welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Avoiding Munich's Mistakes: Advice for CEA and Local Groups, published by Larks on the effective altruism forum.
If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, p23
We strive to base our actions on the best available evidence and reasoning about how the world works. We recognise how difficult it is to know how to do the most good, and therefore try to avoid overconfidence, to seek out informed critiques of our own views, to be open to unusual ideas, and to take alternative points of view seriously. ...
We are a community united by our commitment to these principles, not to a specific cause. Our goal is to do as much good as we can, and we evaluate ways to do that without committing ourselves at the outset to any particular cause. We are open to focusing our efforts on any group of beneficiaries, and to using any reasonable methods to help them. If good arguments or evidence show that our current plans are not the best way of helping, we will change our beliefs and actions.
Excepted from The Guiding Principles of Effective Altruism
Introduction
This post argues that Cancel Culture is a significant danger to the potential of EA project, discusses the mistakes that were made by EA Munich and CEA in their deplatforming of Robin Hanson, and provides advice on how to avoid such issues in the future.
As ever, I encourage you to use the navigation pane to jump to the parts of the article that are most relevant to you. In particular, if you are already convinced you might skip the 'examples' and 'quotes' sections.
Background
The Nature of Cancel Culture
In the past couple of years, there’s been much damage done to the norms around free speech and inquiry, in substantial parts due to what’s often called cancel culture. Of relevance to the EA community is that there have been an increasing number of highly public threats and attacks on scientists and public intellectuals, where researchers are harassed online, disinvited from conferences, had their papers retracted, and fired, because of mass online mobs reacting to an accusation over slight wording on topics of race, gender, and other issues of identity, or guilt-by-association with other people who have also been attacked by such mobs.
This is colloquially called ‘cancelling’, after the hashtags that have formed saying #CancelX or #xisoverparty, where X is some person, company or other entity, hashtags which are commonly trending on Twitter.
While such mobs cannot attack every person who speaks in public, they can attack any person who speaks in public, leading to chilling effects where nobody wants to talk about the topics that can lead to cancelling.
Cancel Culture essentially involves the following steps:
A victim, often a researcher, says or does something that irks someone online.
This critic then harshly criticises the person using attacks that are hard to respond to in our culture - the accusation of racism is a common one. The goal of this attack is to signal to a larger mob that they should pile on, with the hope of causing massive damage to the person’s private and professional lives.
Many more people then join in the attack online, including (often) contacting their employer.
People who defend the victim are attacked as also being guilty of a similar crime.
Seeing this dynamic, many associates of the victim prefer to sever their relationship, rather than be subject to this abuse. This may also include their employer, for whom the loss of one employee seems a relatively small cost for maintaining PR.
The online crowd may swiftly move on; however, the victim now lives under a cloud of suspicion that is hard to...
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