Epistemic Status: I feel pretty confident that the core viewpoint expressed in this post is correct, though I'm less confident in some specific claims. I have not shared a draft of this post with ACE, and so it’s possible I’ve missed important context from their perspective.
EDIT: ACE board member Eric Herboso has responded with his personal take on this situation.
He believes some points in this post are wrong or misleading. For example, he disputes my claim that ACE (as an organization) attempted to cancel a conference speaker.
EDIT: Jakub Stencel from Anima International has posted a response. He clarifies a few points and offers some context regarding the CARE conference situation.
Background
In the past year, there has been some concern in EA surrounding the negative impact of “cancel culture” and worsening discourse norms. Back in October, Larks wrote a post criticizing EA Munich's decision to de-platform Robin Hanson.The post was generally well-received, and there have been other posts on the forum discussing potential risks from social-justice oriented discourse norms. For example, see The Importance of Truth-Oriented Discussions in EAand EA considerations regarding increasing political polarization.
I'm writing this post because I think some recent behavior from Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is a particularly egregious example of harmful epistemic norms in EA. This behavior includes:
- Making (in my view) poorly reasoned statements about anti-racism and encouraging supporters to support or donate to anti-racist causes and organizations of dubious effectiveness
- Attempting to cancel an animal rights conference speaker because of his views on Black Lives Matter, withdrawing from that conference because the speaker's presence allegedly made ACE staff feel unsafe, and issuing a public statement supporting its staff and criticizing the conference organizers
- Penalizing charities in reviews for having leadership and/or staff who are deemed to be insufficiently progressive on racial equity, and stating it won't offer movement grants funding to those who disagree with its views on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Because I'm worried that this post could hurt my future ability to get a job in EAA, I'm choosing to remain anonymous.
My goal here is to:
a) Describe ACE's behavior in order to raise awareness and foster discussion, since this doesn't seem to have attracted much attention, and
b) Give a few reasons why I think ACE's behavior has been harmful, though I’ll be brief since I think similar points have been better made elsewhere
I also want to be clear that I don't think ACE is the only bad actor here, as other areas of the EAA community have also begun to embrace harmful social-justice derived discourse norms. However, I'm focusing my criticism on ACE here because:
- It positions itself as an effective altruism organization, rather than a traditional animal advocacy organization
- It is well known and generally respected by the EA community
- It occupies a powerful position within the EAA movement, directing millions of dollars in funding each year and conducting a large fraction of the movement's research
And before I get started, I'd also like to make a couple caveats:
- I think ACE does a lot of good work, and in spite of this recent behavior, I think its research does a lot to help animals. I'm also not trying to “cancel” ACE or any of its staff. But I do think the behavior outlined in this post is bad enough that ACE supporters should be vocal about their concerns and consider withholding future donations.
- I am not suggesting that racism, discrimination, inequality, etc. shouldn't be discussed, or that addressing these important problems isn't EA-worthy. The EA community can (and should) have these discussions, but we should employ the same epistemic standards as we do when discussing any other issue, and we should assume good faith when people disagree with progressive orthodoxy.
Overview of Behavior I Find Concerning
Blog Post on "Black Lives Matter"
Note: ACE seems to have removed the following statement from its blog, and I'm not sure why (maybe ACE realized the post was bad, but I don't want to speculate without evidence). In any case, the original link now redirects to a post from 2017 on diversity, equity, and inclusion, while I link to an archived version of the original post below.
I think one recent example of bad behavior from ACE is its June 2020 statement on Black Lives Matter. I don't see much wrong with this statement's basic message: I think it can be fine for organizations to make public statements on issues outside of their core focus, and I don't think we should demand that all blog posts be super rigorous. But I think this post was quite bad for a few reasons:
- The language used in the statement makes it hard to interpret and assess factually
- It made bold claims with little evidence
- It recommended readers spend time going through resources of questionable value
For example, here is a section from the post:
In Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters, decolonial theorists Aph and Syl Ko eloquently argue that the oppression of nonhuman animals is inextricably linked to the oppression of human animals in that they have the same root causes of white supremacy and patriarchy.
If the root causes of racism and speciesism are the same, then we may be able to make even more positive impact by addressing both issues simultaneously.
Taken at face value, these claims seem pretty absurd. For example,"inextricably linked" implies that societies without white supremacy and/or patriarchy wouldn't oppress animals.
Maybe a more reasonable interpretation, suggested in the second paragraph, is something like "white supremacy, patriarchy, and the oppression of animals share some of the same causes, and so addressing some of those root causes may reduce both animal suffering and racism." Unfortunately, the writing style makes the precise claim unclear and so it’s difficult to evaluate.
