Which EA organizations do you know have made requests to delete references from archives?

Sorry I missed this comment, just got a recent notification on this post and realized. 

I don't even know what pro-natalism specifically claims or involves other than "more babies is good, pushing society in that direction is good", and I assume there's a huge range of thinking within that, some more libertarian, some more statist, some more racist, some more futurist, etc), and so I don't want to base a discussion on that as a shared assumption, and don't want to port in that assumption without addressing it.

I am specifically talking about the Collins' brand of pronatalism here as reported, as well as the possibility of a faction that are opportunistically seeking to co-opt the goals of the EA movement, rather than pronatalism that is as broad as you describe "more babies is good, pushing society in that direction is good".

In the link (as well as in the comments above), there is discussion of some of these views. Are you happy to defend these views as things that EAs should spend more time discussing and funding on the margin? 

"fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization."

"worry that the overlap between the types of people deciding not to have children with the part of the population that values things like gay rights, education for women, and climate activism — traits they believe are genetically coded — is so great that these values could ultimately disappear."

"What is really happening is that individuals from those families with sociological profiles amenable to movements like effective altruism, progressivism, or broad Western Civilisational values are being selected out of the gene pool."

"Current birth rate trends suggest traits on which the EA community relies, such as prosociality, are being differentially selected out of populations."

Do you think focusing on birth rates in "Western Civilization" is a good way of creating "intergenerationally, durable cultures that will lead to our species being a diverse, thriving, innovative interplanetary empire one day that isn't at risk from, you know, a single asteroid strike or a single huge disease?"

To be clear I'm not likely to engage on the object level even if you are happy to defend these points, I'm just not sure it's useful or relevant for me to spell out all the versions and parts of pronatalism I do support in order to make a post like this. I'm not even making a claim that any of pronatalism beyond what is reported is bad!

I'm just indicating that if there's a faction of people focused on genetic improvement and low birth rates in "Western Civilization" in the EA community, I can see how longtermism rhetoric can be easily co-opted for this, and how this might implicate EA as a result. I stand by that, and I also believe that it should be seen as a clear potential risk for the EA community's ability to fulfill its potential for impact! And if you're just a "more babies is good" pronatalist and don't think these views represent your movement, then this concern applies to you too (or perhaps even more so).

If you do think individual EAs, funders, or EA orgs should be spending more about ways to ensure Western Civilizational values remain competitive in the gene pool on the margin, that's entirely your prerogative! In that case consider this post as well as comments like these to be an indication of the kinds of tradeoffs your movement should take into account when asking people to engage with arguments like this. (I'm reminded of similar conversations and disagreements around Bostrom's letter and "truth-seeking" here).

I've never figured out how to have a good conversation around "this is so obvious we shouldn't have a conversation about it" even though I think that's sometimes a reasonable point to make.

Some things worth considering:

What kind of harms that these kinds of discussions could have? For example, should we dedicate more EA forum discussions to Bostrom's use of a racial slur and whether that's appropriate or not in the pursuit of truth-seeking? How action-guiding are these discussions? Should we spend more time on racial differences in IQ and the implications of this on EA community building? Are discussions of these topics actually a good indicator for people who deeply value truth-seeking, or just people who are edgy and want to outwardly signal this in a community where doing this is rewarded? Is this a strong signal, or is it noisy? Not everyone values outward signals of "truth-seeking" above all, especially if those signals can also be a cover-up for harmful ideas. Being open-minded doesn't mean you give the same space to every idea. Which groups of people are harmed, which groups of people might (wrongly) never join EA because of an unnecessary focus on these discussions? 

I think if you think talking about broad likely to be action guiding in ways that will benefit more than it will harm in expectation then it's worth talking about. Unfortunately, on priors, cause areas that sound like the ensuring the survival of Western Civilization combined with strong genetic determinism do not have a strong track record here, and I'm happy to dismiss by default unless there's good reason to believe this is misguided (whereas talking about feeling anxious about a sharp increase in EA funding does not have the same issue). 

