“Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out… In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.” —Paul Graham
mingyuan
Karma: 6,318
I want to note that this post (top-level) now has more than 3x the number of comments that Zoe’s does (or nearly 50% more comments than the Zoe+BayAreaHuman posts combined, if you think that’s a more fair comparison), and that no one has commented on Zoe’s post in 24 hours. [ETA: This changed while I was writing this comment. The point about lowered activity still stands.]
This seems really bad to me — I think that there was a lot more that needed to be figured out wrt Leverage, and this post has successfully sucked all the attention away from a conversation that I perceive to be much more important.
I keep deleting sentences because I don’t think it’s productive to discuss how upset this makes me, but I am 100% with Aella here. I was wary of this post to begin with and I feel something akin to anger at what it did to the Leverage conversation.
I had some contact with Leverage 1.0 — had some friends there, interviewed for an ops job there, and was charted a few times by a few different people. I have also worked for both CFAR and MIRI, though never as a core staff member at either organization; and more importantly, I was close friends with maybe 50% of the people who worked at CFAR from mid-2017 to mid-2020. Someone very close to me previously worked for both CFAR and Leverage. With all that backing me up: I am really very confident that the psychological harm inflicted by Leverage was both more widespread and qualitatively different than anything that happened at CFAR or MIRI (at least since mid-2017; I don’t know what things might have been like back in, like, 2012).
The comments section of this post is full of CFAR and MIRI employees attempting to do collaborative truth-seeking. The only comments made by Leverage employees in comparable threads were attempts at reputation management. That alone tells you a lot!
CFAR and MIRI have their flaws, and several people clearly have legitimate grievances with them. I personally did not have a super great experience working for either organization (though that has nothing to do with anything Jessica mentioned in this post; just run-of-the-mill workplace stuff). Those flaws are worth looking at, not only for the edification of the people who had bad experiences with MIRI and CFAR, but also because we care about being good people building effective organizations to make the world a better place. They do not, however, belong in a conversation about the harm done by Leverage.
(Just writing a sentence saying that Leverage was harmful makes me feel uncomfortable, feels a little dangerous, but fuck it, what are they going to do, murder me?)
Again, I keep deleting sentences, because all I want to talk about is the depth of my agreement with Aella, and my uncharitable feelings towards this post. So I guess I’ll just end here.
You missed one! Thanks to Zvi for keeping us all informed every single week for months :)
The question for me is how much these observations apply to peasant life in other places and at other times.
Most of this sounds a lot like my dad’s life in China in the 1970s. I don’t know about infanticide or some of the other things, but the impression I get from my dad’s stories is of a dirty, lawless village dominated by horrible people. The following is mostly based on my memories of stories my dad told me when I was younger, so I will definitely get some details wrong, but the basics are true.
Poverty
Food: Many days out of the year, my dad’s family ate nothing but rice. They raised livestock (my dad had to share his room with a pig for a while), but as far as I know they only ate meat at spring festival (and much of this was left out for the ancestors). They also ate eels and frogs that they caught in the river — where they also bathed, washed their vegetables, and dumped their chamber pots — and presumably ate vegetables when they were in season. One time my dad cooked me and my sister the ‘soup’ he used to eat when he was a kid, which was just boiled water with a bit of soy sauce.
Illness: One time when he was very young my father got a horrible fever, and people thought he might die… but his grandmother scooped water from a muddy puddle into a bowl, and showed him a bubble resting atop the water. She told him that the bubble contained his spirit, and had him drink the muddy water to heal him. (Obviously he survived.) Also, my grandfather had bronchitis for about sixty years, and one of their neighbors had a persistent cough for years on end that would drive everyone crazy.
My dad has an anecdote:
One day when I was 4 years old (1971), I fell and cut my forehead on the stone door step of my house and needed to be stitched up. My grandmother wrestled and carried me, with the help of a neighbor, to the village “clinic”, which was staffed by the one and only “barefoot doctor” in my area. A barefoot doctor was a hygiene worker sent down from an urban city to rural areas during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976). The entire medical supply in the village (of more than 1,200 people) fit in a wooden box the size of a small countertop microwave. The supply did not include numbing gel or anesthesia of any kind. It took four adults to pin me down on a wooden board over two workbenches to sew up my wound.
