Nathan Young
Bio
Participation4
Builds web apps (eg viewpoints.xyz) and makes forecasts. Currently I have spare capacity.
How others can help me
Talking to those in forecasting to improve my forecasting question generation tool
Writing forecasting questions on EA topics.
Meeting EAs I become lifelong friends with.
How I can help others
Connecting them to other EAs.
Writing forecasting questions on metaculus.
Talking to them about forecasting.
Posts 147
Comments2651
Topic contributions20
TraceWoodgrains claims one person told him that WBE had sexually assaulted a friend. One of WBE's stories matches a womans account in which he assualts her. He has many other stories where he describes rape. Why is only one of them true? Some private information.
I am no paragon here, and would prefer someone else was handling this.
cw rape
Context:
- A blogger (Worst Boyfriend Ever) who writes accounts of rapes went to Manifest Summer Camp. He was kicked out
- Austin Chen offered him a ticket to manifest, then rescinded it
- I looked into Worst Boyfriend Ever. There are some 3rd hand accounts of sexual assualt. He claims his stories are true except for the illegal bits
- I said he was probably a rapist. I stand by it.
- People from near me on twitter argued that actually he wasn't, or that it was just a kink, or whatever, whatever, whatever
- Ugh. Horrible.
I like to call hits and misses. And so, while I have argued this forum is sometimes too sensitive about gender issues or too guilt prone, I would like to give credit that I am glad it seems very unlikely to me that that behaviour would be acceptable here and that it greives me for women to have to read that a guy who writes lurid descriptions of rape would be reflexively welcomed/defended.
My model of poeple who disagree with me is that they would roll their eyes and say 'obviously' and 'we've been saying this for years' and frankly, we still disagree on many things, but it feels right to say "yeah I agree on this point". I don't know what norms should be, but I completely understand why women wouldn't want to be in spaces where they are likely to come into contact with these people.
A single article discussing ~6 cases, written 3 years ago, several of which have been disputed as being EA/rationalist group houses, one of which was someone who has been banned for years (I think) and the other taking place in the UK, does not seem a lot of evidence about current norms in Berkeley.
I have been excluded from events and not told why. It sucks. But I feel like explaining to everyone is a big cost. And only explaining to the easy cases makes the hard cases more obvious. In a world where there are too few events (in my view) I would like event organisers to do as they want without me claiming they have broken some big norm.
But I'm sad exclusions happen, then generally suck, especially for those excluded, but sometimes for the organisers too.
I would like to have some clarity on Community Health's processes:
- How many things are reported of what level of concern?
- Can they give an example case and how it might be handled?
- What are behaviours that might be responded to in different ways.
I think it's reasonable that even if a community doesn't know specific cases, we could know some numbers and a general sense of how things work and what is and isn't acceptable. The fear/inability to have these discussions as a community has, in my view, been a key fracture down the middle of EA for about 5 years.
Interesting take. I don't like it.
Perhaps because I like saying overrated/underrated.
But also because overrated/underrated is a quick way to provide information. "Forecasting is underrated by the population at large" is much easier to think of than "forecasting is probably rated 4/10 by the population at large and should be rated 6/10"
Over/underrated requires about 3 mental queries, "Is it better or worse than my ingroup thinks" "Is it better or worse than my ingroup thinks?" "Am I gonna have to be clear about what I mean?"
Scoring the current and desired status of something requires about 20 queries "Is 4 fair?" "Is 5 fair" "What axis am I rating on?" "Popularity?" "If I score it a 4 will people think I'm crazy?"...
Like in some sense your right that % forecasts are more useful than "More likely/less likely" and sizes are better than "bigger smaller" but when dealing with intangibles like status I think it's pretty costly to calculate some status number, so I do the cheaper thing.
Also would you prefer people used over/underrated less or would you prefer the people who use over/underrated spoke less? Because I would guess that some chunk of those 50ish karma are from people who don't like the vibe rather than some epistemic thing. And if that's the case, I think we should have a different discussion.
I guess I think that might come from a frustration around jargon or rationalists in general. And I'm pretty happy to try and broaden my answer from over/underrated - just as I would if someone asked me how big a star was and I said "bigger than an elephant". But it's worth noting it's a bandwidth thing and often used because giving exact sizes in status is hard. Perhaps we shouldn't have numbers and words for it, but we don't.