I'll just point out that you say here Manifest is a non-EA conference, but here you say that "Manifest is not a rationalist event significantly more than it is an EA one". I know the two claims are not fully contradictory, but it does seem like you are insinuating EAs should not be complaining about a non-EA event while telling Dustin that he shouldn't blame the Hanania invite on rationality more than EA.

I hear about and see non-trivial levels of grift.

Can you share more?

I stand behind that framing, in that I think Alice and Chloe are substantially more reliable sources of evidence than Kat and Emerson. 

Given Chloe is not involved in this claim, do you also stand behind the framing that Alice is more reliable than Kat/Emerson?

If you think writing an 100 word summary of all of this content is as easy as downvoting, you're probably significantly overrating the value of your original comment.

I disagree, I think it's entirely possible to upvote things you disagree with, or to upvote the post, read it and update negatively, which is presumably not what you meant here by "people changed their minds".

I think this is a very poor way to make this estimate for most reasonable interpretations of "people changed their minds ". One charitable interpretation is that you genuinely believe post upvotes to represent people who agree or have updated positively, but this would be surprising to me.

One uncharitable interpretation is that this is a way of implying a consensus where it doesn't exist, and conflating "good epistemics" with "people who agree with me". ("75% of people agree with us! I'm so grateful that EA epistemics are trustworthy"). Doing this may create some social pressure to conform both to the majority and to people who apparently have "good epistemics", especially given this claim came alongside the link to the EA Forum post on your FB post, and your call for action at the bottom including voting behavior. This is subtle and not necessarily what you intended, but I thought worth pointing out because the effects may exist regardless of your intentions.

On the uncharitable case:
I think there are other examples in the post that seem reasonable at first glance but can be interpreted or misinterpreted as similar cases of creating some kind of social pressure to take the Nonlinear position. Some of these are are raised in Yarrow's comment.

Others include:

• "However, if Ben pulled a Geoffrey Hinton and was able to update based on new information despite massive psychological pressure against that, that would be an act of impressive epistemic virtue. As a community, we want to make it so that people are rewarded for doing the right but hard thing, and this is one of those times."
• "EA’s high trust culture, part of what makes it great, is crumbling, and “sharing only negative information about X person/charity” posts will destroy it.
• "EA since FTX has trauma. We’re infected by a cancer of distrust, suspicion, and paranoia. Frequent witch burnings. Seeing ill-intent everywhere. Forbidden questions (in EA!)  Forbidden thoughts (in EA!)
  We’re attacking each other instead of attacking the world’s problems."
• Most of the rest of the section titled "So how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?")
• "This doesn’t mean EA is rife with abuse, it just means that EA is rife with humans. Humans with strong moral emotions and poor social skills on average. We should expect a lot of conflict. We need to find a better way to deal with this. Our community has been turning on itself with increasing ferocity, and we need to find a better way to recover from FTX. Let’s do what EA does best: optimize dispassionately, embody scout mindset, and interpret people charitably."

On the charitable case:
I think it's fairly obvious that using post upvotes is a poor way of indicating support for the Nonlinear position, because there are a lot of reasons for upvotes (or downvotes) that are unrelated to whether voters agree or disagree with the post itself. 

Skimming some comments quickly (moved to footnote for ease of reading).^[1]

There are obviously problems with aggregating votes which make these hard to interpret, but even if you take a looser definition, like "75% of readers now have a better net impression of Nonlinear than after Ben Pace's post", this still feels very unclear to me without cherry picking comments. I'm not expecting NL to have attempted to modelling consensus with agreevotes, but I think it's clear even on skimming that opinions here are mixed (this doesn't discount the possibility of multiple NL staff agree/disagreevoting many of these posts or comments), and ceteris paribus make it more surprising that the 75% claim was made.