Another issue with the post is that some of the linked resources are quite bad. For example, it suggested that readers consider committing to Black VegFest's 7 points of allyship (Note: Black VegFest has also received funding from ACE)
The pledge contains statements such as:
There is no such thing as an equal playing field under white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy. In the current system, white people have the power to usurp anything Black lives create simply by being white.
and
White vegans/ARs will respect the sanctity of Black space and will not enter unless their presence is necessary. Black space is for the growth and betterment of Black people. Allyship and being accomplices begins with white people learning to respect Black space.
I don't want to come across as mean or snarky, and the main point of this post isn't to critique social justice ideology. But even as a progressive-leaning, educated person raised in a Western country, those quotes sound like nonsense to me. And to my eyes the pledge itself is closer to a faith statement than a serious plan for combating racism. So I think it’s pretty concerning that at least one person at ACE thought that pledge was worth recommending.
I think a major EA-aligned research organization should have much higher standards for content they put out, even if it’s only a blog post. Still, I'm glad that ACE removed the post and replaced it with a link to a post that appears better written and more nuanced.
Withdrawal from the 2020 CARE Conference
Last August, ACE made a Facebook post announcing its withdrawal from the 2020 Conference on Animal Rights in Europe (CARE). Those who are interested can read the full post, but I quote a few key paragraphs below:
ACE began reconsideration of our participation a few weeks ago when an ACE supporter informed us that a person who had recently made inflammatory comments related to race in a Facebook forum was publicized on the CARE website as speaking on the topic of Black Lives Matter. The ACE supporter, a white male ally, had independently written to the CARE organizers to address his concerns about this contradiction.
ACE also shared this concern, especially because two of the three speakers we had planned to send to CARE are women of the global majority (of color). We wanted to avoid placing them in a situation where they had to share a platform with a person whose statements made them feel unwelcome and unsafe.
In fact, asking our staff to participate in an event where a person who had made such harmful statements would be in attendance, let alone presenting, would be a violation of our own anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policy. Naturally, we want to abide by our own policy and support our staff in feeling comfortable in all of their workspaces, including the online sphere of virtual conferences and Facebook forums.
ACE doesn't mention exactly which statements it considers harmful, but the person who was scheduled to speak made a few comments that questioned the effectiveness of dedicating EAA resources to anti-racism and questioned some views commonly held by progressive activists.
Edit: In addition to posting comments, he also 'liked' a comment that described Encompass, an organization that promotes racial diversity in the animal advocacy movement, as a "hate group". I think this was inappropriate, but upon reflection I wouldn't put that much weight on him 'liking' that FB comment. This doesn't change much in my overall assessment of ACE's behavior.
From my perspective, these so-called "inflammatory" and "harmful" comments were generally respectful in tone and expressed pretty reasonable views -- certainly nothing that should be considered outside of the overton window of EAA discussion.
ACE then goes on to say:
ACE decided to withdraw from the conference reaching out to its organizers and failing to find a compromise: we ultimately decided on Monday to withdraw our ACE representatives because we did not feel the conference environment would be truly receptive to our staff members who are Black and of the global majority, and because the sheer emotional labor that has gone into this process has taken a significant toll on all of our speakers.
One could reasonably disagree with some of the comments that the planned speaker posted, but his comments seemed far from anything that would reasonably make people feel unsafe at a conference, and very far from something that would justify barring him from speaking. So I'm very concerned that ACE is implying that the CARE organizers made a mistake in letting this person (who ultimately withdrew from his scheduled talk) speak at the conference.
Edit: I think that his behavior could understandably make someone with strong pro-racial justice views feel unwelcome or unsafe at the conference. But I don't think that comes close to a justification for barring someone from speaking.
Norms of free and open discussion are critical to our ability to engage in truth seeking. And discussions about cause prioritization and cost-effectiveness are cornerstone to EA. So ACE's behavior here seems antithetical to core EA values.
ACE's comments are made worse given its powerful position in the EAA movement as a grant maker and charity evaluator. Conference organizers may now reasonably worry about being denied funding or having their organizations receive unfavorable reviews from ACE if they host any speakers deemed remotely controversial. It may also cause animal advocates to self-censor views deemed controversial for fear of being denied speaking and career opportunities.
Penalizing Charities Based on Statements from Staff
Another concerning behavior from ACE is that it appeared to have heavily punished Anima International (the employer of the planned CARE speaker reference above) in its 2020 charity review.
