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TracingWoodgrains


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 04 19:22:43 UTC

				

User ID: 103

TracingWoodgrains


				
				
				

				
16 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:22:43 UTC

					

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User ID: 103

This is a dead thread months later, but here. Incident reports and shoplifting records from retail firms paint a clear picture.

I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence.

This is healthy for me to hear. He and I had a falling out some time back, and I admit it's colored my impression of things; I'm glad to have such a clear reminder of what he could bring to the table at his best to balance against my own sentiment.

Now featuring a semi-interactive version of the quiz itself.

Thanks for posting this here, by the way! I've, uh, had my hands full with a few things.

Thanks! I’ll see what I wind up doing—I don’t think taking time off school is necessary, but I was definitely more than a little distracted in class today. I figure I’ll see who reaches out to me about what, if anything.

I appreciate the apology. I have always been upfront about precisely who I am.

In the Google Drive folder, I shout at people to install RECAP. I went with the first guy who had PACER access, a stranger to me, trying to get into the story as quickly as possible.

I don’t think it works to treat that passage as not specifically about sex when he emphasizes it is why he will not bother to address sexual ethics. What does Singer think about sexual ethics? That. That is the core of it.

I don’t precisely disagree that utilitarians, in their daily lives, are conscious of duty to the near. I disagree that they have a philosophical justification for it that amounts to more than just stapling the same instinct all people feel onto their framework. More, I disagree that their advocacy for increased duty-to-the-far can or claims to come without tradeoffs. Attention is limited, and utilitarian arguments—Singer’s in particular—constantly focus on the need to assign less of it to the near and more of it to the distant.

So—yes, in their daily lives, they have friends and family members, and yes, when pressed, they come up with utilitarian-sounding justifications for it. But that, I argue, is a second- or third-order kludge to reconcile human instinct with a moral system that does not inherently account for it or treat it as relevant.

I expect people to have insightful comments on every domain of behavior they claim authority over. Singer claims authority over all of ethics and should be held to that standard.

I think the two are inherently connected in important ways—that a world where people share more of Singer’s ideals is one where they share more of his behavior as well. For an ethicist, their life is and must be their message. We all know about the sexual misadventures of Mohammed and Joseph Smith. Secular ethicists, too, must be judged by more than simply their abstract ideas.

Sure. Of the things I listed, I think lying to your affair partner is rather less significant than most other parts of the story—I just wanted to establish that it was one of the points demonstrated by the email.

“I don't see how that is shown by the email in question.”

“If you were thinking you were the only one, and if that was crucial to what you felt about our relationship, I’m sorry, that isn’t true.”

That is: he lied by omission by not mentioning multiple simultaneous affairs. I don’t find your “emotional cheating” reading plausible; in context, it seems strained to read it in any way other than “actively pursuing the same sort of relationship he has with her, as the opportunity arises based on distance.”

I feel like you’re eliding the point in arguing against my case that his behavior follows from his ethics by referring to the drowning child argument rather than the argument I linked, in which he states explicitly that sexual ethics is unimportant and sex raises no unique moral issues at all.

I’m not the one who tied them together—he is! “Why are you focusing on petty things like sex when there are kids starving in Africa?” is only the slightest rephrasing of his argument. I absolutely would expect someone who takes Singer’s explicitly stated attitude towards sexual ethics to have looser sexual ethics than someone who takes the mainstream societal view, and while it would be unfair to pre-judge him based on that, it is eminently reasonable to take it into account after the fact.

Ah—I have no idea whether he explicitly said such a thing and would be quite startled if he did. From my angle, the fact of an affair and concurrent/subsequent collaborative work are already sufficient to establish a degree of fairly serious misconduct, where the spectres of professional reward and punishment inevitably loom given the power dynamics in play.

Oh, I see a lot of open questions and a lot of room for my judgment to shift in a number of directions—but few beyond complete falsehood that are highly exculpatory for Singer. Your hypothetical is not impossible but even in a scenario like that the mixing of career benefits and an affair is morally fraught.

Yes—the email I screenshot in my Twitter thread on the matter. Unless it’s fake, which I place low likelihood on given that she submitted it as evidence in a court filing, it’s strongly indicative that they had an affair and that she was not the only affair partner at the time.

EDIT: The court filings also include an email from him rebuking her about an interaction they had at a fundraiser meeting for her charity, which he was on the board of. The contents of that interaction and email, as described in the court filing, are not nearly as clear of evidence but are still worth mentioning.

In what sense am I not being skeptical enough? My strongest conclusion by far is based on the email from Singer she entered into evidence and the evidence of their collaboration during the time frame of the alleged affair. Did you read the email? Unless it is inauthentic, it makes it hard for me to see a world where they were not having an affair, he did not initially lie to her in at least one way about it, or he was not having at least one other affair at approximately the same time.

