Another way to think about this (imo) is "do you screen falsehoods immediately, such that none ever enter, or do you prune them later at leisure?"
Sometimes, assembling false things (such as rough approximations or heuristics!) can give you insight as to the general shape of a new Actually True thing, but discovering the new Actually True thing using only absolutely pure definite grounded vetted airtight parts would be way harder and wouldn't happen in expectation.
And if you're trying to (e.g.) go "okay, men are stronger than women, and adults are smarter than kids" and somebody interrupts to go "aCtUaLlY this is false" because they have a genuinely correct point about, e.g., the variance present in bell curves, and there being some specific women who are stronger than many men and some specific children who are smarter than many adults ... this whole thing just derails the central train of thought that was trying to go somewhere.
(And if the "aCtUaLlY" happens so reliably that you can viscerally feel it coming, as you start to type out your rough premises, you get demoralized before you even begin, close your draft, and go do something else instead.)
sapphire leaves out that the bits they quote in their document look like this now, and have since just a few days after posting:
[Edit]
What used to stand in this place was an imagined apology, generated by [my model of Brent] plus [my sense of what could be the *least* bad state of affairs that's consistent with reality].
I took that least-bad-of-all-possible-explanations, and wrote a statement out of it, specifically so that the discussion would not anchor on the most-bad-of-all-possible-explanations, the way it sometimes does, to the detriment of our morality and our sense of truth.
As more and more info has come out, I can no longer quite stomach leaving up the exact words that I wrote; I think the least-bad-possible-state-of-affairs is worse than I thought it was three days ago. My original words are preserved elsewhere in a few places—if you wish to read them, I or others are happy to provide you with them. But I don't want them HERE anymore, in the place that people are visiting to participate in the conversation, and the place that new people will look at.
(Again, not trying to hide the words overall, or the fact that I wrote them; I believe a few others have archived or reposted, and I've preserved them myself to hand out on request.)
I continue to admire the degree to which people of startlingly different views and backgrounds were willing to come together and discuss in a way that at *no* time resembled either the extremes of witch-hunting or victim-blaming. I continue to appreciate every person who's participated below, and to be humbled by all of the perspectives you've trusted me enough to share.
(This is a public post, and has remained public the whole time specifically as a defense against adversarial cherry-pickers like sapphire. It also happened to be one of the most central places where the EA and rationality community hashed things out, resulting in Brent's ouster and everyone converging on "yeah okay this was EXTREMELY bad;" it's super plausible that without my hosting of the conversation (including with my FB norms, that sapphire sneers at) the communities would have not had a single room where everybody said their piece and came to the correct conclusion.)
Also, for the (reasonable) tone objection, I note that there was, less than 36h later and while the first conversation was extremely active and ongoing, this followup, which sapphire would like to pretend is ... immaterial?
If I had it to do all over again, I would post these questions first, and yesterday's post an hour or two later. I think yesterday's post was crucial, but looking at how reasonable everyone was when engaging with it, I may have overestimated its *urgency.* And I think I underestimated the degree to which I would tug the conversation in one direction, and that's caused at least me and possibly others to spin their wheels on questions of guilt or malice while meanwhile an expression of hurt has NOT been adequately answered.
My crime re: Brent is, basically, being skeptical enough to not IMMEDIATELY jump on the bandwagon, and instead taking an extra couple of days to wait for evidence to appear (which it did, thanks to my FB norms being such that people felt safe sharing their reactions, and which I then updated on). By "literally one of the last rationalists defending Brent," sapphire means "stopped defending him on ~Sep 22 instead of ~Sep 19." More on my processing of what went wrong there, presented in metaphor.
For calibration, I scrolled back through my own past week of FB posts, looking for anything that might be representative of my stance on things like abuse and abusers, and the two most relevant ones from just the past week are this and this; decently representative reads for people who don't know me. The first is me giving people a heads-up about extreme language from a possible mutual, and the second is me strenuously objecting to someone saying that it's right to deceive others for their own benefit.
(Also, findable in the comments under the post sapphire is cherrypicking are things like the following:
In this case, for instance—if reasonably convinced that either:
a) safewords were ignored in cases where there was no prenegotiated agreement, or
b) deliberate lies were in fact told to third parties with the intent to decrease scrutiny or increase space for abusive behavior
... I would stop interacting with Brent in person and rescind his invitation to my house. I would probably not make a broad-spectrum public statement to that effect, but I would not keep this fact a secret, either.
... which in fact happened.)
I don't expect I'll engage much beyond this; I think my posts (99.99% of which are public) stand for themselves, and my stance is basically "the best conversations are the consensual ones," and I generally don't consent to being in conversation with sapphire; only showed up here in self-defense. Parting note.