Edit: I should note the speaker holds a country-level Executive Director position at Anima. In addition, there another country-level ED who posted some
critical comments in the same Facebook thread.
In its 2019 review of Anima International, ACE rated Anima's "Leadership and Strategic Vision" (criterion 6) as being "strong" with a high degree of confidence. ACE also gave Anima a "strong" rating with a high degree of confidence in criterion 7 (having a healthy culture and sustainable structure), which includes diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
But in its 2020 review of Anima, published in November, ACE downgraded Anima from a "top" to "standout", a change which will likely result in substantially reduced funding to Anima through ACE. ACE also now gives Anima a "weak" rating for “Leadership and Culture” While I can't know for sure whether this decision was appropriate, or the extent to the downgrade was due to Anima staff's views on DEI, some statements in the 2020 review are quite concerning:
Our impression, however, is that the racial homogeneity at the organization has resulted in a limited understanding of racial issues, which has presented itself in some of the public and private communications we’ve witnessed from Anima International’s staff in the last year
In particular, we think leadership staff publicly engaging in conversations about the relevance of racial equity to the animal advocacy movement may have had a negative impact on the progress of racial equity in the movement
Additionally, in ACE’s summary of the review, it notes
We think Anima International’s leadership has a limited understanding of racial equity and that this has impacted some of the spaces they contribute to as an international animal advocacy group—such as coalitions, conferences, and online forums.
as a weakness of the organization.
The poor rating on “Leadership and Culture” is despite Anima staff reporting higher than average levels of satisfaction and staff overwhelmingly agreeing that Anima has an inclusive culture, diverse staff members, and protects staff from discrimination and harassment. Indeed, ACE's assessment of Anima's performance on this criterion seems quite positive, with the exception of some comments from leadership regarding racial equity.
It’s hard to directly compare the reviews from 2019 and 2020, as ACE’s evaluation criteria changed somewhat. Nevertheless, given the overall positive assessment, it's strange that Anima was awarded a "weak" rating in this category, and I think it's likely that Anima is being heavily punished for the public comments made by staff members.
Of course, since much of the dialogue between ACE and Anima has been private, it's possible that some Anima staff made private comments that are much worse than what is public (Edit: It's worth noting Anima apparently requested its private correspondence with ACE be made public, see Jakub Stencel's comment). But I find it unlikely that any of the private statements would have been bad enough to reasonably justify penalization in the review. And due to ACE’s previous statements, I have little confidence in its opinion on whether a given statement related to racial equity is harmful.
I'm worried that ACE will continue to put pressure on charities to censor the views of their staff. Leadership from charities seeking an ACE evaluation could be incentivized to self-censor in order to secure a favorable review. It may also put pressure on charities to adopt policies or take costly actions to signal their commitment to DEI, which could reduce their effectiveness. Collectively, this may contribute to a toxic culture of fear, deceit, and wasteful signalling.
On a related note, I’m also concerned that in a recent blog post, ACE explicitly states that it is unable to fund “groups or projects that do not support ACE’s views on diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) for its Movement Grants Program.
This could plausibly be used to deny funding to good project ideas from those who disagree with ACE on issues related to DEI. And conversely, ACE could be more likely to fund bad project ideas from people who align with ACE’s views, given the priority it seems to assign to DEI.
These actions are harmful to the movement
Edit: By "social justice norms" I'm referring to a set of discussion norms and epistemic norms that are common in many social justice communities. These include, for example, placing great emphasis on standpoint epistemology, displaying great intolerance and hostility toward dissenting views, and a general skepticism of empirical evidence. But I don't mean to imply that all social justice norms are bad, and I don't view social justice and EA as incompatible. There are definitely people who embrace norms of openness and free inquiry and who also identify as social justice advocates.
Embracing certain social justice norms may lead the movement to allocate resources less effectively
I believe that the adoption of these norms will cause ACE and other EAA groups to spend more time supporting social-justice related causes, and less time on effective animal advocacy. I don't think anti-racist and or pro-DEI work is necessary bad, but I think we need to be able to openly discuss whether it's really worth funding “intersectional” or social-justice aligned work from groups like, and whether those resources wouldn't better be served funding organizations that are purely focused on helping animals. At the very least, a rigorous case should be presented before funding intersectional or anti-racist organizations, and those who disagree with decisions to support that work shouldn't be branded as racist or ignorant.
Embracing certain social justice norms may attract bad actors
Embracing social justice norms may cause us to attract more people from social justice communities who care little about the principles of EA or even animal advocacy, but will be drawn to the movement if it seems they can gain support and funding. This seems quite bad for the long-term effectiveness of the movement.
