I prefer not to get into specific examples here (several have been brought up in comments to varying degrees of controversy), but rather to discuss the broader meta question of how best to be a community that avoids falling for things.
Davis_Kingsley
Yes, I think my focus is ideally less on “debate specific examples” (I can easily think of many that I think would be extremely controversial, some of which have been brought up in the comments) and more on what sort of meta-rules would be appropriate to use in order to try and protect ourselves more generally and be the type of community that doesn’t fall for this stuff.
Avoiding Moral Fads?
What counts as an “employee of the Center for Applied Rationality”? I do various work for CFAR on a part-time or contract basis but haven’t worked there full-time for a while, does that make me ineligible?
[Question] How to Legally Conduct “Rationalist Bets” in California?
I am interested in why Vavilov Day feels different to people than common rationalist holidays.
I think that my comments on that will unfortunately involve substantial criticism of other rationalist celebrations in a way that you may not wish to host. I will perhaps write up another post with more detail.
(Oh, one other note—I would quite prefer it if the original post didn’t implicitly endorse suicide.)
I don’t endorse the archipelago model for LW and this is a good example of why—making that comment, I had no idea that you didn’t want to host the discussion or in fact what your opinions on other rationalist holidays were. I’m happy to go along with your decisions since that is the model we have, but I’m not sure how I would have known what you thought on these matters from the post I commented on.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, it was meant mostly as an aside and one that strengthened my praise for Vavilov Day (as indicating that this is appealing even to someone who dislikes most rationalist holidays), but I suppose the dislike was too controversial and/or too flippant.
I may write a post of my own describing why I don’t like rationalist holidays/think they can do better, but I think that post would itself likely be extremely controversial so I’d have to approach it carefully.
Personally, I think Eliezer was straightforwardly wrong about that; I think the word is useful even if it’s misused by some—that said if we were to taboo “cringe” I think that if I had said “embarrassing and unworthy” or something like that I think it would have largely the same meaning.
On the main thread, I commented:
Just wanted to say that I think most rationalist “holidays” or “rituals” are pretty cringe, but this one strikes me as something much more real and valuable. I’m not sure I agree with your concept of “Patron Saint holidays” for the community as a whole but this one seems at least somewhat virtuous and noble in a way that I think a lot of other stuff misses.
I noticed some downvotes there, which I presume are thanks to my low opinion of much of rationalist “holidays” and “rituals”. Would people be interested in discussing that more here? I think this one is notably better than what I’ve seen in other cases and I’m curious if people disagree, just don’t like me expressing negativity about other events, or what.
Just wanted to say that I think most rationalist “holidays” or “rituals” are pretty cringe, but this one strikes me as something much more real and valuable. I’m not sure I agree with your concept of “Patron Saint holidays” for the community as a whole but this one seems at least somewhat virtuous and noble in a way that I think a lot of other stuff misses.
- Jan 27, 2022, 10:06 AM; 3 points) 's comment on Vavilov Day Discussion Post by (
This is a great example of the type of content I do not want to see more of on LessWrong. A dumb clickbait title and random sneers at fields the author doesn’t (edit: seem to?) respect (history is very important) obscure what is actually an interesting and relevant point with respect to communication skills.
I think the fundamental point here is an interesting one but I think that this post is unfortunately marred by using a lewd example that limits the potential audience—there are people who I would not be willing to share this post with as a result.
This is not a problem unique to you in particular—I think many of Eliezer’s posts have similar issues, Three Worlds Collide being perhaps the most well-known but there are also some that suffer from being too “sneery” towards religion or similar—but I thought it might be worth pointing out regardless.
Like the previous post, there’s something weird about the framing here that makes me suspicious of this. It feels like certain perspectives are being “smuggled in”—for example:
Scott asserts that Michael Vassar thinks “regular society is infinitely corrupt and conformist and traumatizing”. This is hyperbolic (infinite corruption would leave nothing to steal) but Michael and I do believe that the problems I experienced at MIRI and CFAR were not unique or unusually severe for people in the professional-managerial class. By the law of excluded middle, the only possible alternative hypothesis is that the problems I experienced at MIRI and CFAR were unique or at least unusually severe, significantly worse than companies like Google for employees’ mental well-being.
This looks like a logical claim at first glance—of course the only options are “the problems weren’t unique or severe” or “the problems were unique and severe”—but posing the matter this way conflates problems that you had as an individual (“the problems I experienced”) with problems with the broader organization (“significantly worse… for employees’ well-being”), which I do not think have been adequately established to exist.
I think this is improper because it jumps from problems you had as an individual to problems that applied to the well-being of employees as a whole without having proved that this was the case. In other words, it feels like this argument is trying to smuggle in the premise that the problems you experienced were also problems for a broader group of employees as a whole, which I think has not properly been established.
Another perspective—and one which your framing seems to exclude—would be that your experience was unusually severe, but that the unique or unusual element had to do with personal characteristics of yours, particular conflicts or interactions you-in-particular had with others in the organization, or similar.
Similarly, you seem to partially conflate the actions of Ziz, who I consider an outright enemy of the community, with actions of “mainstream” community leaders. This does not strike me as a very honest way to engage.
I strongly disagree with this post and think we should be much more conservative until more is known re: omicron. I don’t have a writeup in great detail but thought it would be worthwhile at least to speak up here.
Any updates on this?
I think that CFAR, at least while I was there full-time from 2014 to sometime in 2016, was heavily focused on running workshops or other programs (like the alumni reunions or the MIRI Summer Fellows program). See for instance my comment here.
Most of what the organization was doing seemed to involve planning and executing workshops or other programs and teaching the existing curriculum. There were some developments and advancements to the curriculum, but they often came from the workshops or something around them (like followups) rather than a systematic development project. For example, Kenzi once took on the lion’s share of workshop followups for a time, which led to her coming up with new curriculum based on her sense of what the followup participants were missing even after having attended the workshop.
(In the time before I joined there had been significantly more testing of curriculum etc. outside of workshops, but this seemed to have become less the thing by the time I was there.)
A lot of CFAR’s internal focus was on improving operations capacity. There was at one time a narrative that the staff was currently unable to do some of the longer-term development because too much time was spent on last minute scrambles to execute programs, but once operations sufficiently improved, we’d have much more open time to allocate to longer-term development.
I was skeptical of this and I think ultimately vindicated—CFAR made major improvements to its operations, but this did not lead to systematic research and development emerging, though it did allow for running more programs and doing so more smoothly.
Unfortunately I think the working relationship between Anna and Kenzi was exceptionally bad in some ways and I would definitely believe that someone who mostly observed that would assume the organization had some of these problems; however I think this was also a relatively unique situation within the organization.
(I suspect though am not certain that both Anna and Kenzi would affirm that indeed this was an especially bad dynamic.)
With respect to point 2, I do not believe there was major peer pressure at CFAR to use psychadelics and I have never used psychadelics myself. It’s possible that there was major peer pressure on other people or it applied to me but I was oblivious to it or whatever but I’d be surprised.
Psychadelic use was also one of a few things that were heavily discouraged (or maybe banned?) as conversation topics for staff at workshops—like polyphasic sleep (another heavily discouraged topic), psychadelics were I believe viewed as potentially destabilizing and inappropriate to recommend to participants, plus there are legal issues involved. I personally consider recreational use of psychadelics to be immoral as well.My comment initially said 2014-2016 but IIRC my involvement was much less after 2015 so I edited it.
Thanks for the clarification, I’ve edited mine too.
Yeah, I strongly disagree with some of his takes but agree he has a similar thing in mind.