Jealousy: This is maybe a bit different, but ever since my dad moved to the US (even when he and my mom were on foodstamps and raising a kid with no income), ~100% of his interactions with his family back in China include them asking him for money, often in the $10,000+ range. And not even for necessities, but for things like funding a new (doomed) business venture, or buying an apartment for his nephew so that his girlfriend would marry him.
Morals / cruelty / women
Cruelty to animals: At least my dad definitely didn’t see animals as worthy of compassion — they were either wild or livestock. Dogs were generally wild (I don’t know of people keeping them as pets), and it was normal to throw rocks at them to shoo them away. My dad hated his family’s pig (which smelled terrible, was loud, and ate so much that sometimes there wasn’t any left over for the humans), and even today he has no interest in pets whatsoever.
Cruelty among kids: My dad has a memorable story about chasing a rival gang of boys from a neighboring village into the village’s waste pit (i.e. a giant pile of shit). I get the sense that at least in my dad’s experience, kids were cruel to each other in general — he had maybe one friend, and he has no warm feelings towards either his older or younger brother, and most of his childhood stories involve rivalries or fights.
Cruelty among adults: Physical fights among adult men also weren’t uncommon. When the village’s harvests were pooled by the government and each family was allowed to take a share, people would fight each other for the best melons. Sometimes people fought in the street for other reasons as well.
My dad’s dad was an embezzler, and was verbally and physically abusive to both his wife and his children — he beat my dad for things such as using his writing paper to fold boats, accidentally cracking one of the chamber pots, and not going to school, at least as young as the age of five. He beat his wife all the time, and I think she often took beatings for her children, and he raped her with their children in the room.
My dad writes:
On days my mother didn’t cook enough for everyone, my father would yell at my mother for being a stingy bitch. On days my mother prepared too much food, my father would accuse my mother for being a wasteful idiot incapable of planning ahead. Sometimes my mother found her life too hard to bear and wanted / threatened to end it. She would reach for one of bottles full of pesticides on the living room floor. When fights broke out between my parents, I usually wanted to run away but almost always ended up sticking around to watch for dangerous moves. Quite a few times I had to wrestle that pesticide bottle out of my mother’s hands.
The women of my grandmother’s generation were tasked with spraying the fields with pesticides, and most of them (including my grandmother herself) consequently died young due to ovarian cancer. Also my great-grandmother had bound feet; not sure how that factors in but it’s horrifying.
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Re:
If this kind of cruelty is common, is it inherent to poverty, including the lower levels of education that necessarily accompany poverty? And if so, does increased wealth and education alone lead to a more humane society, or did the transition to more equal rights and status also require a change in morals and other ideas that is not a natural or inherent consequence of material progress?
I’m much less sure about anything here. But my dad’s family seems to have stayed pretty terrible despite the changes of the last fifty years (they now have plumbing, electricity, and plenty to wear and eat). His father never stopped being cruel, his brothers never stopped trying to guilt him into giving them money, and his younger brother’s wife divorced him for being his terrible self. Then again I guess despite their rise in material wealth, they probably still never got anything beyond a middle school education, so maybe just not a relevant example at all.
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Hope this was helpful! Clara had already showed me some of the Semyonova stuff so I had already been thinking about this a fair amount and I’m glad to have a reason to write it up.
My contact with Leverage over the years was fairly insignificant, which is part of why I don’t feel like it’s right for me to participate in this discussion. But there are some things that have come to mind, and since Anna’s made space for that, I’ll note them now. I still think it’s not really my place to say anything, but here’s my piece anyway. I’m speaking only for myself and my own experience.
I interviewed for an ops position at Leverage/Paradigm in early 2017, when I was still in college. The process took maybe a couple months, and the in-person interview happened the same week as my CFAR workshop; together these were my first contact with the Bay community. Some of the other rationalists I met that week warned me against Leverage in vague terms; I discussed their allegations with the ops team at my interview and came away feeling satisfied that both sides had a point.
I had a positive experience at the interview and with the ops and their team hiring process in general. The ops lead seemed to really believe in me and recommended me to other EA orgs after I didn’t get hired at Paradigm, and that was great. My (short-term) college boyfriend had a good relationship with Leverage and later worked at Paradigm. In mid-2017 I met a Leverage employee in a non-Leverage context and we went on a couple dates; that ended amicably. All that’s just to say that at that point, I thought I had a fairly positive relationship with them.
