The core thesis of the post seems to rely on the level of abuse in this community being substantially higher than in other communities (the last sentence seems to make that pretty explicit). I think if you want to compellingly argue for your thesis you should provide the best evidence you have for that thesis. Journalism commonly being full of fallacious reasoning doesn’t mean that it’s good or forgivable for journalism to reason fallaciously.
I do think journalists from time to time summarizing and distilling concrete data is good, but in that case people still clearly benefit if the data is presented in a relatively unbiased way that doesn’t distort the underlying truth a lot, or omits crucial pieces of information that the journalist very likely knew but didn’t contribute to their narrative. I think journalists not doing that is condemnable and the resulting articles are rarely worth reading.
I don’t think the core thesis is “the level of abuse in this community is substantially higher than in others”. Even if we (very generously) just assumed that the level of abuse in this community was lower than that in most places, these incidents would still be very important to bring up and address.
When an abuse of power arises the organisation/community in which it arises has roughly two possible approaches—clamping down on it or covering it up. The purpose of the first is to solve the problem, the purpose of the second is to maintain the reputation of the organisation. (How many of those catholic church child abuse stories were covered up because they were worried about the reputational damage to the church). By focusing on the relative abuse level it seem like you are seeing these stories (primarily) as an attack on the reputation of your tribe (“A blue abused someone? No he didn’t its Green propaganda!”). Does it matter whether the number of children abused in the catholic church was higher than the number abused outside it?
If that is the case, then there is nothing wrong with that emotional response. If you feel a sense of community with a group and you yourself have never experienced the problem, it can just feel like an attack on something you like. The journalist might even be motivated badly (eg. they think an editorial line against EA will go down well). But I still think its a fairly unhelpful response
Of course, one could argue that the position “Obviously deal with these issues, but also they are very rare and our tribe is actually super good” is perfectly logically consistent. And it is. But the language is doing extra work—by putting “us good” next too the issue it sounds like minimising or dismissing the issue. Put another way claims of “goodness” could be made in one post, and then left them out of the sex abuse discussion. The two are not very linked.
Does it matter whether the number of children abused in the catholic church was higher than the number abused outside it?
Yes, it does matter here, since base rates matter in general.
Honestly, one of my criticisms that I want to share as a post later on is that LW ignores the base rates and focuses too much on the inside view over the outside view, but in this case, it does matter here since the analogous claim would be that the church is uniquely bad at sexual assault, and if it turned out that it wasn’t uniquely bad, then it means we don’t have to panic.
That’s the importance of base rates: It gives you a solid number that is useful to compare against. Nothing is usually nearly as unprecedented or new as a first time person thinks.
The base-rates post sounds like an interesting one, I look forward to it. But, unless I am very confused, the base rates are only ever going to help answer questions like: “is this group of people better than society in general by metric X” (You can bring a choice Hollywood producer and Prince out as part of the control group). My point was that I think a more useful question might be something like “Why was the response to this specific incident inadequate?”.
I can see how the article might be frustrating for people who know the additional context that the article leaves out (where some of the additional context is simply having been in this community for a long time and having more insight into how it deals with abuse). From the outside though, it does feel like some factors would make abuse more likely in this community: how salient “status” feels, mixing of social and professional lives, gender ratios, conflicts of interests everywhere due to the community being small, sex positivity and acceptance of weirdness and edginess (which I think are great overall!). There are also factors pushing in the other direction of course.
I say this because it seems very reasonable for someone who is new to the community to read the article and the tone in the responses here and feel uncomfortable interacting with the community in the future. A couple of women in the past have mentioned to me that they haven’t engaged much with the in-person rationalist community because they expect the culture to be overly tolerant of bad behaviour, which seems sad because I expect them to enjoy hanging out in the community.
I can see the reasons behind not wanting to give the article more attention if it seems like a very inaccurate portrayal of things. But it does feel like that makes this community feel more unwelcoming to some newer people (especially women) who would otherwise like to be here and who don’t have the information about how the things mentioned in the article were responded to in the past.
Yeah, I might want to write a post that tries to actually outline the history of abuse that I am aware of, without doing weird rhetorical tricks or omitting information. I’ve recently been on a bit of a “let’s just put everything out there in public” spree, and I would definitely much prefer for new people to be able to get an accurate sense of the risk of abuse and harm, which, to be clear, is definitely not zero and feels substantial enough that people should care about it.
I do think the primary reason why people haven’t written up stuff in the past is exactly because they are worried their statements will get ripped out of context and used as ammunition in hit pieces like this, so I actually think articles like this make the problem worse, not better, though I am not confident of this, and the chain of indirect effects is reasonably long here.
I would be appreciative if you do end up writing such a post.
Sad that sometimes the things that seem good for creating a better, more honest, more accountable community for the people in it also give outsiders ammunition. My intuitions point strongly in the direction of doing things in this category anyway.
I don’t disagree with the main thrust of your comment, but,
I just wanna point out that ‘fallacious’ is often a midwit objection, and either ‘fallacious’ is not the true problem or it is the true problem but the stereotypes about what is fallacious do not align with reality: A Unifying Theory in Defense of Logical Fallacies
Yeah, that’s fair. I was mostly using it as a synonym for “badly reasoned and inaccurate” here. Agree that there are traps around policing speech by trying to apple rhetorical fallacies, which I wasn’t trying to do here.
I feel confused by this argument.
