In favour of compassion, and against bandwagons of outrage

Welcome to the forum! I agree that EAs often have a really troubling relationship with their own feelings, and scruples to a fault. If you have strong reason to believe that Sam acted unethically, I have no objections against directing your feelings of anger at him. But I would urge people to carry their anger with dignity, both for the sake of community norms and their own sense of self-worth.

...what? I haven't been outside for a spell, and I knew things were bad, but that's just broken.

(We can fix it, though! With faith, patience, and a whole lot of sitting in office chairs!)

I’m impressed by your emotional gamut that you can feel anger and compassion simultaneously! (I don’t tend to feel anger.)

Stuff I feel when I see such posts (DEAM is classy in comparison to Twitter):

1. Compassion, because I still think they were basically well-intentioned, though evidently they made all the morally and strategically wrong calls.
2. It feels like uncivilized vigilantism that makes me feel unsafe.
3. They’re not ugly at all imo, so if I or anyone else is further from the beauty ideal, does that make us all even uglier (unbeknownst to me)? I can only imagine how terrible people must feel who read such posts and actually look similar to them!
4. It feels arbitrary and unpredictable. Why is someone suddenly ugly when they steal a ton of money? Are people going to think I smell bad because I did a bad mistake in my driving test 15 years ago? This probably just triggers childhood trauma where students alleged that I must’ve sustained in-utero brain damage because I’m afraid of violence or something. What keeps people from punishing, e.g., Rob Wiblin because they think that he caused harm by switching from CEA to 80k or whatever (80k used that as an example in some article)? That would seem super mean, un-called-for, and unproductive!
5. One of the many ways in which I’m completely different from them is that I’m highly risk-averse. That’s something that is generally frowned upon in our communities. I feel guilty for perpetuating a norm that is merely good at some common margin and not universally and can be so catastrophic when applied universally.

:)

This is the right kind of thinking in general, but in the specific context of this complex situation it would risk causing more problems than it would solve. The situation right now appears relatively stable and it could quickly get much worse. 

The media is combing over the catastrophe and looking for villains, because a good villain gets clicks like nothing else. There is already overwhelming evidence that weird movements like EA make for lucrative foils/characters in these sorts of stories, because ideologies orthogonal to the mainstream left and right are easy and feel satisfying for random people to hate on and reward them for clicking them.

On the other hand, if the dank EA memes page is amplifying messages in an unusually bizarre, intense, and aggressive way, then that's very concerning from a social engineering standpoint, since the hosting website is a repeat offender  and has vested interests in the AI industry.

While I agree that humour is a great de-stressor, I have faith in our ability to find alternative ways to entertain ourselves that don't involve kicking someone while they're down.

but I think that compassion needs to be extended to all the people who have been impacted by the FTX crisis

I agree with this. But I think compassion needs to be even further extended to every sentient beings who might be worse off because of this event (but this is assuming EA suffering from this event will be less good done in the world, and I recognize that there are people who seem to genuinely think that the world will be better if EA disappears from the world).  And the implication of this is that we need to think about whether these mockeries and passionate outrage are good for these sentient beings.

It might be the case that some EAs who are doing mockery or passionate outrage are doing it as a way of damage control. But from a longer-term perspective, I am not sure these mechanisms are net-good, for the reason below.

On a more general level, it seems to me that trusting and following our social norms systematically and reliably leaves out most sentient beings who deserve our compassion (future people and nonhuman animals, nonhuman animals in general, potential digital beings). And anger/disgust as mechanisms for "enforcing ethics" seems to me to be particularly dubious, if not harmful, as they often also show anger/disgust to those who don't show anger/disgust toward what most people think deserve anger or disgust, thereby reinforcing whatever norms that are already widely held, instead of an extension mechanism. Also, people can observe what things attract anger/disgust and what not, and I believe the observation will inevitably make some, if not many, people use that as evidence for how bad/important/urgent some issue is. 

On a personal level, I have tried to move away from using anger or disgust to regulate my moral thinking and my actions, or as mechanisms to change the world, and I seemed to have had some success. I used to be extremely angry with people who know the suffering of factory-farmed animals but still choose to keep fueling it, and moderately disgusted with farmed animal advocates who somehow think the suffering of animals in nature is okay. But I no longer feel these emotions as strongly as I used to. And I have to admit, I don't feel much emotional anger or disgust this time even though I think something very wrong likely has happened.

UPDATE: I saw Wixela's comment above after finishing typing this. I agree with Wixela that EAs are sometimes better off feeling what we genuinely feel, especially given that EAs already have pretty widespread and strong norms on controlling emotions and letting rationality fix our instincts/emotions. But I stand by the view that anger/disgust as mechanisms of "enforcing ethics" is pretty dubious.

Actually appreciate this comment. I should've been more clear about when I was using universal vs existential quantifiers and anything in between. I do not advocate that everyone should withhold anger, because perhaps (as is likely) some people do in fact know much more than me, and they know enough that anger is justified.

I don't object to people condemning him if they know more than me. I clarified what I meant in response to David's comment below.

For people that might not know the reference, this is based on the "To Be Fair, You Have To Have a Very High IQ to Understand Rick and Morty" meme.
It's meant to be sarcastic and make fun of the "self-congratulatory way people talk [about the show]"

lol I laughed

[Wasn't trying to attack the FB group. I'm glad it exists.]

But I was more curious to ask: why do you say Against Pandemics is extremely shady? It's the first time I've heard of them.

I assume nonprofits and independents who were kept afloat by FTX money have to find alternative sources of funding (or otherwise be forced to shut down). But do you mean they should abstain from even doing that?

Mh, crux is wrong. My objections are consistent with my past behaviour in similar situations.

1. I am not categorically defending Sam from everything. I am conditionally defending him from a subset of things. Though I think his welfare is important, my primary purpose here isn't about that. (I do think his welfare matters, just as anyone should have their core dignity as a sentient being respected, regardless of who they are or what they've done.)
2. I would write something equivalent to this post regardless of whether I believed Sam had done something unethical,^[1] because I think some of the community's response was, in part, unhealthy and dangerous either way.
3. When it involves outrage, our epistemic rigour and reluctance to defer to mass opinion should be much stricter than baseline. What happened instead was that people inferred Sam's guilt by how confidently outraged their peers were. And because in our present culture it's really hard to believably signal condemnation without also signalling confidence, this is a recipe for explosive information cascades/bandwagons. This is extremely standard psychology, and something we should as a high-trust community be unceasingly wary of. For this reason primarily, we should be very--but not infinitely--reluctant to enforce "failing to condemn" as a crime.
4. I don't object to people condemning his actions, especially not to the people who are clearly conditionalising their condemnation on seeing specific evidence. I'm not claiming other people don't know more than me, and they might have much stronger reasons to be confident.
5. Ridicule is more tangential to the harm, and has much more associative overlap with cruelty compared to anger and condemnation. Ridicule doesn't even pretend to be about justice (usually). If ridicule must be used, it works better as a tool for diminishing people in power, when you want them to have less power; when someone is already at the bottom, ridicule is cruelty. (Maybe the phase shift in power was so sudden that people failed to notice that they are now targeting someone who's suddenly very vulnerable to abuse.)

1. ^{^}

   I have my object-level probabilities, but part of my point is how expected I am to reveal them, which makes me think I should leave it ambiguous, at least in public. "Which side are you on?!" <- Any social instincts that pressure a resolution to this question should be scrutinised with utmost suspicion.