Then, Leverage/Paradigm put on EA Summit in the summer of 2018. I applied to attend and was rejected. My boyfriend, who I think attended a Paradigm workshop around that time, managed to get that decision reversed, but told me that I was rejected because I was on a list of people who might speak ill of Leverage. That really rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t think I had ever acted in a way to deserve that, and it seemed bad to me that they were so paranoid about their reputation that they would reject large swaths of people from a conference that’s supposed to bring together EAs from around the world, just because of vague suspicion. Ironically that’s the personal experience that led me to distrust Leverage the most.
The bottom line being that discussions around Leverage’s reputation have always been really fraught and murky, and it’s totally understandable to me that people would fear unknown repercussions for discussing Leverage in public. Many other people in these threads have said that in various ways, but there’s my concrete example.
Yes, thank you for pointing out the gender difference! As a woman working on x-risk and dating other people working on x-risk, I’m terrified by the stories of people like Laura Fermi and Clara Haber. Both were promising scientists in their own right, but once they married their famous scientist husbands, their own careers were abruptly ended. Laura felt like her life had become a footnote to Enrico’s, was expected to take care of the children, and felt demeaned at social gatherings, and it wasn’t until after her husband’s death that she achieved any measure of recognition in her own right (as a writer). Clara was miserable and felt stifled in her marriage. From Wikipedia:
It has always been my attitude that a life has only been worth living if one has made full use of all one’s abilities and tried to live out every kind of experience human life has to offer. It was under that impulse, among other things, that I decided to get married at that time… The life I got from it was very brief...and the main reasons for that was Fritz’s oppressive way of putting himself first in our home and marriage, so that a less ruthlessly self-assertive personality was simply destroyed.
She had a son essentially against her will and ended up committing suicide – though to be fair, she had a lot of issues and it’s not clear exactly why she killed herself.
(Note that the above is based on imperfect recollections of biographies I’ve read where these women played quite small parts, so the claims might not be exactly accurate, but that’s the gist.)
Anyway I read those stories and I’m like, fuck no. I could so easily see that being me, especially if I lived a hundred years ago. Luckily my primary partner is Habryka so I’m not in danger of being pressured to have children, but also, those things are not unrelated. I’M ON YOUR SIDE OLI RIDE OR DIE
There’s no way to comment on the original, so I’ll say here that I’m so insanely incredibly sick of the ‘rationalists don’t actually win’ meme.
The classic rebuttal these days is that we were better-prepared for COVID than most and have avoided catching it better than base rates would predict; that seems like a win. We also created Epidemic Forecasting (which had rationalist members advising national governments) and the microCOVID Project. You also might count signing up for cryonics as a win, or becoming a prolific writer. Multiple rationalists have been internationally ranked Magic: The Gathering players (at least Zvi Mowshowitz and Aaron Gertler, there might be others).
And even if the navel-gazey type of success ‘doesn’t count,’ I still think it’s meaningful that we successfully put on major events like EAG and get people like Elon Musk to come. There’s all the work we’ve done to put AI safety on the map, which might turn out to be really important. There’s the revitalization of LessWrong thanks to the dedicated work of a few individuals. I’d wager we have more books published per capita than most communities.
For something more mainstream, plenty of rationalists have been very financially successful. Sam Bankman-Fried, who runs a crypto trading company, is perhaps the biggest example, but he’s not the only one. Multiple rationalists made millions off of Bitcoin. Conor White-Sullivan’s Roam got a crazy high seed valuation of $200M last month. ZeroCater was also founded by a rationalist-adjacent guy. So yes, rationalists do run successful startups and hedge funds.
What do people want us to do, become president of the US? Start our own country? Politics is not really our arena, but Open Phil’s access to $10 billion translates into not-insignificant influence on many parts of reality. I just don’t get what would count as obvious success, short of being solely and visibly responsible for a positive singularity. Agh!!!
The advice this post points to is probably useful for some people, but I think LessWrongers are the last people who need to be told to be less socially graceful in favor of more epistemic virtue. So much basic kindness is already lacking in the way that many rationalists interact, and it’s often deeply painful to be around.
Also, I just don’t really buy that there’s a necessary, direct tradeoff between epistemic virtue and social grace. I am quite blunt, honest, and (I believe) epistemically virtuous, but I still generally interact in a way that endears me to people and makes them feel listened to and not attacked. (If you know me feel free to comment/agree/disagree on this statement.) I’m not saying that all of my interactions are 100% successful in this regard but I think I come across as basically kind and socially graceful without sacrificing honesty or epistemics.
