One’s strength as a rationalist can be measured by how much you are more confused by fiction than by reality. In group-rationality, one’s strength can be measured by how much true information is amplified and false information finds friction.
A special case of this is moral accusations. If legitimate moral accusation are passing through a social graph, do you clarify and sharpen them? If illegitimate moral accusations are passing through a social graph, do they find friction in you, do you pose them with the cruxes laid bare? Or do you amplify them, demanding answers to questions that hide their reasoning and make it harder to challenge them?
I think it’s currently the case that there’s a large and popular force on the internet reading through the personal emails of Jeffrey Epstein and moral criticisms being levied at people merely for being in the emails at all. (Example: It seems that a news contributor / health author lost his job due to exchanging many emails with Epstein, even though he never visited Epstein’s island nor is accused of any crimes.)
It’s good to raise moral concerns/criticisms that you possess about behavior in your social scene! I think a more reflective version of this post could’ve been net-positive. Something like “Obviously correspondence with a felon is not itself unethical; I think it is worth checking whether this relationship was anything more than that? Does anyone have any further info about any relationship with Epstein, or has Eliezer written about it?” and then getting the link to the answer. But I think you should know better than to also put your weight behind guilt-by-association as a credible moral accusation, and I think I should be able to hold people to that basic standard on LessWrong.
One’s strength as a rationalist can be measured by how much you are more confused by fiction than by reality. In group-rationality, one’s strength can be measured by how much true information is amplified and false information finds friction.
A special case of this is moral accusations. If legitimate moral accusation are passing through a social graph, do you clarify and sharpen them? If illegitimate moral accusations are passing through a social graph, do they find friction in you, do you pose them with the cruxes laid bare? Or do you amplify them, demanding answers to questions that hide their reasoning and make it harder to challenge them?
I think it’s currently the case that there’s a large and popular force on the internet reading through the personal emails of Jeffrey Epstein and moral criticisms being levied at people merely for being in the emails at all. (Example: It seems that a news contributor / health author lost his job due to exchanging many emails with Epstein, even though he never visited Epstein’s island nor is accused of any crimes.)
It’s good to raise moral concerns/criticisms that you possess about behavior in your social scene! I think a more reflective version of this post could’ve been net-positive. Something like “Obviously correspondence with a felon is not itself unethical; I think it is worth checking whether this relationship was anything more than that? Does anyone have any further info about any relationship with Epstein, or has Eliezer written about it?” and then getting the link to the answer. But I think you should know better than to also put your weight behind guilt-by-association as a credible moral accusation, and I think I should be able to hold people to that basic standard on LessWrong.