Embracing certain social justice norms is likely to create a hostile epistemic environment and reduce trust
There are countless examples of toxic discourse norms in social justice heavy fields, such as parts of academia and journalism. In these communities, people who question progressive orthodoxy or make innocuous statements deemed "offensive" are often bullied, harassed, threatened, forced to write presumably fake apologies (and then often bullied for writing an insufficiently sincere apology), and sometimes even fired from their jobs. For some specific examples of social-justice driven cancel culture, see this list compiled by Larks.
If EA (or EAA specifically) adopts these toxic norms, community members will be incentivized to hide their beliefs in order to gain funding, employment, and social approval. I'd like people in the EAA community to be able to argue in good faith and express disagreement with each other, and be unafraid of criticizing views held by powerful organizations or people within the movement. In keeping with the good faith principle, I won't be asking ACE to write an apology, as I don't believe it should issue one unless it truly thinks it acted wrongly.
I’d like to close with an excerpt that resonated with me from a popular comment from Anna Salamon on a previous post:
It seems to me that the EA community's strength, goodness, and power lie almost entirely in our ability to reason well (so as to be actually be "effective", rather than merely tribal/random). It lies in our ability to trust in the integrity of one anothers' speech and reasoning, and to talk together to figure out what's true.
Finding the real leverage points in the world is probably worth orders of magnitude in our impact. Our ability to think honestly and speak accurately and openly with each other seems to me to be a key part of how we access those "orders of magnitude of impact."
In contrast, our ability to have more money/followers/etc. (via not ending up on the wrong side of a cultural revolution, etc.) seems to me to be worth... something, in expectation, but not as much as our ability to think and speak together is worth
I’m part of Anima International’s leadership as Director of Global Development (so please note that Animal Charity Evaluators’ negative view of the leadership quality is, among others, about me).
As the author noted, this topic is politically charged and additionally, as Anima International, we consider ourselves ‘a side’, so our judgment here may be heavily biased. This is why, even though we read this thread, we are quite hesitant to comment.
Nevertheless, I can offer a few factual points here that will clear some of the author’s confusion or that people got wrong in the comments.
We asked ACE for their thoughts on these points to make sure we are not misconstruing what happened due to a biased perspective. After a short conversation with Anima International, ACE preferred not to comment. They declined to correct what they feel is factually incorrect and instead let us know that they will post a reply to my post to avoid confusion, which we welcome.
1.
The author wrote: “it's possible that some Anima staff made private comments that are much worse than what is public”
While I don’t want to comment or judge whether comments are better or worse, we specifically asked ACE to publish all of this material for the sake of transparency, which they declined to do. They also stated that they would not give Anima International permission to share the correspondence for the same reasons of confidentiality. We are happy that ACE noted our request in a footnote, but we still believe it can be very damaging to the reputation of the organization to mention private conversations in the context of racial equity without explicitly publishing them or paraphrasing them for the review’s readers to judge. We are afraid this may make the reader consider a lot of scenarios in their mind and some of them can make them anxious to support our work, admit publicly that they support our work, participate in our recruitments or engage with us. For example, some of the worries we have are that readers may think that in Anima International we express or tolerate discriminatory actions or views; are against or don’t work on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; or that we consider the linked Facebook discussion as a conversation norm that we support.
2.
Ben West wrote in the comment that he suspects that our rating about poor leadership and culture was based on removal of our CEO due to misconduct rather than other causes. According to our knowledge this is not true. In our exchanges with Animal Charity Evaluators which took place after the removal of our CEO and after the Facebook thread with mentioned comments had taken place as well as during the review process, there was nothing that would indicate that this was a factor. Our view was and still is that Animal Charity Evaluators supported Anima International in its leadership transition and congratulated us on our practices in protecting staff and organizational culture.
3.
I concluded that it’s worth clarifying that Anima International is the owner of the CARE conference and hosts change occasionally, as we share our conference with other organizations in the animal advocacy movement. The host in 2020 was an organization called Humánny Pokrok.
4.
Anonymous00 wrote that they assume that “The CARE Conference schedule came out, and said ED was speaking on a panel about Black Lives Matter and diversity in the movement.” - I would like to clarify this is not true. The talk at CARE was about effective campaigning tactics using Black Lives Matter as an example. The topic was not about diversity or any topic related to similar issues. While in principle there is nothing wrong with discussing DEI issues at CARE and people could still be negatively affected by it, the difference can matter in the context of this post.
5.