Related: I wish people still wrote poems about major achievements. Everyone knows the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, but it seems like that wasn’t an isolated thing. For example, the man who designed the Golden Gate Bridge wrote:
As harps for the winds of heaven,
My web-like cables are spun;
I offer my span for the traffic of man,
At the gate of the setting sun.(Apologies because I know this comment isn’t really engaging with the post itself.)
I’ve heard a lot of people say things along the lines that CFAR “no longer does original research into human rationality.” Does that seem like an accurate characterization? If so, why is it the case that you’ve moved away from rationality research?
One of my objections is similar to benjamincosman’s — people not taking no for an answer in romantic/sexual contexts is a problem I’ve seen in people of all ages, races, cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic status, social status, and points on the autism spectrum. It was a big problem at both my urban public high school and my elite private college.
Yes power differentials make it worse, yes it’s more of a problem in an environment as gender-imbalanced as EA or the wider Bay Area tech scene, and yes people who are striving to be moral should hold themselves to a higher standard. But trying to use the existence of these problems as an indictment of the community proves too much — I don’t know of any community of any kind that successfully avoids them.
I am not opposed to an honest discussion of the gender issues in EA or rationality or the Bay Area as a whole or whatever other scene. I’m a woman and I care about this. But this post completely fails at “Aim to explain, not persuade”. It uses inflammatory rhetoric, makes sweeping generalizations like “EA/rationalism and redpill fit like yin and yang”, and lumps polyamory in with the problems in an apparent attempt to score points, when polyamory is something that many people practice in a way that’s healthy, happy, and consensual for all parties involved.
I also take issue with the specific line
There are also upsides [to accepting the sexual advances of men in power], as reported by CoinDesk on Caroline Ellison.
This reads to me like you’re implying that Caroline only got into a position of power because she was sleeping with Sam? That’s internalized misogyny if I’ve ever heard it. Whatever her recent actions may have been, Caroline is an extremely smart person who was a successful trader at Jane Street before ever joining Alameda. When I heard she had become CEO, that made sense to me based on her experience, intelligence, and seniority at the company.
Maybe I am just feeling frustrated about everything lately and am taking it out on you, but come on. If you want people on LessWrong to respect what you’re saying, at least try to write with epistemic honesty, instead of whatever this is.
I looked at the 2020 Forbes list of most powerful women (which was the first thing that came up when I googled “powerful women”) and spent about an hour total investigating whether they have children. The Forbes list had 100 women; I was able to find probably-reliable information about children for 95 of them (many of them are very private about their personal lives, which is reasonable). Of those, 25 were childless, or 26%.
This source indicates that 85% of women in the US have children in their lifetime – a lot of the women in question weren’t from the US, but I’m not putting that much effort into the investigation, so close enough. So that’s 26% of successful women being childless, vs the US average of 15%. Also (cherry-picking alert), out of the top three women on the list, two were childless (Angela Merkel and Kamala Harris).
I listened to David Goggins’ account of Navy SEAL training last year. They encourage you to push yourself so hard that you are at genuine risk of death or permanent disability. The first two times Goggins tried to get through he failed out because of injuries, even though he was willing to — and did — run many miles on literally broken legs. He only made it through the third time because hell week got cut short due to someone in their cohort DYING (from participating in some kind of swimming exercise while very sick with pneumonia).
I actually found the book incredibly inspiring, though it did not make me think anyone should model themselves after the Navy SEALs in particular. I also don’t think someone should run 100 miles in 24 hours with zero training and continue despite the fact that their legs are breaking and they’re shitting and pissing blood while they run, which is another thing that Goggins did.
One training exercise in the book that seemed more reasonable to me (more like an exercise and less like abject torture) was an orienteering-type thing (for I think the Army Rangers?), where the terrain was treacherous and unfamiliar and the weather dangerously cold at night. I think it’s a good test of rationality to put yourself in a genuinely high-stakes situation like that — as long as one of the choices you’re allowed to make is to call for help if you are genuinely afraid for your life. That was an option in the case of the Rangers orienteering challenge, but my point is that the thing that’s bad about SEAL hell week is that you’re considered a pussy if you quit, even if it’s out of genuine and reasonable fear for your life.