1. ^{^}

   Yarrow's comment

   "Even if most of what Kat says is factually true, this post still gives me really bad vibes and makes me think poorly of Nonlinear."

   has 68 agreevotes and 24 disagreevotes. 

    

   Lukas' comment:

   "I updated significantly in the direction of "Nonlinear leadership has a better case for themselves than I initially thought",

   "it seems likely to me that the initial post indeed was somewhat careless with fact-checking.",

   "I'm still confused about some of the fact-checking claims", "I still find Chloe's broad perspective credible and concerning (in a "this is difficult work environment with definite potential for toxicity" rather than "this is outright abusive on all reasonable definitions of the word"). The replies by Nonlinear leadership didn't change my initial opinion here by too much"

   has 34 agree-votes and 4 disagreevotes.

    

   Ollie's comment:

   I don't have time to engage with all the evidence here, but even if I came away convinced that all of the original claims provided by Ben weren't backed up, I still feel really uneasy about Nonlinear; uneasy about your work culture, uneasy about how you communicate and argue, and alarmed at how forcefully you attack people who criticise you. 

   has 78 agreevotes and 31 disagreevotes

    

   Muireall's comment/spot check:

   From my perspective, this is between "not responsive to the complaint" and "evidence for the spirit of the complaint". It seems an overreach to call "They told me not to spend time with my boyfriend..." a "sad, unbelievable lie" "discrediting [Chloe] as a reliable source of truth" when it is not something anyone has cited Chloe as saying. It seems incorrect to describe "advised not to spend time with 'low value people'" as in "direct contradiction" with any of this, which instead seems to affirm that traveling with Nonlinear was conditioned on "high potential" or being among the "highest quality people". Finally, having initially considered inviting Chloe's boyfriend to travel with them would still be entirely consistent with later deciding not to; encouraging a visit in May would still be consistent with an overall expectation that Chloe not spend too much time with her boyfriend in general for reasons related to his perceived "quality".

   has 20 agreevotes and 3 disagreevotes
    

   Geoffrey's comment:

   Whatever people think about this particular reply by Nonlinear, I hope it's clear to most EAs that Ben Pace could have done a much better job fact-checking his allegations against Nonlinear, and in getting their side of the story.

   has 53 agreevotes and 11 disagreevotes

    

   Vipulnaik's comment: 

   "For the most part, an initial reading of this post and the linked documents did have the intended effect on me of making me view many of the original claims as likely false or significantly exaggerated. But my own take is that the post would have been stronger had these changes been made prior to publishing. Curious to hear if others agree or disagree."

   has 24 agreevotes and 2 disagreevotes

    

   Peter's comment:

   "Personally, I have updated back to being relatively unconcerned about bad behaviour at Nonlinear"

   has 9 agreevotes and 15 disagreevotes

    

   Kerry's comment:

   "to the main charges raised by Ben, this seems about as close to exonerating as one can reasonably expect to get in such cases"

   has 30 agreevotes and 26 disagreevotes

    

   Marcus' comment:

   "Overall, I think Nonlinear looks pretty good here. I definitely think they made some mistakes, especially adding members to their work+travel arrangements, but on the whole, I think they acted pretty reasonably and were unjustly vilified."

   has 14 agreevotes and 13 disagreevotes

   
   John's comment:

   I think the preliminary takeaway is that non-linear are largely innocent, but really bad at appearing that way. They derailed their own exoneration via a series of bizarre editorials, which do nothing but distract, borne out of (seemingly) righteous indignation

   has 12 agreevotes and 13 disagreevotes

    

In the same comment at the bottom:

"Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio."

Apart from the 3 month period, this also had multiple reviewers. It would quite surprising if none or only a few of these pushbacks by Yarrow or others in the comment section were raised. So (along with Kat's comment that there was a lot of internal debate) I think it is better to model these decisions as intentional and considered, rather than due to "loss of equanimity".