Hi, my name is Scott Alexander and here's why it's bad rationalism to think that widespread EA wrongdoing should reflect poorly on EA.

The assertion that having semi-frequent sexual harassment incidents go public is actually an indication of health for a movement since it's evidence that there's no systemic coverup going on and besides everyone's doing it is uh quite something.

But surely of 1,000 sexual harassment incidents, the movement will fumble at least one of them (and often the fact that you hear about it at all means the movement is fumbling it less than other movements that would keep it quiet). You’re not going to convince me I should update much on one (or two, or maybe even three) harassment incidents, especially when it’s so easy to choose which communities’ dirty laundry to signal boost when every community has a thousand harassers in it.

Ah, if only the world wasn't so full of "stupid people" updating their bayesians based off things they see on the news, because you should already be worried of and calculating your distributions for... inhales deeply terrorist nuclear attacks, mass shootings, lab leaks, famine, natural disasters, murder, sexual harassment, conmen, decay of society, copyright, taxes, spitting into the wind, your genealogy results, comets hitting the earth, UFOs, politics of any and every kind, and tripping on your shoe laces.

What... insight did any of this provide? Seriously. Analytical statistics is a mathematically consistent means of being technically not wrong, while using a lot of words, in order to disagree on feelings, and yet saying nothing.

Risk management is not a statistical question in fact. It's an economics question of your opportunities. It's why prepping is better seen as a hobby, a coping mechanism and not as viable means of surviving apocalypse. It's why even when a EA uses their super powers of bayesian rationality the answer in the magic eight ball is always just "try to make money, stupid".

Scott is saying essentially that "one data point doesn't influence the data as a whole that much" (usually true)... "so therefore you don't need to change your opinions when something happens" which is just so profoundly stupid. Just so wrong on so many levels. It's not even correct Bayesianism!

(if it happens twice in a row, yeah, that’s weird, I would update some stuff)

???????? Motherfucker have you heard of the paradox of the heap? What about all that other shit you just said?

What is this really about, Scott???

Do I sound defensive about this? I’m not. This next one is defensive. [line break] I’m part of the effective altruist movement.

OH ok. I see now. I mean I've always seen, really, that you and your friends work really hard to come up with ad hoc mental models to excuse every bit of wrongdoing that pops up in any of the communities you're in.

You definitely don’t get this virtue by updating maximally hard in response to a single case of things going wrong. [...] The solution is not to update much on single events, even if those events are really big deals.

Again, this isn't correct Bayesian updating. The formula is the formula. Biasing against recency is not in it. And that's just within Bayesian reasoning!

In a perfect world, people would predict distributions beforehand, update a few percent on a dramatic event, but otherwise continue pursuing the policy they had agreed upon long before.

YEAH BECAUSE IT'S A PERFECT WORLD YOU DINGUS.

OK my knowledge of Bayes is rusty at best, but isn't the idea that the occurrences should be relatively common, and/or not correlated?

So far, there has been zero or one[1] lab leak that led to a world-wide pandemic. Before COVID, I doubt anyone was even thinking about the probabilities of a lab leak leading to a worldwide pandemic.

Also, ideally, if there was a lab leak, then people running labs would take note and ensure that that particular failure mode doesn't happen again. Thus the probability of an occurrence would be less than the first time it happened, because people actually take note of what has happened and change stuff.

Scottyboy could have used something that has occurred multiple times, like a nuclear powerplant accident, but his audience loves nuclear power, so that's a non-starter. Also it's a given that the mainstream press is the big bad in the fight against nuclear, just because serious accidents with widespread death and economic destruction happen again and again with nuclear power.

Raising the lab leak "hypothesis" is just signalling to his base.

[1] depending on where you stand in current US politics

Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain. The rate of men behind curtains is actually quite low. Do not doubt the great and powerful Oz.

No no, you see it's called Synthetic data. Very serious stuff.

people who are my worst enemies - e/acc people, those guys who always talk about how charity is Problematic - [...] weird anti-charity socialists

Today I learned that 'effective accelerationists' like CEO of Y-combinator Garry Tan, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and "Beff Jezos" are socialists. I was worried that those evil goals they wanted to achieve by simply trying to advance capitalism might reflect badly on it, but luckily they aren't fellow capitalists after all, they turned out to be my enemies the socialists all along! Phew!