It’s worth being skeptical of her claims, and I am, visibly so and stated every time I post about it. I agree that the “made advances on every female coauthor” claim in particular strains credulity. But there is enough that does not rely solely on her word to make it noteworthy and tough for me to dismiss in full.

It’s not priced in, though, except perhaps to the extremely aware. Not a single article has been written about it, it gets not a single mention in his biographies, virtually nobody in the public knows any details of it. If it was an open secret, it certainly never escaped the circles closest to him, and while it’s possible and natural to assume he’d be the sort of person not to take serious issue with it, that doesn’t reveal much if anything about him actually doing it.

It makes sense, yes. But many things make sense without actually being part of people’s stories. He has been meticulous at keeping it out of the public eye.

I have no idea who Walter Block is without looking him up. Singer is one of a small handful of living philosophers to make it into standard intro to philosophy courses. He is the only living person in the lede of Wikipedia’s article on utilitarianism and is, I would guess, virtually universally considered the greatest living utilitarian. He’s made Time top 100 lists and received a long list of public honors.

By any measure, he is one of the most influential ethicists of all time, certainly one of the most influential living ones. Few people’s ideas have shaped and shifted the public idea of morality as his have. He is almost singularly influential in his field.

Than virtue ethics, deontology, or contractualism? Yes. I am not claiming they are more likely than people who do not actively aim towards upholding high, clearly articulated ethical standards, but yes, I assert that moral systems have measurable impacts on people’s behavior in important ways, and the safeguards against cheating within utilitarianism—and particularly, by Singer’s own explicit admission, in his brand of it—are straightforwardly less than those in other ethical systems.

There’s no evidence either way about an arrangement except the accuser’s claim that he lied about having one.

If you do not consider breaking monogamous relationships up and giving career benefits to affair partners in a domain where he holds immense power to be evidence of wrongdoing, I will not be able to convince you otherwise, but my impression is that most people (correctly, in my estimation) disapprove of both.

When:

  1. someone is in a monogamous relationship, 2. Singer propositions her, 3. They have an affair, and 4. He publishes alongside her through the course and in the immediate aftermath of the affair…

I see very little left to demonstrate.

I think his comment on sexual ethics provides a hint as to what his rationalization of having affairs would be: people get so caught up on sexual ethics when what really makes a difference in the world are things like donating to overseas charities and advocating for animal rights. Yes, his affairs were selfish, but they were a small selfishness as he was pushing large groups towards immense utilitarian good, so to focus on it is a mere distraction. Particularly if nobody finds out—as you say, what’s the harm?

Even in utilitarian terms, this is a rationalization. He knows the second-order effects of affairs and knows what society’s actual feelings on sexual ethics are. He knows, surely, that it is the stuff of scandals and cratered reputations, that it could bring immense harm not just to him but to the ideas he champions, to his philosophy as a whole.

And you can argue that in a utilitarian frame, but we are all at war with our own minds to one extent or another, and the possibility of rationalization depends on the strength of one’s safeguards. Singer’s brand of utilitarianism is unusually bad, I would argue (and I think his quote on sexual ethics supports my argument), at providing defenses against rationalizing sexual misconduct to oneself.

In news that went mostly unnoticed at the time but has since picked up some steam, Peter Singer was sued pro se by a woman who alleged they had an affair twenty years ago and that he's had affairs with many other women, including many co-authors, over his career. Her lawsuit was pretty transparently weak due to statute of limitations issues and the affair being consensual--the "damages" she claimed were the loss of the house her ex-fiance bought as he was breaking up with her due to the affair--but the claims in it are nothing short of a terrible look for Singer: propositioning and sleeping with married and unmarried women in his field over a long period of time, giving career benefits (eg coauthorship) to affair partners, misrepresenting himself as having a "Don't ask, don't tell" arrangement with his wife and lying to affair partners about having multiple simultaneous affairs, and more. It was dismissed after a demurrer claiming no actionable claims was granted: that is, no facts were actually discovered or litigated.

In terms of hard evidence, she included several emails between Singer and her in the filing, one of which included him confessing to her that he had multiple other apparent affair partners. They collaborated on at least four op-eds during the affair or its immediate aftermath, and she contributed a chapter to a book he wrote, so it does appear that her portrayal of career benefits for affair partners has some substance.

I read the court filings and have contacted the parties involved; I'm working on a more detailed article about the whole thing. If you'd like to see the court files yourself, the relevant court is here. Search for case number 22CV01792. The accuser also wrote a shorter essay about it on her website.

While she should not be viewed as a fully reliable narrator, the evidence suggests the truth of her claims that they had an affair, that he admitted to her he was having other affairs, and that she got career benefits from the affair. It's a bit mysterious to me that nobody has touched the story, but at least until a somewhat obscure December YouTube video, about the only place I can find the allegations having been discussed is a quiet EA forum thread.

