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Effective Altruism drama update:
You may remember a few weeks ago the article Effective Altruism Promises to Do Good Better. These Women Say It Has a Toxic Culture Of Sexual Harassment and Abuse was published in TIME (Motte discussion here).
It's been a hectic two weeks on the EA forum. Meta community posts have been consistently getting more engagement than object-level posts about actual charity. There is a palpable tension on the site between the hardcore rationalists and the mainstream liberals. Vote counts swing on an hourly basis depending on who has the upper hand, but overall the discussion has remained civil (mostly). A few days ago, the (in)famous Aella posted "People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You", a devastating screed against prudes, anonymous allegations, and haters of eccentric Bay Area parties. Eliezer himself even shows up, taking a break from doomscrolling to deliver a supporting bombardment against the mainstream press.
There's nothing EAs care about more than cute poly girls and AI. Once Aella and Eliezer weigh in, case closed right? WRONG.
A statement and an apology
EV UK board statement on Owen's resignation
One of the perpetrators from the article has been identified. So who wins?
Well, its too soon to say. This seems to be the first sexual misconduct allegation confirmed against an official EA leader, so you can't really call the TIME story which broke it to be a complete pile of journalistic garbage. It does seem like a pretty minor infraction though. After reading Owen's statement it seems like it could fall under the "weird nerds trying to date" umbrella, but maybe you can't use that excuse when you're a board member.
One aspect I haven't seen discussed is that this is the same guy who was behind the controversial decision to buy Wytham Abbey for 15 million pounds (see here). In light of current events, it sure looks to me like EA officials decided to blow millions on a luxury venue in Oxford in order to impress women.
Yeah, I dunno. I feel like I have no right to comment on any of this, since I'm nowhere near any of the physical places, I don't know any of the people involved save at second-hand by reading accounts written by others, and I'm not part of Less Wrong ("thank God" says them and me both).
But that Aella piece - I'm torn between "well yeah she probably does get a lot of hate for no apparent reason other than she's a big fish in their small pond" and "this is a group that makes a huge point out of being welcoming and non-judgemental to the unconventional and the neurodivergent, can she really be shocked at this hour of her life to learn sometimes unstable people are unstable and interpret things in a wildly different way to what happened?"
Well, welcome to the party, rationalists and EA movement. We Catholics had our own sex scandals, now it's your turn. I do think this may be the moment - not over sex scandals per se but because of a conflux of issues and tensions all coming to the boil at once - where the endeavour splits off into the "normie" version that goes mainstream (EA seems to be there already) and the remnants of the original 'true believers' who will wonder what happened and where it all went, leaving them behind.
EDIT: I am sardonically amused about the vegan commenting on that, and her story of all the horrible meat-eaters making up lies about pure innocent vegans. I have my own Vegan Big Traditional Meal story to tell, and that really was a vegan making a fuss and inconveniencing everyone. But then, I am a horrible meat-eater, maybe I'm just "[lying] so they'd have a dramatic story to tell about vegans and cement their own ingroup status or so they'd have a seeming-reason to dismiss animal welfare asks and play the victim themselves and cement their control for future interactions" 😐
Maybe this is asking too much, but why wouldn't Rationalist women adopt a different viewpoint of male sexual behavior, being Rationalists?
Instead of taking the same progressive approach of "toxic masculinity must be extirpated," it seems like the Rationalist view would be something like: "Male Sexual Behavior is how it is for reasons, and has been this way since the beginning. Even if we wanted to change it, it is unlikely to change. Therefore lets find a way to harness it for the greater good. One way that this has worked historically is for women to engage with male sexuality and control it as best as possible via marriage..." etc.
There's a good deal of path dependency going on here. Rationalists, especially the Bay-area variety, are overwhelmingly progressive. They are not going to endorse a traditionalist/conservative position if they can help it.
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Hanania:
https://open.substack.com/pub/richardhanania/p/why-ea-will-be-anti-woke-or-die
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The big problem here is that EA is becoming the victim of its own success. It wanted (especially now with concerns about existential risk and AI risk) to become more than just a little group of the like-minded in their own bubble, it wanted to go mainstream, and it looks like it has.
So this woman was not part of the whole Bay Area/Less Wrong/Rationalist/EA scene. She went to Oxford and signed up as a (to use the term) normie who bought into the rhetoric and did want to do good according to their principles.
Then she hit up against the existing culture, where cuddle piles (though I haven't heard much of them lately), minors and runaways, trans and all kinds of kink-friendly and sex-positive and poly and unconventional lifestyles are welcomed and tolerated, and where there's a good chance of pinning the weasel (if I may be forgiven the reference). But she's an outsider, so to her this kind of "Hey, I'm Georgiou, I'm EA, vegan, poly and kinky, wanna see my etchings?" approach like shaking hands when introduced to someone is normal and acceptable did not come across as 'this is how professionals work in the settings I know'.
As EA expands and normies start joining, this is only going to be more of a problem. I do think the split between 'the original band' and 'now we're big enough to do corporate venues, are we selling out?' is happening.
I shouldn't have closed these tabs, but have you noticed that most of the attacks on EA are coming from people affiliated with Oxford"? Like https://twitter.com/oxhcai
And this David Thorstad guy is from the Global Priorities Institute at Oxord, "Using academic research to drive positive change within and outside of the effective altruism movement." : https://twitter.com/IneffectiveAlt4 https://ineffectivealtruismblog.com/ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/david-thorstad
He's been heavily attacking people on the EA forum, after joining in 2021.
He protected his tweets and they weren't archived, but this is what he was saying to scott (dead twitter link):
You know, honeyed words about "growth and change," followed by the standard bullying commissar stuff as soon as he thinks he has power over someone.
Smells like an entryist clique to me. Somebody on EA really ought to call him out about this.
(Edit: noticed by Ilforte last month)
Some of the Twitter stuff was archived
As for his demand to repeat a mantra about "racist pseudoscience", the best substantive answer is probably along the lines of:
"If the claims of 'racist pseudoscience' are true, I wish to believe they are true. If the claims of 'racist pseudoscience' are not true, I wish to believe they are not true. Labeling an idea 'racist pseudoscience' does not affect its truth value".
But most of EA will likely prefer to stick with the cool kids over everything else, and so will be utterly subsumed into the progressive leviathan.
Thanks! I searched .is for the tweet URLs, but nothing came up. Guess the archived one was the top tweet.
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This strikes me as the opening blows in a conflict that EA will be unable to deal with. The activist community has seen a lot of money flowing to the Wrong kind of people, and now they are moving in to deal with a potential threat to their status and position. How exactly is the EA movement going to protect itself against an avalanche of bad-faith actors like the one you have identified, while also dealing with an equally withering barrage of negative stories from legacy media? They can't just attack the media without painting themselves as members of the Trump tribe, which would cause lots of people and donators to leave. Long-winded rationalist essays might be able to convince the core members of the group, but they are worse than useless when it comes to defending oneself against spurious accusations in the court of public opinion.
I really don't see how the movement survives if this continues - people like David Thorstad would (at least, in my reading of his statements and actions) prefer that the movement sink into irrelevancy and fail to have any noticeable positive impact on the world, instead becoming a den of comfortable sinecures that people like him and his friends can occupy without having to actually do any real work... and they have existing institutions (Oxford, the mainstream media, etc) putting a thumb on their end of the scale.
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