I am worried.
The last month or so has been very emotional for a lot of people in the community, culminating in the Slate Star Codex controversy of the past two weeks. On one side, we've had multiple posts talking about the risks of an incipient new Cultural Revolution; on the other, we've had someone accuse a widely-admired writer associated with the movement of abetting some pretty abhorrent worldviews. At least one prominent member of an EA org I know, someone I deeply respect, deleted their Forum account this week. I expect there are more I don't know about.
Both groups feel like they and their sacred values are under attack. Both groups are increasingly commenting anonymously or from throwaway accounts, and seeing their comments mass-downvoted and attacked. It's hard not to believe we're at risk of moving in a much more unpleasant direction.
I'm not going to pretend I don't have my own sympathies here. I've definitely been feeling a lot more tribal than usual lately, and it's impaired my judgement at a couple of points. But I think it's important to remember that we are all EAs here. We're here because we endorse, in one form or another, radical goodwill towards the rest of the world. I have never been among a group of people at once more dedicated to the wellbeing of others and the pursuit of the true. I admire you all so much.
Many people here feel their membership in EA is a natural outgrowth of their other beliefs. Those other beliefs can differ quite a lot from person to person. But I implore all of you to see the common good in each other. There are many people in EA who hold beliefs and political opinions significantly different from mine. But with very few exceptions they have proven among the most open, honest and charitable proponents of those views I've ever encountered. We can have the conversations we need to have to get through this.
The Forum is probably not the place to have those conversations. Too many people are too worried about their words being used against them to speak too openly under their own names – an indictment of our broader culture if ever there was one. But you can reach out to each other! Schedule calls! Now is a bad time to not be able to have in-person conferences, but it's not impossible to make up the difference if we try.
(And on the Forum, please try to be charitable, even if your conversation partner is falling short of the standards you would set yourself. Strive to raise the tone of the conversation, not just to match it. I have sometimes failed in this recently.)
I'll start. If I say something on the Forum you disagree with, and you don't think it's productive to discuss it in comments, please feel free to reach out to me by private message, or schedule a call with me here.
Our epistemic norms are precious. So are our norms of compassion, justice, and universal goodwill. We need both to achieve the lofty goals we've set ourselves, and we need each other.
Thanks for making this post Will -
I'll admit that since the SSC stuff happened, I've been feeling a lot further from EA (not necessarily the core EA ideas, but associating with the community or labeling myself as an EA), and I felt genuinely a bit scared learning through the SSC stuff about ways in which the EA community overlaps with alt-right communities and ideas, etc. I don't know what to make of all of it, as everyone I work with in EA regularly are wonderful people who care deeply about making the world better. But I feel wary and nervous about all this, and I've also been considering leaving the forum / FB groups just to have some space to process what my relationship with EA ought to be external to my work.
I see a ton of overlap between EA in concept and social justice. A lot of the dialogue in the social justice community focuses on people reflecting on their biases, and working to shift out of a lens on the world that introduces some kinds of biases. And, broadly folks working on social justice issues are trying to make the world better. This all feels very aligned with EA approaches, even if the social justice community is working on different issues, and are focused on different kinds of biases.
I've heard (though don't know much about it), that to some extent EA outreach organizations stopped focusing on growth and has focused more on quality in some sense a few years ago. I wonder if doing that has locked in whatever norms were present in the community prior to that, and that's ended up unintentionally resulting in a fair amount of animosity toward ideas or approaches to argument that are outside the community's standards of acceptability? I generally think that one of the best ways to improve this issue is to invest heavily in broadening the community, and part of that might require work to make the community more welcoming (and not actively threatening) to people who might not feel welcome here right now.