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@HenriThunberg Yes, this counts for me and it is precisely the thing that I had in mind when I made this market. I am resolving it as "YES."

@NathanNguyen I suggest no, on the spirit of it.

@NathanNguyen I would also go with "No," in reference to this question. If I allowed for that, Torres (or anyone else for that matter) could just take one small incident and write a bunch of articles about it. It would pass the market's measuring stick, but could easily be about something that is not at all a scandal to the rest of the world.

@EMcNeill Fixed that, thank you!

@HenriThunberg "makes one worry about the whole Bostrom-adjacent thoughtspace." Honestly I am having a tough time with this one. It seems extremely likely to me that this person had the EA community in mind when they wrote that sentence. That being said, this article is not really about Bostrom's email or Effective Altruism specifically, so I think you are right in that is falls short on that front.

@HenriThunberg I can't edit or delete comments? 🤦

@NathanNguyen I'm going to tentatively answer this "No" unless someone gives a good reason as to why I instead should say "Yes." The Emile Torres article was about Bostrom and mentioned specifically him, his email, EA, and the way everything is tied and impacts one another. The Jacobin article did the same. In those senses, they were about Bostrom and how his racism is a problem for or revealing of EA values. The Business Insider Article seems to sort of be along the lines of what you were describing, but it wasn't really "about" Bostrom, the email, or his connections to EA. Unless there are good reasons as to why I should count an article like that, I'm currently erring towards No.

@amoebus Yep! 2/3 on the Bostrom email.

@amoebus I'm not an EA, and I share the opinion that most (although not all) of the 'HBD' movement is thinly-veiled traditional racism, but even so... HOLY guilt by association, Batman! The entire article is basically just a long, fancy version of 'some people who have had influence on movements adjacent to EA have said prejudiced things, therefore the EA movement is actually just racism and if we ever listened to anything EA had to say we'd get Holocaust 2.0'. Reading it was really depressing :(

@AngolaMaldives It was written by Emile Torres. This is to be expected.

@AngolaMaldives Agreed. I was shocked at how poorly thought out it was. You could very easily paint an equally nasty portrait of any movement via some guilt by association.

i thought the article was great and correctly laid out an argument that bostrom and hanson and scott alexander are white supremecists. you gotta believe that most people in EA aren't racists like these leaders are, and are annoyed at being unable to criticize EA leaders because they're scared of getting blacklisted. you gotta imagine a schism occurring this year in the EA institution

@JamieCrom, what makes you think that Scott Alexander is a white supremacist? In general, he seems like he does his research, and my mental model of him is somewhat center-leftish, but certainly not racist (in the sense of believing that there are meaningful biological differences between ethnicity A and B, that make B measurably worse than A.).

@CadeMataya I don’t think this article should count because the author explicitly sets out to dig up dirt on longtermism and EA, so it doesn’t actually provide any support for this being a “scandal.” A publication digging up dirt and writing a hit piece doesn’t make a scandal. It only becomes a scandal once other publications, without direct interest in the dirt digging, write about it.

@Yoav While this is a fair point (especially because of the Author's history with EA), the circumstances shift this, for me.
A scandal is some sort of misbehavior deemed morally wrong that results in public outrage. The way I have tried to measure this is by using Wikipedia-notable publications. I think that Bostrom's email clears the bar for scandal, the thing is that it has not been definitely linked to Effective Altruism by three publications. Admittedly, I could revise that, but I will grant that you may be right in that I should not count initial hit pieces as part of the three used to measure "scandal" (and there are some things that may not be reported on by major news sources that could constitute scandal; EA is not the center of the universe after all, so that marks a major limitation of this market's measuring stick, in my opinion). However, given the fact that Bostrom revealed this prior to Torres, I will count it, as the prior revelation was factored into the Truthdig article, meaning that it still constitutes a reaction to Bostrom's more recent behavior and is more than the original hit piece would have been.

@CadeMataya Though for full reference Torres admits it was them who went looking for the article which proceeded all this.

@JosephNoonan It's only 19 days into the year, and we've had two as-of-yet insufficiently noteworthy scandals with Bostrom and Tegmark playing the unlikely leads so far. At this rate @ScottAlexander will be doing blow off of underage hookers by mid-season. I'm strapping in for the ride.

@EdwardKmett *doing modafinil off of underage hookers

@NathanNguyen I thought I was supposed to give an unlikely scenario?

@NathanNguyen lol too real

@EdwardKmett Yeah, turns out I was wrong to say this, since Nathan Nguyen posted the Jacobin article that is counting towards the Bostrom scandal as was typing the comment. But oh well, I still made a profit by selling No shares just as it got down to near 50%.

@NathanNguyen This one seems like a much better contender to be included than the BI article, since it does specifically try to tie Bostrom's racist email to EA, and mentions it as more than just a side remark.

@JosephNoonan Seems right, although it seems like it might qualify as a "minor publication"

@JonasVollmer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine) it has a wikipedia page, so it should pass the notable bar used here at least.

@EdwardKmett There we go, that's one that I'll count without qualification. Barring serious objections, Bostrom's email is at 1/3

@CadeMataya Ok, given how you're resolving this, I'm now betting much more strongly the other direction

@EdwardKmett Three of these articles have already been rejected, https://manifold.markets/CadeMataya/will-the-effective-altruism-movemen-ccc7088738a4#W36vBPs97pJuLsbWgEdZ

https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2023/01/13/su-crae-campaign-reprimands-blacks-are-stupider-than-whites-comment-by-oxford-philosophy-professor/ passes the wikipedia notability test and talks about the Boston issue, but fails to mention EA or longtermism per se. (including this in the roundup just to keep track of what has been seen.)