The book overall is about the idea that your limits are fake, and humans can accomplish things that seem like they should be physically impossible as long as they just don’t give up. I think that’s a concept we could work with.
I think there are quite a few rationalists who challenge themselves to do fairly hard things, like founding a successful startup, putting together a large conference on short notice at the age of 18, or publishing a good post on rationality every day for a month, things kind of like that. I think I’ve challenged myself a lot more than I would have if I weren’t in the rationalist community, but I don’t think I’ve ever tried to do something that I felt was impossible. (I think a precious few rationalists have faced the impossible — probably Holden and Eliezer, to name any at all — but they’re very much the exception rather than the rule.)
Here are some things that feel impossible:
Write something as groundbreaking as the sequences, starting in one week (that’s your planning period) and posting every day for at least a year
Cause the public collective consciousness and ~all significant intellectuals in the US to take x-risk (and especially AI x-risk) seriously, within the year
Note that I very much do not suggest that people throw themselves at this task!
Make a novel discovery in particle physics (or a similar well-established field that you’ve never studied before), within six months
Without piggybacking on any existing space exploration project, put a spacecraft of your own design / owned by you on the moon within five years
Found a new country that gets recognized by the UN
And here are some things where I can see a path to accomplishing them, but where that path feels incredibly hard and scary — these examples are specific to me:
Become fluent in Mandarin, both speaking/listening AND reading/writing, in the next three months
I have a lifetime of failure to learn Mandarin behind me, including one academic year when I really actually tried, also Mandarin is just really fucking hard
Run a marathon within the next year
I have a chronic leg injury that makes running essentially impossible, that feels insurmountable but probably in reality is not
Make a million dollars in the next six months just via investing/betting
I am a very risk-averse person and was raised to fear the stock market
Permanently fix my depression and anxiety
It’s probably not impossible but jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezzzz
Found and run a company, like, one with actual employees and investors and a goal of growth (not just a one-person LLC, that’s cheating)
This just sounds awful in every way; I hate dealing with people and money and feel super unqualified for all of this
Again these will be different for different people. I think Eliezer’s quest to lose weight qualifies somewhere around here. I think things in this class are probably better candidates for serious rationality training exercises than the first list, though, maybe that’s wrong.
Anyway the goal is not to teach object-level skills, but to cause people to change their outlook on tasks that seem impossible. I think that’s one really important skill for rationalists/EAs to have, though not the only important skill. In any given quest you will probably learn additional useful object-level skills.
So idk those are some thoughts on one aspect of the thing. Didn’t properly feel like an answer so here it is as a comment instead.
(I have launch codes and am happy to prove it to you if you want.)
Hmmm, I feel like the argument “There’s some harm in releasing the codes entrusted to me, but not so much that it’s better for someone to die” might prove too much? Like, death is really bad, I definitely grant that. But despite the dollar amount you gave, I feel like we’re sort of running up against a sacred value thing. I mean, you could just as easily say, “There’s some harm in releasing the codes entrusted to me, but not so much that it’s better for someone to have a 10% chance of dying”—which would naïvely bring your price down to $167.20.
If you accept as true that that argument should be equally ‘morally convincing’, then you end up in a position where the only reasonable thing to do is to calculate exactly how much harm you actually expect to be done by you pressing the button. I’m not going to do this because I’m at work and it seems complicated (what is the disvalue of harm to the social fabric of an online community that’s trying to save the world, and operates largely on trust? perhaps it’s actually a harmless game, but perhaps it’s not, hard to know—seems like the majority of effects would happen down the line).
Additionally, I could just counter-offer a $1,672 counterfactual donation to GiveWell for you to not press the button. I’m not committing to do this, but I might do so if it came down to it.
I took an emergency medical response course in college (~40 hours, all in-person, with a mix of verbal lessons and practical exercises in each class), and the most important thing I learned was that having memorized what to do in an emergency is not sufficient to get you to actually act. [ETA: Also, to call 911 in an emergency!]
I got 100% on the written test and still remember much of it to this day, but I am an absolutely terrible person to go to in an emergency because I panic and freeze every time. I’ve seen this play out in myself many times over my life, not only when witnessing real falls, car accidents, and other incidents, but even in the practical exam for the course. The exam involved diagnosing and describing the treatment for instructors acting out different emergency scenarios, and while there were other contributing factors, ultimately the fact remains that I got 0% on the practical and failed the course because I had a panic attack and had to leave.
