ET

Elliot Temple

302 karmaJoined Sep 2022criticalfallibilism.com

Bio

NOTE: None of my substantive posts use the CC BY license. They're from before the 2022-12-01 cutoff. I'm quitting the forum due to the new licensing rule.

I write about philosophy: https://criticalfallibilism.com

Disagree with me? I have a debate policy you may use: https://www.elliottemple.com/debate-policy

Comments
119

OK, I gave CF forum posting access to your account.

You're right that I should make the curi.us comment section clearer than the current small-print note. If you lost the text of what you wrote, I should be able to retrieve it for you from logs.

I don't think I will pay $20 because all the money I earn beyond my basic needs is going to charities.

If $20 got you even a 1% chance to find out that much of your money and effort is going to the wrong charities and causes, wouldn't that be a good deal? Error correction is high value.

I think what EA is doing by getting people to donate that much (all above basic needs) is extremely harmful to people like you. I'd believe that even if I didn't also believe that the majority of EA causes and efforts were counter-productive.

There's something really problematic about thinking a cause is so important that you'll make large personal sacrifices for it, but not being willing to do much to pursue potential error correction. EA has a lot of people who will go to great lengths to help their causes – they just are so sure they're right(?) that they don't seem to think debating critics is very important. It's weird. If you think every dollar you donate is a big deal, you should also think every tiny bit of risk reduction and error correction is a big deal. Those things are scarcer than dollars and can easily have larger impacts. But I come here and say I think EA is wrong about important issues, and I want to debate, and I ask if EA has any organized debate methods or even just individuals who'd be happy to debate much. And the answer was no and also no one seems to think that's very bad or risky. That shows a widespread lack of respect for the risk of being wrong about causes that people are investing all their money above basic needs in, and a disinterest in criticism.

Anyway, if you find my ideas implausible and not worth pursuing or debating, or still don't really value my time more than the time of the next guy you could talk with instead, then we should part ways.

Same for the CC BY license. I know I'd have less impact if I left the forum, and what I write is there with the goal of being shared anyway, so I don't really care about that.

I just put up 7 more EA-related articles at https://curi.us The best way to find all my EA related articles is https://curi.us/2529-effective-altruism-related-articles

I have more drafts to go through so there will be more posts soon.

If you or anyone else thinks that any of them should be on the EA forum, you can post them at EA as link posts. In general, I don't plan to link post my own stuff at EA going forward, for several reasons, but if even one person thinks it would add much value to EA, they are welcome to do it.

Yes the current default (US) copyright/IP system is far from perfect.

I'm not aware of setting a setting and both voting things are showing up for me on my own post just like on yours (including with a private browsing window).

Ok - I subscribed to the forum but I don't know how to answer to the comment you linked to.

To post on my forum, you have to pay $20 (once, not recurring). I know the communication on this isn't amazing (Discourse has limited options) though there should be a banner and some info about it in a few places, but I know sometimes people still don't see it. There's a subscribe button on the home page but it's in a menu on mobile instead of directly visible. It takes you to https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/s and then the payment flow is with a standard plugin that uses Stripe.

If it's a financial burden for you, I can give you free access.

If you can afford it, then I'll have to ask you to pay, because my general policy is if people value a discussion with me less than $20 then I shouldn't talk with them. I skip that policy when I go participate at other communities, but I'm quitting the EA forum now.

I also just wrote more about my issues with the CC BY license at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WEAXu8yTt5XbKq4wJ/ignoring-small-errors?commentId=Z7Nh36x3brvzC3Jpm

What is the license problem that you foresee, Elliot?

What specifics concern you? I haven't thought about it carefully, what perspective am I missing?

The license gives anyone the right to e.g. put my posts in a book and sell them without my consent. It lets them do all kinds of stuff with my work. I think my work is valuable and and I want to retain my IP and copyright rights about it. I think the prior, default system was good: fair use and quotations, plus asking for permission for other stuff.

BTW I've been plagiarized multiple times, I've had multiple people put my ideas in their published commercial books without consent or even notifying me (including some copyright violations), and including with mangling my ideas so badly that I wouldn't want to be associated with their version so simply giving credit doesn't fix the problem for me. Talking about someone's ideas and quoting and paraphrasing them fairly and reasonably takes some skill that many people lack. One person offered to credit me as a co-author of his book when I found out he'd put a ton of my ideas in it. I declined because I would not want authorship of his low quality writing and reasoning, plus I was not involved with authoring the book at all. I don't want him to plagiarize me, and I also don't want him to incompetently summarize my ideas then credit me, let alone say I endorse it... CC BY would make all this stuff worse not better.

But mostly I just want to retain my property rights for my ideas, work, research, writing, etc. I think giving most of my ideas and writing away as free to read is more than generous enough.

My plan is to quit using the EA forum, though I'll write a few things without important philosophy in them, like this one, rather than quitting abruptly. I will continue posting articles at https://criticalfallibilism.com and https://curi.us plus I'm actively using my forum and two YouTube channels. I have ~30,000 words of EA related draft articles which I'll no longer be able to use as planned. I'll probably try to quickly post a fair amount of that at curi.us with only light editing.

BTW, when reviewing EA's terms of use yesterday I found other problems, e.g. a prohibition on posting anything "untrue".

EDIT: I should also mention that I don't want anyone translating my writing without consent because translations can easily be inaccurate and misleading, and essentially be like misquoting me. Translations basically come with an implication that I endorse what they say because it's allegedly just my own words. I've had an issue with this in the past too, and if I ever get more popular all this stuff will come up more including with my archives.

FWIW I generally take this to be the case; unless I have strong prior evidence that someone's citations are consistently to a high standard, I don't assume their citations can be easily trusted, at least not for important things.

Awesome. I think most people do not do that.

I'm no longer having substantive discussions at this site due to the CC BY license rule. Do you want to discuss off-site?

You want me to talk to a lawyer to know how quotes and your new CC BY stuff works? (E.g. if I quote from my own article while link posting it, possibly the entire thing, does that keep anything quoted out of CC BY?) You aren't willing to clarify that yourselves and just want individuals to go pay lawyers to find out how your forum works? That seems very unreasonable.

Also

Subject to Section 2.2, [a bunch of stuff]. You also irrevocably waive any “moral rights”

That qualifier doesn't appear to apply to the moral right waiving.

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