Larks wrote that they don’t believe ACE offered Anima International the opportunity to see their statement about withdrawing from CARE in advance. I would like to clarify that ACE did send their statement regarding the withdrawal of their speakers from the CARE conference to Anima International’s leadership in advance of posting it in the interest of transparency, which we were grateful for. We let ACE know that we didn’t agree with their statement and the following day we informed ACE that if their team strongly supported the statement they should go ahead and post it, as on principle Anima International didn’t want to interfere with other groups’ actions and their public statements.
6.
I agree with Eric Herboso that there doesn’t need to be a dichotomy between welcoming, inclusive communities and the ability to openly discuss ideas and evidence. I also agree that communities have an obligation to level the playing field for disadvantaged groups and in their work control for their biases.
I also agree with the statement in EricHerboso’s “Withdrawal from 2020 CARE Conference” post section that what happened is much more nuanced than Hypatia makes. I feel that EricHerboso misses a lot of details that he most likely doesn’t possess, this in consequence may give the wrong impression of either Anima International or of our staff member who was to give the talk, or in general obscure the facts.
EricHerboso writes that ”ACE, as an organization, did not intend in any way to cancel this speaker” which is in some sense right. But while there was no official request from Animal Charity Evaluators towards the organisers of the conference, the first email Anima International received about issues with CARE was information that ACE had chosen to freeze Anima International’s funds from the Recommended Charity Fund with the stated reasons being what they believed to be racist behaviour of our staff members and the lack of appropriate response to this from Anima International's leadership. ACE based these opinions on the example that our team continued to allow Connor Jackson to represent Anima International on the topic of BLM at the CARE conference the following month. As one can imagine the unannounced information of freezing funds and, what is more, potential damage to organizational reputation is an enormous concern. Furthermore, morally, the accusation of racist behavior is an incredibly serious one that should warrant further investigation.
We hadn’t been informed that ACE had any concerns with CARE before these actions. If we had been contacted, ACE would have learned that the person who posted these comments - Connor Jackson, had already decided to change his talk at CARE to avoid unnecessary controversy or hurt towards others, even though the original talk wasn’t connected to any DEI issues, but campaigning.
The communication that followed when we pointed out to ACE that Connor had already agreed to change the subject of his talk and that an accusation of racism should be thoroughly investigated was quite demanding and complicated and it’s probably not the place to discuss it without Animal Charity Evaluators’ participation as it may be too one-sided.
I decided to mention these facts as I believe that EricHerboso's account of events could simplify the events to the detriment of factuality, as they may give the impression that ACE was passive, which wasn’t what we encountered.
Final remarks
It is worth stating explicitly that while we have some deep disagreements with ACE regarding this and other topics, we strongly support their mission and enjoy working with their team to improve the animal advocacy movement’s effectiveness.
I want to repeat that I feel a bit conflicted about commenting here. Transparency in public discourse is on the one hand important, but seeing that ACE downgraded Anima International it can be treated as “scoring points” at the expense of Animal Charity Evaluators’ reputation or some kind of revenge. Please let me know if some of my clarifications seem disingenuous and I will try to improve clarity. I can also not promise I will reply here quickly, because I would prefer to, if they are willing or have time, get comments from ACE on drafts of my comments to avoid unnecessary damage for both organizations.
Thanks very much for this comment, and for correcting my mistaken assumption.
Thanks for correcting my mistaken impression Jakub! I've updated my comment to link to yours.
Thanks, Jakub. Good to get the perspective of someone more closely involved in this.
Are you able to give an indication of how long Anima's funding was frozen? Are we talking hours? Days? Weeks?
Hey Will.
In the first email that I mentioned, we were informed that the funds will be frozen until the current round of evaluations is done by December, so for about 4 months. The reasoning was that ACE wanted to reevaluate Anima International effectiveness with the possibility that they will not release these funds. We were also informed this information will be announced on the ACE website and in their newsletter. The decision was based on the events they observed in regards to CARE that ACE was worried about - Animal Charity Evaluators wanted to investigate these concerns further. Around December, after evaluations were done, we were contacted to let us know that the funds were unfrozen.
Please note that the amount was not substantial and we, in Anima International, don’t necessarily claim here that this behavior displayed by ACE was either proper or improper. I can see reasons to do it for ACE and it was explained to us that this is consistent with the actions Animal Charity Evaluators has taken in the past. The reasons I mentioned it in my original comment is that this was the first communication from ACE that we received concerning the CARE conference, which contradicts what some commenters in this thread implied, and to provide our perspective of how concerning it was.
