TracingWoodgrains
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User ID: 103
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
“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.”
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
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.
TracingWoodgrains
5mo ago
There are absolutely competent people within it, inasmuch as there are people within it at all. The issue I'm pointing to is one of raw numbers, not one of competence.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
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.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
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.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
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.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
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.
TracingWoodgrains
5mo ago
The best advice I can give for Twitter is basically “follow eigenrobot and work outward from there.” tszzl (roon) and growing_daniel are also good “hub accounts” for the tech side of things. If you prefer to start with motte-adjacency, go with ymeskhout, AnechoicMedia_, sonyasupposedly, CremieuxRecueil, and Kulak.
There are a lot more accounts I could mention (I follow around 900 people) but the clear entry point to Twitter for people from here is the ACX-adjacent section (TPOT), which maintains a high standard of amiability/sanity norms while talking about much the same stuff as here.
TracingWoodgrains
9mo ago
My impression is that there's little reason to contain culture war in specific. Other similar spaces I participate in (eg /r/blockedandreported) do just fine with a discussion thread for most topics and independent posts for particularly effortful or relevant commentary. I think it would make sense to preserve the culture war thread as it stands while allowing effortful posts touching on culture war topics to stand independently if the author wants to post them at the top level.
TracingWoodgrains
9mo ago
It's the same set of 4 charts I embed towards the top of my article, showing the relative rankings of students of different races on academic, extracurricular, personal, and overall axes.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
while it is true that speakers of tonal languages are substantially more likely to exhibit AP, even among musically trained children it's not really an "almost everyone" thing
I do think it’s worth emphasizing the difference between “musically trained children” and “children trained in absolute pitch.” It’s a specific skill related to musicality but neither fully contained within it nor necessary for it; knowing that children receive musical training says relatively little about their specific pitch training.
It’s possible that I’m stating it too strongly! It’s an understudied, underutilized training process, since people have broadly treated it as a mysterious divine gift rather than a specific, trained skill. I think the most precise statement would be “far more people than generally acknowledged can develop absolute pitch during early childhood with relatively low effort.” But mostly I just think people should move from completely ignoring it to studying it enough that we know how prevalent it can be.
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
What are you talking about here? Last time I recall mentioning systems on Twitter it was to marvel at the way some people take the whole thing seriously.
I freely admit association with the Motte as appropriate. This place was a big part of my own intellectual journey and I have nothing to hide about it. In this case, Twitter throttles Substack links as if they're ads, so I couldn't link the Vitalist's blog without my posts getting throttled into oblivion. I even mention my connection in the replies to that post.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
Did you? I barely noticed that happened on my timeline. It didn't really pop up except from, like, a BARPod listener tagging me.
TracingWoodgrains
7mo ago
I believe I address this adequately in my article, so before I answer I’d appreciate hearing your understanding of my opinion given my article’s commentary on the matter.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
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:
- 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.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
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.
TracingWoodgrains
5mo ago
I’ve been spending a lot more time on Twitter lately, particularly since I can mottepost there now. What I formerly read as fundamental constraints in the directions you point turn out to be mediated pretty heavily by the part of it a person spends time in and who they choose to interact with. There’s a self-selecting group in and around the ACX-adjacent parts of Twitter that is pleasant and full of smart, well-mannered, somewhat ideologically sympathetic people, with two clear advantages in my view:
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The decentralized nature means that incompatible personalities can self-select into slightly different subcommunities where people who get on with both can still interact with both in what feels like the same space, meaning in particular that the ideological range is much broader than here.
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The public nature means that when you chat with people in your quiet corner, your posts will occasionally leave the bubble and contact a much wider audience, sometimes including the public figures you talk about. In the recent OpenAI drama, for example, the interim CEO was a well-known regular in Twitter’s ACX-adjacent sphere.
TracingWoodgrains
9mo ago
I disagree. This chart is nothing if not ranking people from best to worst along every relevant domain Harvard can muster. Axes of diversity go into their rankings within some of those metrics, but while their numbers may not match up to what you or I would rank as "best" or "worst", they are very much trying to select, and justify their selection as, the best.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
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 won't claim it's entirely discontinuous from the past, but I think it's notable that eg Ben expressed fury at the lack of changes since FTX and the EA community as a whole has recent memories of being dragged through scandal after not being suspicious enough.
EDIT: Oliver, too, mentions being intimidated by FTX and not sharing his concerns as one of the worst mistakes of his career.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
I very frankly do not care who someone is "adjacent to"; I care who they are and what they say. Your favored public thinkers, whoever they are, are extremely unlikely to talk about things as in the link above. Know why I can say that? Because I follow just about everyone who talks visibly about that stuff. People should talk about it more. That he does so is a credit to him and a strike against those who complain that I would so much as mention him.
Your line about "Jews" betrays your own ignorance about him, incidentally. He's anything but antisemitic, and inasmuch as I have disputes with him on that broad topic, it is that he sees Israel's hands as rather cleaner than I personally do. Your opponents do not all fit into a single bucket that you can label "fascist" and have done with it, and I have little patience for dark insinuations of this sort.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
Yeah, one of my friends with absolute pitch reports the same thing—but relative pitch really is an incredibly useful skill for music, and the former entails the latter. I think those who have it and dismiss it often do so in comparison to “a generally good musical ear” and not something like my own near-tone-deafness and total inability to carry a tune when singing without accompaniment (this despite training early-ish on piano and becoming quite competent at it).
TracingWoodgrains
25d ago
Not really something I have the bandwidth for atm, unfortunately, but I'm happy to provide the questions as a base template for anyone wanting to run it again.
Why would I? That tension between his present and his past, and my conflicted thoughts about it, is core to the reason we thought it would be interesting to do a podcast in the first place. We chatted in advance as well and covered some of the same ground; he came in fully aware that it could get combative and was not just amenable to that approach but actively interested in it. Masking my own sentiment towards the alt-right would be a disservice both to him and to listeners. When we moved past that part, I went back to engaging in a milder, more deliberate way, but both have their place.
Walt doesn't praise Hitler, but analogies are just that: analogies. I absolutely would push soft democratic socialists who had histories full of guillotine memes and so forth on those topics in very much the same tone I was pushing Walt. In his own writing, he makes the explicit comparison between himself and liberals who had communist phases, so it's worth exploring that comparison on its own terms.
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