Thinking aloud here. I don't think you necessarily have to respond by quoting the person. You can just provide a frame or facts which counter or inoculate against whatever critiques are currently widespread. E.g. if someone accuses you of a crime, you can mention that you were someplace else at the time the crime was committed, without directly repeating the criminal accusation. However, your X replies might fill with accusation talk in that case.

Maybe I should've clarified that I was more talking about the community health team than event organizers. I don't think the community health team should be excluding people based on vibes. I think they should mediate conflicts, and announce their decisions in some cases, but the blacklist should not generally be used as a tool to "resolve" conflicts unless there are additional circumstances beyond just the disagreement itself.

See also Google Trends.

Supposedly, people on X generally don't click links. My guess would be that even fewer are searching on Google/Wikipedia. So I don't expect these metrics to be super reliable. They might more closely track "fraction of users engaging deeply" than "size of PR crisis".

If you're explaining, you're losing: Every rebuttal repeats the accusation to people who haven't heard it yet. Answer the accusation once, link to it, and stop explaining. This is the "illusory truth" effect (information is true when it's repeated).

Is that actually true of X's reply mechanism to a significant degree? My impression was that replies on X are mostly just seen by people who tap on the original post. Replies wouldn't necessarily have the effect of amplifying the original post?

Certainly writing Community Notes would not present much risk I presume??

her participation at our event is recommended against, lest she gather supporters for her case

This seems fairly dubious to me, as grounds to exclude someone. I thought exclusions were supposed to be for someone who was potentially dangerous to others.

If Laura's case is bad, hopefully potential supporters will be able to suss that out. If Laura's case is good, it's good that there's a safeguard by which she can gather supporters.

The idea of trying to "keep the peace" in this kind of hamfisted way seems likely to create more problems than it solves.

Apparently AI is not even a winning issue for Democrats right now:

https://x.com/DKThomp/status/2099871668411805768

So I don't see how doubling down on Democratic Party partisanship gets us anywhere.

Remember that in the US, Independents are much more common than either Democrats or Republicans.

The Trump stuff may all be true. Nonetheless, getting Trump impeached would basically need to be a bipartisan effort.

We might be able to win with Democrats + Independents. But the way to win the Independents, in my mind, is to make arguments which could, at least in theory, persuade Republicans.

https://x.com/gmiller/status/2099902172075078006

It seems like either this works and is easy (in which case CG should be able to do it) or hard (in which case SFF is net negative and should stop - if this were true I'd like to know it so I could stop supporting them). I still can't figure out the world-model in which SFF exists and is net positive, CG is begging for more grantmakers, and all these organizations still aren't fully funded.

To be fair, CG's grant to OpenAI looks fairly terrible with the benefit of hindsight. That does seem to suggest that AI grantmaking should be done with care, or something of that nature. But I would say that problem would be better fixed through public reflection on what went wrong with the OpenAI grant, as opposed to just trying to monopolize more talent. It would really suck if CG is monopolizing talent for an organization that is fundamentally broken at a structural incentives level, e.g. excessive focus on prestige-maxxing.

Whose job is it to identify EA questions which could benefit from better forecasts?

Consider two different hypotheses:

• Forecasting is only helpful for AI

• Forecasting is helpful outside of AI, but AI has captured much more forecasting interest than other cause areas

How much time are non-AI org leaders spending trying to think up decision-relevant forecasts related to their cause areas?

• If leaders are not spending any time trying to think up such forecasts, maybe there is low-hanging fruit here. Maybe EA has latent forecasting capability which can be tapped to improve organizational decision-making. Or maybe such forecasting capability will free up in a few years if AI turns out to be a nothingburger.

• If leaders have spent a lot of time trying to think up useful forecasts, and failed, maybe forecasting really is fairly useless outside of AI.

If I was leading a non-AI EA organization, and I had a forecast I really wanted to see the result of, who would I even talk to? Which forecasting organizations are actively soliciting ideas for EA-related forecast questions?

It seems to me that a lot of what EA does is implicit forecasting in some sense, e.g. if you give someone a grant, it's an implicit forecast about the probability that they will be able to accomplish something with that grant. EA is often critiqued for neglecting "systemic change". If you want to do systemic change, being able to forecast the effects of various systemic changes is really useful. If you take any action, there's an implicit forecast that it will lead to a good outcome and not backfire somehow. Wouldn't it be better to make this forecast explicit? All else equal, wouldn't it be good to get some perspective from people outside of the organization, who are perhaps forecasting in their free time as a replacement for watching TV or other downtime activities?

Of course it is socially acceptable to disagree with "traumatized" people in EA.

Well you previously wrote:

I think writing such quoted passages in passive response to a disclosure of sexual assault is cruel and disgusting in my personal opinion

Insofar as others share this opinion of yours, it won't be socially acceptable to express those particular disagreements.

Assuming we are talking about the Any Community That Tolerates Trauma Junkies Is Unsafe For Everyone Else post, it's not something I would've predicted in advance would be considered "cruel and disgusting". So it remains the case that I personally have some uncertainty regarding what opinions will be considered "cruel and disgusting", to the point where it seems a bit safer socially to just avoid expressing much of any disagreement at all.

I think you have a good point that if a person behaves in a traumatized way, that's evidence they are an assault victim. On the other hand, it's also possible to go too far in the opposite direction, where it becomes socially unacceptable to disagree with the traumatized person in any way, and we have policies set by traumatized people who aren't thinking clearly.

I'm not claiming that EA is at this point necessarily. But I do believe this possibility is part of what motivates skepticism towards trauma victims. I expect with some creative thinking it is possible to come up with a compromise which achieves both of the important objectives here.