Thank you, I thought this was a very thoughtful and helpful comment.
I added some thoughts to my previous comments here and here based on this.
(I also agree with the sentiment that, as you alluded to, in such situations it can be quite delicate to decide which information to make vs. not make public. FWIW my sense is that, given that substantial public discussion had already started, you navigated this well in this comment, but I'm also aware that this is something that is incredibly hard to assess "from the outside", and so I don't feel like I could reasonably be very confident about my assessment.)
As Jakub has mentioned above, we have reviewed the points in his comment and fully support Anima International’s wish to share their perspective in this thread. However, Anima’s description of the events above does not align with our understanding of the events that took place, primarily within points 1,5, and 6. We have declined to include our perspective here. The most time-consuming part of our commitment to Representation, Equity, and Inclusion has been responding to hostile communications in the EA community about the topic, such as this one. We prefer to use our time and generously donated funds towards our core programs. Therefore, we will not be engaging any further in this thread.
Would you really call Jakub's response "hostile"?
Why was this response downvoted so heavily? (This is not a rhetorical question—I'm genuinely curious what the specific reasons were.)
This is relevant, useful information.
Perhaps the objection is to ACE's description of the OP as “hostile”? I certainly didn't think the OP was hostile, so if that's the concern, I would agree, but...
I think this is an extremely reasonable position, and I don't think any person or group should be downvoted or otherwise shamed for not wanting to engage in any sort of online discussion. Online discussions are very often terrible and I think it's a problem if we have a norm that requires people or organizations to publicly engage with any online discussion that mentions them.
I didn't downvote (because as you say it's providing relevant information), but I did have a negative reaction to the comment. I think the generator of that negative reaction is roughly: the vibe of the comment seems more like a political attempt to close down the conversation than an attempt to cooperatively engage. I'm reminded of "missing moods"; it seems like there's a legitimate position of "it would be great to have time to hash this out but unfortunately we find it super time consuming so we're not going to", but it would naturally come with a mood of sadness that there wasn't time to get into things, whereas the mood here feels more like "why do we have to put up with you morons posting inaccurate critiques?". And perhaps that's a reasonable position, but it at least leaves a kind of bad taste.
That's a great point; I agree with that.
I downvoted because it called the communication hostile without any justification for that claim. The comment it is replying to doesn't seem at all hostile to me, and asserting it is, feels like it's violating some pretty important norms about not escalating conflict and engaging with people charitably.
I also think I disagree that orgs should never be punished for not wanting to engage in any sort of online discussion. We have shared resources to coordinate, and as a social network without clear boundaries, it is unclear how to make progress on many of the disputes over those resources without any kind of public discussion. I do think we should be really careful to not end up in a state where you have to constantly monitor all online activity related to your org, but if the accusations are substantial enough, and the stakes high enough, I think it's pretty important for people to make themselves available for communication.
Importantly, the above also doesn't highlight any non-public communication channels that people who are worried about the negative effects of ACE can use instead. The above is not saying "we are worried about this conversation being difficult to have in public, please reach out to us via these other channels if you think we are causing harm". Instead it just declares a broad swath of communication "hostile" and doesn't provide any path forward for concerns to be addressed. That strikes me as quite misguided given the really substantial stakes of shared reputational, financial, and talent-related resources that ACE is sharing with the rest of the EA community.
I mean, it's fine if ACE doesn't want to coordinate with the rest of the EA community, but I do think that currently, unless something very substantial changes, ACE and the rest of EA are drawing from shared resource pools and need to coordinate somehow if we want to avoid tragedies of the commons.
(I mostly agree with your comment, but note that from the wording of ACE's comment it isn't clear to me if (a) they think that Jakub's comment is hostile or (b) that Hypatia's OP is hostile, or (c) that the whole discussion is hostile or whatever. To be clear, I think that kind of ambiguity is also a strike against that comment.)
Oh, yeah, that's fair. I had interpreted it as referring to Jakub's comment. I think there is a slightly stronger case to call Hypatia's post hostile than Jakub's comment, but in either case the statement feels pretty out of place.
Yeah—I mostly agree with this.
Are you sure that they're not available for communication? I know approximately nothing about ACE, but I'd surprised if they wouldn't be willing to talk to you after e.g. sending them an email.
I'm a bit skeptical of this sort of “well, if they'd also said X then it would be okay” argument. I think we should generally try to be charitable in interpreting unspecified context rather than assume the worst. I also think there's a strong tendency for goalpost-moving with this sort of objection—are you sure that, if they had said more things along those lines, you wouldn't still have objected?