It's worth knowing that sapphire has never interacted with me in person to my knowledge, and also that I blocked sapphire on social media a while back (while they were using a different name) out of self-protectiveness. The accusation is pretty DARVO.
"This post is anonymised because I don't want to have to deal with the interpersonal consequences of the beliefs I hold; I don't want people knowing that I hold my beliefs, and would rather trick people into associating with me in ways they might not if they actually knew my true stance."
The essay itself is the argument for why EAs shouldn't steelman things like the TIME piece.
(I understand you're disagreeing with the essay and that's :thumbsup: but, like.)
If you set out to steelman things that were generated by a process antithetical to truth, what you end up with is something like [justifications for Christianity]; privileging-the-hypothesis is an unwise move.
If one has independent reasons to think that many of the major claims in the article are true, then I think the course most likely to not-mislead one is to follow thoseindependent reasons, and not spend a lot of time anchored on words coming from a source that's pretty clearly not putting truth first on the priority list.
This language is inflammatory ("overwhelming", "incestuous"), but we can boil this down to a more sterile sounding claim
A major part of the premise of the OP is something like "the inflammatory nature is a feature, not a bug; sure, you can boil it down to a more sterile sounding claim, but most of the audience will not; they will instead follow the connotation and thus people will essentially 'get away' with the stronger claim that they merely implied."
The accuser doesn’t offer concrete behaviors, but rather leaves the badness as general associations. They don’t make explicit accusations, but rather implicit ones. The true darkness is hinted at, not named. They speculate about my bad traits without taking the risk of making a claim. They frame things in a way that increases my perceived culpability.
I think it is a mistake to steelman things like the TIME piece, for precisely this reason, and it's also a mistake to think that most people are steelmanning as they consume it.
So pointing out that it could imply something reasonable is sort of beside the point—it doesn't, in practice.
I am at best 1/1000th as "famous" as the OP, but the first ten paragraphs ring ABSOLUTELY TRUE from my own personal experience, and generic credulousness on the part of people who are willing to entertain ludicrous falsehoods without any sort of skepticism has done me a lot of damage.
I mean, I don't have this hypothetical document made in my head (or I would've posted it myself).
But an easy example is something of the shape:
[EDIT: The below was off-the-cuff and, on reflection, I endorse the specific suggestion much less. The structural thing it was trying to gesture at, though, of something clear and concrete and observable, is still the thing I would be looking for, that is a prerequisite for enduring endorsement.]
"We commit to spending at least 2% of our operational budgets on outreach to [racial group/gender group/otherwise unrepresented group] for the next 5 years."
Maybe the number is 1%, or 10%, or something else; maybe it's 1 year or 10 years or instead of years it's "until X members of our group/board/whatever are from [nondominant demographic]."
The thing that I like about the above example in contrast with the OP is that it's clear, concrete, specific, and evaluable, and not just an applause light.
I would like for all involved to consider this, basically, a bet, on "making and publishing this pledge" being an effective intervention on ... something.
I'm not sure whether the something is "actual racism and sexism and other bigotry within EA," or "the median EA's discomfort at their uncertainty about whether racism and sexism are a part of EA," or what.
But (in the spirit of the E in EA) I'd like that bet to be more clear, so since you were willing to leave a comment above: would you be willing to state with a little more detail which problem this was intended to solve, and how confident you (the group involved) are that it will be a good intervention?
Another way to think about this (imo) is "do you screen falsehoods immediately, such that none ever enter, or do you prune them later at leisure?"
Sometimes, assembling false things (such as rough approximations or heuristics!) can give you insight as to the general shape of a new Actually True thing, but discovering the new Actually True thing using only absolutely pure definite grounded vetted airtight parts would be way harder and wouldn't happen in expectation.
And if you're trying to (e.g.) go "okay, men are stronger than women, and adults are smarter than kids" and somebody interrupts to go "aCtUaLlY this is false" because they have a genuinely correct point about, e.g., the variance present in bell curves, and there being some specific women who are stronger than many men and some specific children who are smarter than many adults ... this whole thing just derails the central train of thought that was trying to go somewhere.
(And if the "aCtUaLlY" happens so reliably that you can viscerally feel it coming, as you start to type out your rough premises, you get demoralized before you even begin, close your draft, and go do something else instead.)
sapphire leaves out that the bits they quote in their document look like this now, and have since just a few days after posting:
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/pfbid022BUomRWLnDk3ev9SvurcY31rpxLViWFw96TrLB2cpgxBrYiuDdQUcxzxtoHRSNdhl
(This is a public post, and has remained public the whole time specifically as a defense against adversarial cherry-pickers like sapphire. It also happened to be one of the most central places where the EA and rationality community hashed things out, resulting in Brent's ouster and everyone converging on "yeah okay this was EXTREMELY bad;" it's super plausible that without my hosting of the conversation (including with my FB norms, that sapphire sneers at) the communities would have not had a single room where everybody said their piece and came to the correct conclusion.)