Knowing how to do chest compressions on a dummy is better than not knowing how to do that. But doing chest compressions on a dummy is extremely different from being faced with an unresponsive person, knowing that they’ll die if you don’t act, and knowing that even if you successfully save their life, administering CPR means a good chance of breaking some of their ribs. It’s better to know how to drag someone out of a burning building than to not know, but dragging an unconscious person through a smoky inferno is going to be different than doing the same motion in a brightly-lit classroom with a conscious and cooperative partner, where there are no real stakes for messing up.
On balance I’m still glad I took the course. But I caution anyone against thinking that just studying flashcards is sufficient preparation for real-life emergencies — at the very least, take a class like Jason did, with some in-person practical components.
I do have some general sense here that those aren’t emotionally realistic options for people with my emotional makeup.
Here’s my take: From the inside, Nate feels like he is incapable of not becoming very frustrated, even angry. In a sense this is true. But this state of affairs is in fact a consequence of Nate not being subject to the same rules as everybody else.
I think I know what it’s like, to an extent — I’ve had anger issues since I was born, and despite speaking openly about it to many people, I’ve never met anyone who’s been able to really understand the feeling of being overwhelmed with rage (especially not as an adult). That feeling can be very hard to control.
However, I am constantly aware that having an angry outburst is massively socially unacceptable, to the point where if I let such things happen regularly I would lose my job / my standing in the community / all my friends / everyone close to me. This creates an extremely strong incentive for me to self-regulate at least my outward reactions, even when it’s really hard. But because Nate is so high-status, he is allowed to make such outbursts without being faced with losing his job, his standing in the community, or his friends. This means he is insufficiently incentivized to self-regulate, and thus has been unable to learn.
I have several problems with including this in the 2018 review. The first is that it’s community-navel-gaze-y—if it’s not the kind of thing we allow on the frontpage because of concerns about newcomers seeing a bunch of in-group discussion, then it seems like we definitely wouldn’t want it to be in a semi-public-facing book, either.
The second is that I’ve found that most discussion of the concept of ‘status’ in rationalist circles to be pretty uniformly unproductive, and maybe even counterproductive. People generally only discuss ‘status’ when they’re feeling a lack of it, which means that discussions around the subject are often fraught and can be a bit of an echo chamber. I have not personally found any post about status to be enlightening or to have changed the way I think.
My other concerns have to do with specific parts of the post:
How is worth generated? Quite simply, by giving praise.
This is unsubstantiated and confusing in a whole host of ways. First, what is ‘worth’ supposed to mean? Toon seems to say it means something along the lines of “we will grant you personhood and take you seriously and allow you onto the ark when the world comes crumbling.” If I had to sum this idea up into one word I would call it ‘acceptance’.
Second, “worth is generated by praise” doesn’t square with my experience at all. I tend to think I’m fairly well-calibrated when it comes to my own abilities, so when someone gives me praise that I don’t think I deserve, that doesn’t generate any value for me (I just think the person is wrong/miscalibrated). Praise is also not what I need when I’m burned out or upset—I need people to help me solve my problems, not give me vacuous words of encouragement.
Also, to be more general about it, giving children too much praise can harm them just as much as giving them too little.
I’m having trouble putting my finger on exactly what else about this claim feels wrong to me, but the two points I covered are definitely not all of it. It just really rubs me the wrong way.
I’d like to suggest we try for Giving Praise as a rationalist virtue.
I see lots of rationalists shying away from calls to action nowadays, and I think this one is particularly dicey. Related to my point about being calibrated about your own abilities, if we unthinkingly adopted this ‘rationalist virtue’, it seems like it would encourage people to say nice things to others even when it wasn’t warranted.
In this post, Toon specifically mentions not being appreciated for his work on RAISE, which he recently revealed shut down partially due to potential funders having concerns about the organization. While I know from (less intense) experience that it can be really emotionally draining to work for no pay on something that gets no recognition, I don’t think the problem there is that we’re refusing to give recognition. The problem is usually with the project. When I’ve worked on projects that fizzled and died, and while the negative feedback at the time hurt my feelings, I’m glad that people didn’t lie to me and tell me that the projects were a good idea. The failure and lack of recognition were usually eye-opening signals that my idea was bad or that I was going about the thing incorrectly. I don’t have context on RAISE beyond what’s in Toon’s post, but (not to be a huge jerk) my sense is that it was likely a flawed project, and while the impact the whole thing had on Toon’s well-being was definitely unfortunate, I see no evidence that just giving him more praise for the effort he was putting into it would have been helpful.