To be clear, I don't have a problem with this post existing—I think it's perfectly reasonable for Hypatia to present their concerns regarding ACE in a public forum so that the EA community can discuss and coordinate around what to do regarding those concerns. What I have a problem with is the notion that we should punish ACE for not responding to those accusations—I don't think they should have an obligation to respond, and I don't think we should assume the worst about them from their refusal to do so (nor should we always assume the best, I think the correct response is to be charitable but uncertain).
I do think I would have still found it pretty sad for them to not respond, because I do really care about our public discourse and this issue feels important to me, but I do think I would feel substantially less bad about it, and probably would only have mild-downvoted the comment instead of strong-downvoted it.
I mean, I do think they have a bit of an obligation to respond? Like, I don't know what you mean by obligation, like, I don't think they are necessarily morally bad people, but I do think that it sure costs me and others a bunch for them to not respond and makes overall coordinating harder.
As an example, I sometimes have to decide which organizations to invite to events that I am organizing that help people in the EA community coordinate (historically things like the EA Leaders Retreat or EA Global, now it's more informal retreats and one-off things). The things discussed here feel like decent arguments to reduce those invites some amount, since I do think it's evidence that ACE's culture isn't a good fit for events like that. I would have liked ACE to respond to these accusations, and additionally, I would have liked ACE to respond to them publicly so I don't have to justify my invite to other attendees who don't know what their response was, even if I had reached out in private.
In a hypothetical world where we had great private communication channels and I could just ask ACE a question in some smaller higher-trust circle of people who would go to the EA Leaders forum, or tend to attend whatever retreats and events I am running, then sure, that might be fine. But we don't have those channels, and the only way I know to establish common-knowledge in basically any group larger than 20 people within the EA community is to have it be posted publicly. And that means having private communication makes a lot of stuff like this really hard.
To be clear, I think it's perfectly reasonable for you to want ACE to respond if you expect that information to be valuable. The question is what you do when they don't respond. The response in that situation that I'm advocating for is something like “they chose not to respond, so I'll stick with my previous best guess” rather than “they chose not to respond, therefore that says bad things about them, so I'll update negatively.” I think that the latter response is not only corrosive in terms of pushing all discussion into the public sphere even when that makes it much worse, but it also hurts people's ability to feel comfortably holding onto non-public information.
This feels wrong from two perspectives:
I think that you need to be quite careful with this sort of naive-CDT-style reasoning. Pre-commitments/norms against updating on certain types of evidence can be quite valuable—it is just not the case that you should always update on all evidence available to you.[1]
To be clear, I don't think you need UDT or anything to handle this sort of situation, you just need CDT + the ability to make pre-commitments. ↩︎
I agree the calculation isn't super straightforward, and there is a problem of disincentivizing glomarization here, but I do think overall, all things considered, after having thought about situations pretty similar to this for a few dozen hours, I am pretty confident it's still decent bayesian evidence, and I endorse treating it as bayesian evidence (though I do think the pre-commitment consideration dampen the degree to which I am going to act on that information a bit, though not anywhere close to fully).
I disagree, obviously, though I suspect that little will be gained by hashing it out in more here. To be clear, I have certainly thought about this sort of issue in great detail as well.
I would be curious to read more about your approach, perhaps in another venue. Some questions I have:
I guess in general I'm pretty confused about what your proposed policy or norm is, and would appreciate some kind of thought-out exposition.
To be clear, I think that ACE calling the OP “hostile” is a pretty reasonable thing to judge them for. My objection is only to judging them for the part where they don't want to respond any further. So as for the example, I definitely would have thought worse of MIRI if they had labeled Holden's criticisms as “hostile”—but not just for not responding. Perhaps a better example here would be MIRI still not having responded to Paul's arguments for slow takeoff—imo, I think Paul's arguments should update you, but MIRI not having responded shouldn't.
I think you should update on all the object-level information that you have, but not update on the meta-level information coming from an inference like “because they chose not to say something here, that implies they don't have anything good to say.”
Yes.
Still pretty unclear about your policy. Why is ACE calling the OP "hostile" not considered "meta-level" and hence not updateable (according to your policy)? What if the org in question gave a more reasonable explanation of why they're not responding, but doesn't address the object-level criticism? Would you count that in their favor, compared to total silence, or compared to an unreasonable explanation? Are you making any subjective judgments here as to what to update on and what not to, or is there a mechanical policy you can write down (that anyone can follow and achieve the same results)?
Also, overall, is you policy intended to satisfy Conservation of Expected Evidence, or not?