Also, for the (reasonable) tone objection, I note that there was, less than 36h later and while the first conversation was extremely active and ongoing, this followup, which sapphire would like to pretend is ... immaterial?
My crime re: Brent is, basically, being skeptical enough to not IMMEDIATELY jump on the bandwagon, and instead taking an extra couple of days to wait for evidence to appear (which it did, thanks to my FB norms being such that people felt safe sharing their reactions, and which I then updated on). By "literally one of the last rationalists defending Brent," sapphire means "stopped defending him on ~Sep 22 instead of ~Sep 19." More on my processing of what went wrong there, presented in metaphor.
For calibration, I scrolled back through my own past week of FB posts, looking for anything that might be representative of my stance on things like abuse and abusers, and the two most relevant ones from just the past week are this and this; decently representative reads for people who don't know me. The first is me giving people a heads-up about extreme language from a possible mutual, and the second is me strenuously objecting to someone saying that it's right to deceive others for their own benefit.
(Also, findable in the comments under the post sapphire is cherrypicking are things like the following:
... which in fact happened.)
I don't expect I'll engage much beyond this; I think my posts (99.99% of which are public) stand for themselves, and my stance is basically "the best conversations are the consensual ones," and I generally don't consent to being in conversation with sapphire; only showed up here in self-defense. Parting note.
It's worth knowing that sapphire has never interacted with me in person to my knowledge, and also that I blocked sapphire on social media a while back (while they were using a different name) out of self-protectiveness. The accusation is pretty DARVO.
"This post is anonymised because I don't want to have to deal with the interpersonal consequences of the beliefs I hold; I don't want people knowing that I hold my beliefs, and would rather trick people into associating with me in ways they might not if they actually knew my true stance."
Selfish piggyback plug for the concept of sazen.
The essay itself is the argument for why EAs shouldn't steelman things like the TIME piece.
(I understand you're disagreeing with the essay and that's :thumbsup: but, like.)
If you set out to steelman things that were generated by a process antithetical to truth, what you end up with is something like [justifications for Christianity]; privileging-the-hypothesis is an unwise move.
If one has independent reasons to think that many of the major claims in the article are true, then I think the course most likely to not-mislead one is to follow those independent reasons, and not spend a lot of time anchored on words coming from a source that's pretty clearly not putting truth first on the priority list.
A major part of the premise of the OP is something like "the inflammatory nature is a feature, not a bug; sure, you can boil it down to a more sterile sounding claim, but most of the audience will not; they will instead follow the connotation and thus people will essentially 'get away' with the stronger claim that they merely implied."
I think it is a mistake to steelman things like the TIME piece, for precisely this reason, and it's also a mistake to think that most people are steelmanning as they consume it.
So pointing out that it could imply something reasonable is sort of beside the point—it doesn't, in practice.
I am at best 1/1000th as "famous" as the OP, but the first ten paragraphs ring ABSOLUTELY TRUE from my own personal experience, and generic credulousness on the part of people who are willing to entertain ludicrous falsehoods without any sort of skepticism has done me a lot of damage.
I mean, I don't have this hypothetical document made in my head (or I would've posted it myself).
But an easy example is something of the shape:
[EDIT: The below was off-the-cuff and, on reflection, I endorse the specific suggestion much less. The structural thing it was trying to gesture at, though, of something clear and concrete and observable, is still the thing I would be looking for, that is a prerequisite for enduring endorsement.]
"We commit to spending at least 2% of our operational budgets on outreach to [racial group/gender group/otherwise unrepresented group] for the next 5 years."
Maybe the number is 1%, or 10%, or something else; maybe it's 1 year or 10 years or instead of years it's "until X members of our group/board/whatever are from [nondominant demographic]."
The thing that I like about the above example in contrast with the OP is that it's clear, concrete, specific, and evaluable, and not just an applause light.
I would like for all involved to consider this, basically, a bet, on "making and publishing this pledge" being an effective intervention on ... something.
I'm not sure whether the something is "actual racism and sexism and other bigotry within EA," or "the median EA's discomfort at their uncertainty about whether racism and sexism are a part of EA," or what.
But (in the spirit of the E in EA) I'd like that bet to be more clear, so since you were willing to leave a comment above: would you be willing to state with a little more detail which problem this was intended to solve, and how confident you (the group involved) are that it will be a good intervention?