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If I were to reformulate the entire idea of this post into something more palatable to me, I would say something like, “If you appreciate someone’s actions, you can often provide them with a lot of value by giving them specific and genuine feedback about what it is you appreciate about them,” and, “In general, showing people love and acceptance is a good way to help them avoid burnout, and once you have that established backdrop of trust and mutual respect, you can be honest with them about the ways in which they’re going about things wrong.”
These takeaways are very different from the original “give praise”, and I continue to be uncomfortable with this post.
When you wrote “Against Facebook” a couple years ago, I had the same reaction as some of the other commenters here—that yes, Facebook was terrible, but I used it more responsibly than other people, and I had really thought it through and was getting the valuable things out of it while avoiding most (though not all) of the drawbacks.
But I left Facebook (and Tumblr) last November, and now reading this post I was like, “hell yeah, of course.” I don’t ever feel a desire to check Facebook—last week it sneakily logged me back in without me knowing, and I couldn’t deactivate again fast enough. I had a bunch of notifications but even the thought of checking them felt disgusting.
I thought Facebook was helping me keep in touch with friends, but before leaving I made sure I shared my other contact information with anyone who asked for it, and this seems like it’s solved the problem. I may not know what’s going on with everyone I’ve ever known at every moment, but I know that I could find out if I really wanted to, by texting them or emailing them or sending them a letter. Plus, this strategy meant that one of my friends from high school, who I haven’t talked to in years, sent me a postcard from all the way in Japan! That gave me more warm fuzzies than a full year of Facebook use. Since leaving social media I also spend more time with my housemates and higher-quality time with my boyfriend, so I feel that it’s helped my social relationships in general, even if I have fewer now.
(One caveat is that I live in a group house, which means that if there’s an event that I might want to go to or something important happens in our social circles, I’m likely to find out about it even though I don’t have Facebook, because my housemates do have Facebook. So this feels kind of like cheating.)
I’m more conflicted about the use of Facebook for things other than casual socializing. On the LW/SSC meetups survey I ran, I asked a question about how people would want to communicate with people from other meetup groups, and a clear majority of respondents wanted to use a Facebook group. I really don’t want to go back to using Facebook (which I’d have to if I wanted to admin the group), but I do sort of agree that Facebook groups are the best currently-existing tool for the sort of thing we want to do.
I also used to have a feeling that Facebook was really the only place to go to ask for things like borrowing items or finding volunteers for events. That’s somewhat less true for me since people in my neighborhood coordinate over Slack and Discord, but I do think there’s a lot of value in being able to broadcast requests to hundreds of people at once.
tl;dr I personally hate Facebook but am not sure about the feasibility of replacing it. Not a very unique position, I know.
You can’t just cite a Shakespeare quote as being from King Henry IV, that is two different plays you BARBARIAN. If you were trying to pander to me because King Henry IV Part 1 is my favorite play, you FAILED; you quoted from King Henry IV Part 2. Disgusting.
I agree with other commenters that you are just less likely to see psychosis even if it’s there, both because it’s not ongoing in the way that depression and anxiety are, and because people are less likely to discuss it. I was only one step away from Jessica in the social graph in October of 2017 and never had any inkling that she’d had a psychotic episode until just now. I also wasn’t aware that Zack Davis had ever had a psychotic episode, despite having met him several times and having read his blog a bit. I also lived with Olivia during the time that she was apparently inspiring psychosis in others.
In fact, the only psychotic episodes I’ve known about are ones that had news stories written about them, which suggests to me that you are probably underestimating the extent to which people keep quiet about the psychotic episodes of themselves and those close to them. It seems in quite poor taste to gossip about, akin to gossiping about friends’ suicide attempts (which I also assume happen much more often than I hear about — I think one generally only hears about the ones that succeed or that are publicized to spread awareness).
Just for thoroughness, here are the psychotic episodes I’ve known about, in chronological order:
Eric Bruylant’s, which has been discussed in other comments. I was aware that he was in jail because my housemates were trying to support him by showing up to his trials and stuff, and we still got mail for him (the case had happened pretty recently when I moved in). I think I found out the details — including learning that psychosis was involved — from the news story though.