ETA: It looks like MIRI did give at least a short object-level reply to Paul's takeoff speed argument along with a meta-level explanation of why they haven't given a longer object-level reply. Would you agree to a norm that said that organizations have at least an obligation to give a reasonable meta-level explanation of why they're not responding to criticism on the object level, and silence or an unreasonable explanation on that level could be held against them?
I think you're imagining that I'm doing something much more exotic here than I am. I'm basically just advocating for cooperating on what I see as a prisoner's-dilemma-style game (I'm sure you can also cast it as a stag hunt or make some really complex game-theoretic model to capture all the nuances—I'm not trying to do that there; my point here is just to explain the sort of thing that I'm doing).
Consider:
A and B can each choose:
And they each have utility functions such that
Then, I'm saying that in this sort of situation you should play (private) rather than (public)—and that therefore we shouldn't punish people for playing (private), since punishing people for playing (private) has the effect of forcing us to Nash and ensuring that people always play (public), destroying overall welfare.
(It seems that you're switching the topic from what your policy is exactly, which I'm still unclear on, to the model/motivation underlying your policy, which perhaps makes sense, as if I understood your model/motivation better perhaps I could regenerate the policy myself.)
I think I may just outright disagree with your model here, since it seems that you're not taking into account the significant positive externalities that a public argument can generate for the audience (in the form of more accurate beliefs, about the organizations involved and EA topics in general, similar to the motivation behind the DEBATE proposal for AI alignment).
Another crux may be your statement "Online discussions are very often terrible" in your original comment, which has not been my experience if we're talking about online discussions made in good faith in the rationalist/EA communities (and it seems like most people agree that the OP was written in good faith). I would be interested to hear what experiences led to your differing opinion.
But even when online discussions are "terrible", that can still generate valuable information for the audience, about the competence (e.g., reasoning abilities, PR skills) or lack thereof of the parties to the discussion, perhaps causing a downgrade of opinions about both parties.
Finally, even if your model is a good one in general, it's not clear that it's applicable to this specific situation. It doesn't seem like ACE is trying to "play private" as they have given no indication that they would be or would have been willing to discuss this issue in private with any critic. Instead it seems like they view time spent on engaging such critics as having very low value because they're extremely confident that their own conclusions are the right ones (or at least that's the public reason they're giving).
To be clear, I agree with a lot of the points that you're making—the point of sketching out that model was just to show the sort of thing I'm doing; I wasn't actually trying to argue for a specific conclusion. The actual correct strategy for figuring out the right policy here, in my opinion, is to carefully weigh all the different considerations like the ones you're mentioning, which—at the risk of crossing object and meta levels—I suspect to be difficult to do in a low-bandwidth online setting like this.
Maybe it'll still be helpful to just give my take using this conversation as an example. In this situation, I expect that:
If there are lots of considerations that have to be weighed against each other, then it seems easily the case that we should decide things on a case by case basis, as sometimes the considerations might weigh in favor of downvoting someone for refusing to engage with criticism, and other times they weigh in the other direction. But this seems inconsistent with your original blanket statement, "I don’t think any person or group should be downvoted or otherwise shamed for not wanting to engage in any sort of online discussion"
About online versus offline, I'm confused why you think you'd be able to convey your model offline but not online, as the bandwidth difference between the two don't seem large enough that you could do one but not the other. Maybe it's not just the bandwidth but other differences between the two mediums, but I'm skeptical that offline/audio conversations are overall less biased than online/text conversations. If they each have their own biases, then it's not clear what it would mean if you could convince someone of some idea over one medium but not the other.
If the stakes were higher or I had a bunch of free time, I might try an offline/audio conversation with you anyway to see what happens, but it doesn't seem like a great use of our time at this point. (From your perspective, you might spend hours but at most convince one person, which would hardly make a dent if the goal is to change the Forum's norms. I feel like your best bet is still to write a post to make your case to a wider audience, perhaps putting in extra effort to overcome the bias against it if there really is one.)
I'm still pretty curious what experiences led you to think that online discussions are often terrible, if you want to just answer that. Also are there other ideas that you think are good but can't be spread through a text medium because of its inherent bias?
Yeah, I am really not sure. I will consider sending them an email. My guess is they are not interested in talking to me in a way that would later on allow me to write up what they said publicly, which would reduce the value of their response quite drastically to me. If they are happy to chat and allow me to write things up, then I might be able to make the time, but it does sound like a 5+ hour time-commitment and I am not sure whether I am up for that. Though I would be happy to pay $200 to anyone else who does that.