It caught my attention because of that lack of attention despite its clear newsworthiness. It's the sort of thing I think is easy, but incorrect, to dismiss as mere gossip: Peter Singer is one of the leading ethicists of our time, and I believe his behavior follows from his ethics in visible, important ways. More specifically, I think classical utilitarianism as a whole suffers from a lack of respect for duty to the near in ways that this sort of misconduct highlights.

I don't think it's the sort of thing that should, or will, define Singer. I do, however, think that it's the sort of thing that should be part of his life story and so far has conspicuously not been.

New from me - Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong, a deep dive into the sequence of events I summarized here last week. It's much longer than my typical article and difficult to properly condense. Normally I would summarize things, but since I summarized events last time, I'll simply excerpt the beginning:

Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek's Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about rumors they'd heard about affinity between Effective Altruists, neoreactionaries, and something called TESCREAL. They spend hundreds of hours over six months on interviews and evidence collection, paying Émile and Timnit for their time and effort. The phrase "HBD" is muttered, but it's nobody's birthday.

A few days before publication, they present key claims to the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), who furiously tell them that many of the claims are provably false and ask for a brief delay to demonstrate the falsehood of those claims, though their principles compel them to avoid threatening any form of legal action. The Times unconditionally refuses, claiming it must meet a hard deadline. The day before publication, Scott Alexander gets his hands on a copy of the article and informs the Times that it's full of provable falsehoods. They correct one of his claims, but tell him it's too late to fix another.

The final article comes out. It states openly that it's not aiming to be a balanced view, but to provide a deep dive into the worst of EA so people can judge for themselves. It contains lurid and alarming claims about Effective Altruists, paired with a section of responses based on its conversation with EA that it says provides a view of the EA perspective that CEA agreed was a good summary. In the end, it warns people that EA is a destructive movement likely to chew up and spit out young people hoping to do good.

In the comments, the overwhelming majority of readers thank it for providing such thorough journalism. Readers broadly agree that waiting to review CEA's further claims was clearly unnecessary. David Gerard pops in to provide more harrowing stories. Scott gets a polite but skeptical hearing out as he shares his story of what happened, and one enterprising EA shares hard evidence of one error in the article to a mixed and mostly hostile audience. A few weeks later, the article writer pens a triumphant follow-up about how well the whole process went and offers to do similar work for a high price in the future.

This is not an essay about the New York Times.

The rationalist and EA communities tend to feel a certain way about the New York Times. Adamantly a certain way. Emphatically a certain way, even. I can't say my sentiment is terribly different—in fact, even when I have positive things to say about the New York Times, Scott has a way of saying them more elegantly, as in The Media Very Rarely Lies.

That essay segues neatly into my next statement, one I never imagined I would make:

You are very very lucky the New York Times does not cover you the way you cover you.

[...]

I follow drama and blow-ups in a lot of different subcultures. It's my job. The response I saw from the EA and LessWrong communities to [the] article was thoroughly ordinary as far as subculture pile-ons go, even commendable in ways. Here's the trouble: the ways it was ordinary are the ways it aspires to be extraordinary, and as the community walked headlong into every pitfall of rumormongering and dogpiles, it did so while explaining at every step how reasonable, charitable, and prudent it was in doing so.

Yeah. And honestly, there are worse things than being paid in exposure. I'd describe that as the primary compensation for my podcast job (my bosses pay me a perfectly fair hourly wage, but I'm certainly not doing it for the money). It's just worth being clear-eyed about precisely what that entails and when it's appropriate.

At least the callout post came with testimony from people who had actually worked at Nonlinear. It had quotes and screenshots and other forms of evidence of the kind that convince us of many things every day. It turns out these statements did not reflect reality and the screenshots were carefully curated to present a particular narrative. This is a risk we run any time we trust someone's testimony about a situation we don't have first hand experience with. This is an ordinary, and probably unavoidable, epistemic failure mode.

Not good enough.

Yes, the callout post came with all of those things. Here's what else it came with:

  • An emphatic warning from a trusted community member that he had reviewed the draft the day before publication and warned of major inaccuracies, only one of which got corrected.

  • The subjects of the post claiming hard evidence that many of the claims in the post were outright false and begging for a week to compile and send that evidence while emphasizing that they'd had only three hours to respond to claims that took hundreds of hours to compile.

  • A notice at the top, treated as exculpatory rather than damning, that it would be a one-sided post brought about by a search for negative information.

Any one of those things, by itself, was a glaring red flag. All three of them put together leave absolutely no excuse for the post to have been released in the state it was in, or for an entire community that prides itself on healthy epistemics to treat it as damning evidence of wrongdoing. If it had been published in the New York Times rather than the effective altruism community, every single rationalist would—rightly—be cursing the name of the news outlet that decided to post such a piece.

This is ordinary in Tumblr fandoms. It's ordinary in tabloids. It's jarring and inexcusable to see the same behavior dressed up in Reasonable, Rational, Sensible language and cheered by a community that prides itself on having better discourse and a more truth-seeking standard than others.