I was on a sports team in college, and the year after I graduated, one of my teammates had a psychotic break. I only heard about this because he was wandering the streets yelling and ended up trying to attack some campus police officers with a metal pipe and got shot (thankfully non-fatally).
It’s unclear to me if what happened with Ziz&co at Westminster Woods was a psychotic episode, but in any case I knew about it at the time, but only had the details clarified in the news story.
Okay, meta: This post has over 500 comments now and it’s really hard to keep a handle on all of the threads. So I spent the last 2 hours trying to outline the main topics that keep coming up. Most top-level comments are linked to but some didn’t really fit into any category, so a couple are missing; also apologies that the structure is imperfect.
Topic headers are bolded and are organized very roughly in order of how important they seem (both to me personally and in terms of the amount of air time they’ve gotten).
Discussion of MIRI/CFAR vs Leverage comparison
Extent to which this post pulls attention away from (and cheapens) the important discussion that was being had about Leverage
Aella’s thread
Discussion of extent to which the comparison is misleading, and concrete places where the comparison breaks down
Eli’s thread
Viliam’s subsubthread
Habryka’s subthread
Vanessa’s thread
Different drivers of mental health problems (rationalistthrowaway’s thread)
Different norms wrt criticsim (Viliam’s subthread)
We don’t actually know how bad Leverage was (Freyja’s subthread)
Accounts from other MIRI and CFAR employees (current or former)
Addressing factual statements
orthonormal’s thread
Anna’s thread
Unreal’s thread
Allegations of problems at CFAR (PhoenixFriend’s thread)
Several responses from current or recent CFAR employees
It’s misleading to say CFAR and Leverage had the same plans (Anna’s subthread)
Addressing the interaction between CFAR and MAPLE/Monastic Academy (Duncan’s subthread)
Addressing the general vibe of the OP
Logan’s subthread
Extent of Michael Vassar’s involvement in psychosis cases, and discussion of how misleading it was to leave this out of the original post
Scott’s thread
Habryka’s subthread
Problems need scapegoats (Vaniver’s subthread)
Is the situation described here worse than the average?
Discussion of how rates of mental health problems in the rationality community and various subcommunities compare to base rates in comparable communities
Rob’s thread
Anecdotal experience in CS academia
Gunnar and Habryka’s subthread
Discussion of whether MIRI and Leverage are worse for employees’ mental health than the average tech workplace
Jessica’s subthread
Discussion of secrecy
Zack’s thread
Claim that secrecy of this level is totally normal in some fields (Aryeh’s comment)
Discussion of whether writing about timelines influences timelines (AlexMennen’s thread)
Is cult-like psychological harm a recurring pattern in the rationalist community, and what can we do to mitigate it?
nostalgebraist’s thread
Comparison to academia (temporarity_visitor_account’s thread)
Three factors and potential ways of addressing them (James_Miller’s thread)
Short comment by 4thWayWastrel basically just stating the question
Discussion of potentially harmful memes around ‘psycho-spiritual development’, including postrationality, psychedelics, and ‘woo’/supernaturalism
CronoDAS and Eliezer’s thread
Woo: Discussion of Buddhism, meditation, tarot
Can meditation be harmful in much the same way as psychedelics
Connections between psychedelic use and ‘woo’
Psychedelics: Discussion of therapeutic uses, anecdotes about good and bad effects, anecdotes about irresponsible usage
Sub-discussion about drugs in general and illegality
Viliam’s subthread
Around Kegan levels and the Monastic Academy
Claim that psychedelics don’t have much impact on most people (Kenny’s thread)
Discussion of drugs and drug legal status (James_Miller’s thread)
The mission is inherently stressful
Chris_Leong’s comment
adamzerner’s comment
Vanessa’s thread
Discussion of idolization of rationalist community ‘thought leaders’
Deference to Eliezer (Ben’s thread)
Deference to Anna Salamon (PhoenixFriend’s thread, perhaps elsewhere as well)
How important is Eliezer’s contribution to AI safety, actually? (Chris_Leong’s thread)
People might have very different experiences in the same organization
Unreal’s thread
Also discussed a lot in the comments of the preceding Leverage-focused posts
Addressing other aspects of the OP
Discussion of what OP says about hiring practices (Vanessa’s thread)
Discussion of OP’s allegations that other EA orgs do ‘fake research’ (philip_b’s thread)
Unconvinced by the argumentation in the post (bn22’s comment)