangerously unguarded).

It also doesn't seem that important in the grand scheme of things; relative to the much more direct existential risks.

The revised statement is:

"As a general strategy, it seems much better for most people in the community to watch what they say in public somewhat, be careful with their public associations, and minimize public contact with any associations that could be seen as potentially problematic."

More broadly, I think the thing I'm most worried about is altruistic nerds not thinking about the second order considerations at all, rather than any object level suggestions.

Someone wrote this to me privately. I agree with the substance of the criticism and has since edited the post accordingly.

> As a general strategy, it seems much better for most people in the community to [...] quickly disavow any associations that could be seen as potentially problematic.

This part seems objectionable to me even if I agreed with the rest of your post.

1. Public disavowal can increase the chance that the accused person will suffer unjust bad outcomes. This starts to slide away from ‘don’t protect your peers from being burned