"I think your posting about him undermines your credibility elsewhere." This seems worryingly like epistemic closure to me (though it depends a bit what "elsewhere" refers to.) A lot of Thorstad's work is philosophical criticism of longtermist arguments, and not super-technical criticism either. You can surely just assess that for yourself rather than discounting it because of what he said about an unrelated topic, unless he was outright lying. I mostly agree with Thorstad's conclusions about Scott's views on HBD, but whilst that makes me distrust Scott's political judgement, it doesn't effect my (positive) view of the good stuff Scott has written about largely unrelated topics like whether antidepressants work, or the replication crisis.  

I'd also say that the significance of Scott sometimes pushing back against HBD stuff is very dependent on why he pushes back. Does he push back because he thinks people are spreading harmful ideas? Or does he push back because he thinks if the blog becomes too associated with taboo claims it will lose influence, or bring him grief personally? The former would perhaps indicate unfairness in Thorstad's portrayal of him, but the latter certainly would not. In the leaked email (which I think is likely genuine, or he'd say it wasn't, but of course we can't be 100% sure) he does talk about stratigising to maintain his influence with liberals on this topic. My guess, as a long-time reader is that it's a bit of both. I don't think Scott is sympathetic to people genuinely wanting to hurt Black people, and I'm sure there are Reactionary claims about race that he thinks are just wrong. But he's also very PR conscious on this topic in my view. And it's hard to see why he's had so many HBD-associated folk on his blogroll if he doesn't want to quietly spread some of the ideas. 

It's easy for both to be true at the same time right? That is skeptics tone it down within EA, and believers tone it down when dealing with people *outside* EA.

As the article in The Critic itself points out, it is hardly surprising that a group that is disproportionately made up of young, single men are more criminal than the general population, since young men are overwhelmingly more criminal than anyone else, and single men are likely plausibly worse. It's not clear what this tells us about immigrants even from Syria or Afghanistan, let alone anywhere else, if we control for that. My guess for what it's worth is that they will still have higher crime rates even if you control if they are Syrians (don't know about Afghans, suspect more positive selection there), but you'd need to actually look.

Can you be more specific about what right-coded stuff you want OP to fund that they aren't? 

I feel like on the one hand, I have no problem with GV not funding certain right-coded things where I think the ideas are genuinely bad for more or less standard reasons why socially liberal people don't like right-wing things, and that's also what GV thinks. But on the other hand, if the issue is (as I somewhat suspect) more like "Dustin doesn't want to fund stuff that looks bad to influential people in the Democrat party because he doesn't want to lose influence, regardless of whether he personally thinks that stuff is bad" that seems a lot dodgier. 

I suspect that it is either, the second, bad, influence-maxing thing or something else, since I doubt people are actually going to OP demanding funding for HDB-type stuff or "investigate whether women being allowed to have jobs is bad"*. But maybe intelligence enhancement stuff, minus any HBD connection, is a more plausible case of genuine ideological disagreement between GV and people who might want GV funding? 


*I'm not making this one up as a real right-Rationalist or former Rationalist take, I saw Roko say it on twitter.

I think Thorstad has written very good stuff-for example on the way in which arguments for small reductions in extinction risk. More politically, his reporting on Scott Alexander and some other figures connected to the community's racism is a useful public service and he has every right to be pissed off {EDIT: sentence originally ended here: I meant to say he has every right to be pissed of at people ignore or disparaging the racism stuff]. I don't even necessarily entirely disagree with the meta-level critique being offered here.

But it was still striking to me that someone responded to the complaint that people making the institutional critique tend not to actually have much in the way of actionable information, and to take a "let me explain why these people came to their obviously wrong views" tone, by posting a bunch of stuff that was mostly like that.

If my tone is sharp it's also because, like Richard I find the easy, unthinking combination of "the problem with these people is that they don't care about changing the system" with "why are they doing meat alternatives and not vegan outreach aimed at a particular ethnic group that makes up <20% of the population or animal shelters" to be genuinely enragingly hypocritical and unserious. That's actually somewhat separate from whether EAs are insufficiently sympathetic to anticapitalist or "social justice"-coded.

Incidentally, while I agree with Jason that it's "Moskowitz and Tuna ought to be able to personally decide where nearly all the money in the movement is spent" that is the weird claim that needs defending, my guess is that at least one practical effect of this has been to pull the movement left, not right, on several issues. Open Phil spent money on anti- mass incarceration stuff, and vaguely left-coded macroeconomic policy stuff at a time when the community was not particularly interested in either of those things. Indeed I remember Thorstad singling out critiques of the criminal justice stuff as examples of the community holding left-coded stuff to a higher standard of proof. More recently you must have seen the rationalist complaints on the forum about how Open Phil won't fund anything "right-coded". None of that's to say there are no problems in principle with unaccountable billionares of course. After all, our other major billionaire donor was SBF! (Though his politics wasn't really the issue.)

Yeah, I suppose that is fair.

I'm not sure any of these except maybe the second actually answer the complaints Richard is making. 

The first linked post here seems to defend, or at least be sympathetic to, the position that encouraging veganism specifically among Black people in US cities is somehow more an attempt at "systemic change" with regard to animal exploitation than working towards lab-grown meat (the whole point of which is that it might end up replacing farming altogether). 
The third post is mostly not about the institutional critique at all, and the main thing it does say about it is just that longtermists can't respond to it by saying they only back interventions that pass rigorous GiveWell-style cost benefit analysis. Which is true enough, but does zero to motivate the idea that there are good interventions aimed at institutional change available. Thorstad does also say "well, haven't anti-oppression mass movements done a whole lot of good in the past; isn't a bit suspicious to think they've suddenly stopped doing so". Which is a good point in itself, but fairly abstract and doesn't actually do much to help anyone identify what reforms they should be funding. 

The fourth post is extraordinarily abstract: the point seems to be that a) we should pay more attention to injustice, and b) people often use abstract language about what is rational to justify injustice against oppressed groups. Again, this is not very actionable, and Thorstad's post does not really mention Crary's arguments for either of these claims. 

I think this goes some way to vindicating Richard's complaint that not enough specific details are given in these sort of critiques, rather than undermining it actually (though only a little, these are short reviews, and may not do the stuff being reviewed justice.) 



 

In fairness, you could consistently think "billionaires are biased against intervention which are justified via premises that make "the system"/billionaires sound bad" without believing we should abolish capitalism. The critique could also be pointing to a real problem, and maybe on that could be mitigated in various way,  even if "abolish the system" is not a good idea. (Not a comment either way on whether your criticism of the versions of the institutional critique that have actually been made is correct.) 

Firstly, it's not really me you should be thanking, it's not my project, I am just helping with it a bit. 

Secondly, it's just another version of this, don't expect any info about funding beyond an update to the funding info in this: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/zaaGsFBeDTpCsYHef/shallow-review-of-live-agendas-in-alignment-and-safety

"pwning the childless cat ladies" I know this is just a joke in passing and not the point of the paper, but this is sexist (in the sense that it comes off hostile to women or at least gender-nonconforming women) and sexism should be avoided for both substantive and PR reasons.