Richard Ngo's Shortform

Richard_Ngo

This is a special post for quick takes by Richard_Ngo. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Since there's been some recent discussion of the SSC/NYT incident (in particular via Zack's post), it seems worth copying over my twitter threads from that time about why I was disappointed by the rationalist community's response to the situation.

I continue to stand by everything I said below.

Thread 1 (6/23/20):

Scott Alexander is the most politically charitable person I know. Him being driven off the internet is terrible. Separately, it is also terrible if we have totally failed to internalize his lessons, and immediately leap to the conclusion that the NYT is being evil or selfish.

Ours is a community built around the long-term value of telling the truth. Are we unable to imagine reasonable disagreement about when the benefits of revealing real names outweigh the harms? Yes, it goes against our norms, but different groups have different norms.

If the extended rationalist/SSC community could cancel the NYT, would we? For planning to doxx Scott? For actually doing so, as a dumb mistake? For doing so, but for principled reasons? Would we give those reasons fair hearing? From what I've seen so far, I suspect not.

I feel very sorry for Scott, and really hope the NYT doesn't doxx him or anyone else. But if you claim to be charitable and openminded, except when confronted by a test that affects your own community, then you're using those words as performative weapons, deliberately or not.

[One more tweet responding to tweets by @balajis and @webdevmason, omitted here.]

Thread 2 (1/21/21):

Scott Alexander is writing again, on a substack blog called Astral Codex Ten! Also, he doxxed himself in the first post. This post seems like solid evidence that many SSC fans dramatically overreacted to the NYT situation.

Scott: "I still think the most likely explanation for what happened was that there was a rule on the books, some departments and editors followed it more slavishly than others, and I had the bad luck to be assigned to a department and editor that followed it a lot. That's all." [I didn't comment on this in the thread, but I intended to highlight the difference between this and the conspiratorial rhetoric that was floating around when he originally took his blog down.]

I am pretty unimpressed by his self-justification: "Suppose Power comes up to you and says hey, I'm gonna kick you in the balls. ... Sometimes you have to be a crazy bastard so people won't walk all over you." Why is doxxing the one thing Scott won't be charitable about?

[In response to @habryka asking what it would mean for Scott to be charitable about this]: Merely to continue applying the standards of most of his other posts, where he assumes both sides are reasonable and have useful perspectives. And not to turn this into a bravery debate.

[In response to @benskuhn saying that Scott's response is understandable, since being doxxed nearly prevented him from going into medicine]: On one hand, yes, this seems reasonable. On the other hand, this is also a fully general excuse for unreasonable dialogue. It is always the case that important issues have had major impacts on individuals. Taking this excuse seriously undermines Scott's key principles.

I would be less critical if it were just Scott, but a lot of people jumped on narratives similar to "NYT is going around kicking people in the balls for selfish reasons", demonstrating an alarming amount of tribalism - and worse, lack of self-awareness about it.

Ours is a community built around the long-term value of telling the truth. Are we unable to imagine reasonable disagreement about when the benefits of revealing real names outweigh the harms? Yes, it goes against our norms, but different groups have different norms.

I think this only holds if NYT has a consistent policy of using real names. My understanding is they have repeatedly written about other people using pseudonyms only, and have not articulated a principled reason to treat Scott differently.

2Vladimir_Nesov3y

Scott's flavor of charity is not quite this. It wouldn't be useful for understanding sides that are not reasonable or have useless perspectives otherwise, or else you'd need to routinely "assume" false things to carry out the exercise. The point is to meaningfully engage with other perspectives, without the usual prerequisite of having positive beliefs about them. Treating them in a similar way as if they were reasonable or useful, even when they clearly aren't. Sometimes the resulting investigation changes one's mind on this point. But often it doesn't, while still revealing many details that wouldn't otherwise be noticed. Actually intervening on your own beliefs would be self-deception, while treating useless and unreasonable views as they are usually treated wouldn't be charity. This is related to tolerance, where the point isn't to start liking people you don't like, or to start considering them part of your own ingroup. It's instead an intervention/norm that goes around the dislike to remove some of its downsides without directly removing the dislike itself.

9Jiro3y

Scott is already too charitable. I'd even say that Scott being too charitable made this specific situation worse. I don't find this to be a worthwhile thing about Scott either for us to emulate, or for Scott to take further. "Quokka" is a meme about rationalists for a reason. You are not going to have unerring logical evidence that someone wants to harm you if they are trying to be at all subtle. You have to figure it out from their behavior. Sometimes it just isn't true that both sides are reasonable and have useful perspectives.

Richard Ngo's Shortform

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Richard Ngo's Shortform

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