The core thesis of the post seems to rely on the level of abuse in this community being substantially higher than in other communities (the last sentence seems to make that pretty explicit). I think if you want to compellingly argue for your thesis you should provide the best evidence you have for that thesis. Journalism commonly being full of fallacious reasoning doesn’t mean that it’s good or forgivable for journalism to reason fallaciously.
I do think journalists from time to time summarizing and distilling concrete data is good, but in that case people still clearly benefit if the data is presented in a relatively unbiased way that doesn’t distort the underlying truth a lot, or omits crucial pieces of information that the journalist very likely knew but didn’t contribute to their narrative. I think journalists not doing that is condemnable and the resulting articles are rarely worth reading.
I don’t think the core thesis is “the level of abuse in this community is substantially higher than in others”. Even if we (very generously) just assumed that the level of abuse in this community was lower than that in most places, these incidents would still be very important to bring up and address.
When an abuse of power arises the organisation/community in which it arises has roughly two possible approaches—clamping down on it or covering it up. The purpose of the first is to solve the problem, the purpose of the second is to maintain the reputation of the organisation. (How many of those catholic church child abuse stories were covered up because they were worried about the reputational damage to the church). By focusing on the relative abuse level it seem like you are seeing these stories (primarily) as an attack on the reputation of your tribe (“A blue abused someone? No he didn’t its Green propaganda!”). Does it matter whether the number of children abused in the catholic church was higher than the number abused outside it?
If that is the case, then there is nothing wrong with that emotional response. If you feel a sense of community with a group and you yourself have never experienced the problem, it can just feel like an attack on something you like. The journalist might even be motivated badly (eg. they think an editorial line against EA will go down well). But I still think its a fairly unhelpful response
Of course, one could argue that the position “Obviously deal with these issues, but also they are very rare and our tribe is actually super good” is perfectly logically consistent. And it is. But the language is doing extra work—by putting “us good” next too the issue it sounds like minimising or dismissing the issue. Put another way claims of “goodness” could be made in one post, and then left them out of the sex abuse discussion. The two are not very linked.
Yes, it does matter here, since base rates matter in general.
Honestly, one of my criticisms that I want to share as a post later on is that LW ignores the base rates and focuses too much on the inside view over the outside view, but in this case, it does matter here since the analogous claim would be that the church is uniquely bad at sexual assault, and if it turned out that it wasn’t uniquely bad, then it means we don’t have to panic.
That’s the importance of base rates: It gives you a solid number that is useful to compare against. Nothing is usually nearly as unprecedented or new as a first time person thinks.
The base-rates post sounds like an interesting one, I look forward to it. But, unless I am very confused, the base rates are only ever going to help answer questions like: “is this group of people better than society in general by metric X” (You can bring a choice Hollywood producer and Prince out as part of the control group). My point was that I think a more useful question might be something like “Why was the response to this specific incident inadequate?”.
That might be the problem here, since there seem to be two different conversations, going by the article:
Why was this incident not responded to accurately?
Is our group meaningfully worse or better, compared to normal society? And why is it worse or better?
I can see how the article might be frustrating for people who know the additional context that the article leaves out (where some of the additional context is simply having been in this community for a long time and having more insight into how it deals with abuse). From the outside though, it does feel like some factors would make abuse more likely in this community: how salient “status” feels, mixing of social and professional lives, gender ratios, conflicts of interests everywhere due to the community being small, sex positivity and acceptance of weirdness and edginess (which I think are great overall!). There are also factors pushing in the other direction of course.
I say this because it seems very reasonable for someone who is new to the community to read the article and the tone in the responses here and feel uncomfortable interacting with the community in the future. A couple of women in the past have mentioned to me that they haven’t engaged much with the in-person rationalist community because they expect the culture to be overly tolerant of bad behaviour, which seems sad because I expect them to enjoy hanging out in the community.
I can see the reasons behind not wanting to give the article more attention if it seems like a very inaccurate portrayal of things. But it does feel like that makes this community feel more unwelcoming to some newer people (especially women) who would otherwise like to be here and who don’t have the information about how the things mentioned in the article were responded to in the past.
Yeah, I might want to write a post that tries to actually outline the history of abuse that I am aware of, without doing weird rhetorical tricks or omitting information. I’ve recently been on a bit of a “let’s just put everything out there in public” spree, and I would definitely much prefer for new people to be able to get an accurate sense of the risk of abuse and harm, which, to be clear, is definitely not zero and feels substantial enough that people should care about it.
I do think the primary reason why people haven’t written up stuff in the past is exactly because they are worried their statements will get ripped out of context and used as ammunition in hit pieces like this, so I actually think articles like this make the problem worse, not better, though I am not confident of this, and the chain of indirect effects is reasonably long here.
I would be appreciative if you do end up writing such a post.
Sad that sometimes the things that seem good for creating a better, more honest, more accountable community for the people in it also give outsiders ammunition. My intuitions point strongly in the direction of doing things in this category anyway.
I don’t disagree with the main thrust of your comment, but,
I just wanna point out that ‘fallacious’ is often a midwit objection, and either ‘fallacious’ is not the true problem or it is the true problem but the stereotypes about what is fallacious do not align with reality: A Unifying Theory in Defense of Logical Fallacies
Yeah, that’s fair. I was mostly using it as a synonym for “badly reasoned and inaccurate” here. Agree that there are traps around policing speech by trying to apple rhetorical fallacies, which I wasn’t trying to do here.