The Twitter post is literally just title + link. I don’t like Twitter, and don’t want to engage on it, but I figured posting this more publicly would be helpful, so I did the minimum thing to try to direct people to this post.
From my perspective, I find it pretty difficult to be criticized for a “feeling” that you get from my post that seems to me to be totally disconnected from anything that I actually said.
Yeah, I am sorry. Like, I don’t think I currently have the energy to try to communicate all the subtle things that feel wrong to me about this, but it adds up to something I quite dislike.
I wish I had a more crystallized quick summary that I expect to cross the inferential distance quickly, but I don’t currently.
FWIW when I first saw the title (on the EA Forum) my reaction was to interpret it with an implicit “[I think that] We must be very clear: fraud in the service of effective altruism is unacceptable”.
Things generally don’t just become true because people assert them to be—surely people on LW know that. I think habryka’s concern that not including “I think” in the title is a big deal is overblown. Dropping “I think” from the title is reasonable IMO to make the title more concise; I don’t anticipate it degrading the culture of LW. I also don’t see how it “bypasses epistemic defenses.” If the lack of inclusion of an “I think” in your title will worsen readers’ epistemics, then those readers seem to be at great risk of getting terrible epistemics from seeing any news headlines.
I don’t mean to say that there’s not value in using more nuanced language, including “I think” and similar qualifications to be more precise with ones words, just that I think the karma/vote ratio your post received is an over-reaction to concern about posts of your style degrading the level one “Attempt to describe the world accurately” culture of LW.
IDK where habryka is coming from, but to me the post is good, and the title is fine but gives a twinge from the words “We” and “must” and those words together. (Also the phrase “is unacceptable” also is implicitly speaking from a social-collective-objective perspective, if you know what I mean. Which is fine, but it contributes to the twinge.) Things that would, to me, decrease the twinge:
EAs should be....
EA must unambiguously not accept fraud...
That’s a low-character-count way to be a bit more specific about who We is, to whom something Is Unacceptable. It’s maybe not what you really mean, maybe you really mean something more complicated like “people who want to ambitiously do good in the world” or something, and you don’t have a low-character way to say that, and “We” is aspirationally pointing at that.
In the post you clarify
we—as people who unknowingly benefitted from it and whose work for the world was potentially used to whitewash it
and say
Right now, I think the best course of action is for us—and I mean all of us, anyone who has any sort of a public platform—to make clear that we don’t support fraud done in the service of effective altruism.
Which is reasonable. The title though, by touching on the We, seems to me to “make it” a “decision that is the group’s decision”.
The Twitter post is literally just title + link. I don’t like Twitter, and don’t want to engage on it, but I figured posting this more publicly would be helpful, so I did the minimum thing to try to direct people to this post.
From my perspective, I find it pretty difficult to be criticized for a “feeling” that you get from my post that seems to me to be totally disconnected from anything that I actually said.
Yeah, I am sorry. Like, I don’t think I currently have the energy to try to communicate all the subtle things that feel wrong to me about this, but it adds up to something I quite dislike.
I wish I had a more crystallized quick summary that I expect to cross the inferential distance quickly, but I don’t currently.
FWIW when I first saw the title (on the EA Forum) my reaction was to interpret it with an implicit “[I think that] We must be very clear: fraud in the service of effective altruism is unacceptable”.
Things generally don’t just become true because people assert them to be—surely people on LW know that. I think habryka’s concern that not including “I think” in the title is a big deal is overblown. Dropping “I think” from the title is reasonable IMO to make the title more concise; I don’t anticipate it degrading the culture of LW. I also don’t see how it “bypasses epistemic defenses.” If the lack of inclusion of an “I think” in your title will worsen readers’ epistemics, then those readers seem to be at great risk of getting terrible epistemics from seeing any news headlines.
I don’t mean to say that there’s not value in using more nuanced language, including “I think” and similar qualifications to be more precise with ones words, just that I think the karma/vote ratio your post received is an over-reaction to concern about posts of your style degrading the level one “Attempt to describe the world accurately” culture of LW.
IDK where habryka is coming from, but to me the post is good, and the title is fine but gives a twinge from the words “We” and “must” and those words together. (Also the phrase “is unacceptable” also is implicitly speaking from a social-collective-objective perspective, if you know what I mean. Which is fine, but it contributes to the twinge.) Things that would, to me, decrease the twinge:
EAs should be....
EA must unambiguously not accept fraud...
That’s a low-character-count way to be a bit more specific about who We is, to whom something Is Unacceptable. It’s maybe not what you really mean, maybe you really mean something more complicated like “people who want to ambitiously do good in the world” or something, and you don’t have a low-character way to say that, and “We” is aspirationally pointing at that.
In the post you clarify
and say
Which is reasonable. The title though, by touching on the We, seems to me to “make it” a “decision that is the group’s decision”.