@PeterWildeford If it doesn’t reach three articles about a single thing, each thing is unlikely to be “major”

@NathanNguyen This is a good point. If Effective Altruism had a few hiccups that only picked up minimum steam each (journalistically), I doubt that it would be good faith to put any of those things anywhere near the importance of the FTX event.

@PatrickAupperle I agree. It briefly mentions the behavior, pretty much as an aside, and doesn't say anything to imply that it is connected to EA. Not sure how that would be considered to "directly relate the purported behavior to the ideals or structure of the EA movement".

@JosephNoonan Even if it did "directly relate ... movement", it would arguably not be "an article about the misbehavior".

@StevenK (Because texts can mention things without being about those things.)

@PatrickAupperle Fair point! Seeing the discourse in this thread, I think y'all are right: it neither links the behavior directly to effective altruism nor would it be enough to say that the article is "about" the misbehavior/linking the misbehavior to effective altruism.

This is one of the prominent blogs of the philosophy progression, it links to previous posts about EA, and it relates Bostrom’s behavior to longtermist/EA attitudes.

"wikipedia notable"? Blogs aren't usually notable i i r c

@jacksonpolack It's mentioned here but doesn't have its own page.

@jacksonpolack I honestly don't know what "Wikipedia notable" means.

@NicoDelon See an earlier comment by Cade.

I'm fine if this one doesn't count. It's just some more signal.

@NicoDelon I'm going to say it doesn't count based on my metrics, but is possibly indicative of what's to come.

@NicoDelon If this is one of the most prominent blogs in the philosophy profession it reflects poorly on that profession imo

@JonathanRay Why?

the two big claims it makes are "racism is creepy. creepy vibes. racism is, like, bad, ew. bostrom is racist" and "despite that, longtermism isn't false JUST because he's creepy, so he shouldn't be fired". The second claim is better than nothing, but the first claim attributes some enduring and entirely unspecified badness to bostrom because of what he said. Philosophy makes one think of 'clear and precise thinking and writing', this isn't that!

I am not astonished because longtermism has seemed to me to have a creepy vibe from the start, an elaborate and ugly rationalization for not doing anything about the actual suffering of billions of human beings, which no doubt is why it has been very appealing to creepy billionaries like Elon Musk. 

as has been said a hundred thousand times at this point, followers of longtermism have clearly done more for the physical suffering of the global poor than any of the people making these criticisms.

Why is every criticism of EA on the internet so disgusting and offensive?

@DeanValentine and it's not even limited to small communities like the sneerclub

@jacksonpolack I’m glad we’re all resting our impression of philosophy as a profession on a single blog post.

@NicoDelon FWIW I don’t share Brian Leiter’s view of EA and longtermism at all. It’s just a widely read blog, for all sorts of reasons. The point of this market is not to discuss the merits of Bostrom, philosophy, critics, or what have you. Focus.

my answer was to "why that blog post looks bad", not "why that blog post means philosophy is bad".

@jacksonpolack No one asked that question.

@jacksonpolack Fwiw every bad philosophy blog post should update me very slightly in the direction of academic philosophy sucking, and the size of the update depends on the popularity of the blog among academic philosophers.

@JonathanRay You’re taking noise for signal.

@PeterWildeford It's not clear to me that this part of the condition is satisfied:

that directly relates the purported behavior to the ideals or structure of the Effective Altruism movement

@StevenK (It seems pretty likely that it will be satisfied by future articles, though.)

@StevenK I guess up to @CadeMataya to decide how to interpret "directly relates". I still think it "directly relates". But admittedly none of the articles mention the phrase "effective altruism" and only 1/3 mention the phrase "longtermism" (Vice).

@PeterWildeford It may be that the behavior directly relates (intransitive verb) to the ideals/structure, but for it to be true that the articles relate the behavior to the ideals/structure, I think they'd have to say something about that explicitly.

@PeterWildeford At least merriam webster defines "relates" (as in 'X relates A to B', not 'A relates to B') as "to show or establish logical or causal connection between" - just mentioning that he also is a longtermist wouldn't count under that definition.

@StevenK If/When a publication creates an article that is more along the lines of "How Nick Bostrom's racism reveals the white saviorism of Effective Altruism" or something akin to that, I'll say that counts; as of right now we're in "Figure X accused of Embezzlement," territory, not quite "Figure X, sheltered by Effective Altruism, accused of Embezzlement" territory (at least in my view).

@PeterWildeford IMO if a source doesn't mention the words effective altruism, it shouldn't count. Though I can totally believe we'll get to three soon enough... (at the very least, there'll surely be a Torres article)

@CadeMataya Sure ok thanks for clarifying. I accept that. So right now we're at 1 based on the Vice article?

vice doesn't have the phrase "Effective Altruism" in it. it has "existential risks" and 'longtermism". idk

@jacksonpolack @CadeMataya can you clarify whether you view "longtermism" as sufficiently synonymous with "effective altruism"?

@PeterWildeford Good question. I do not; they are deeply related but distinct enough from one another that it would be inaccurate to use the terms interchangeably (some Effective Altruists, for example, would reject Longtermism).

@CadeMataya Ok thanks! So currently we're at 0/3!

@PeterWildeford Yes! I imagine that a forthcoming article by Emile Torres will push it to 1/3 pretty soon, though.

@CadeMataya While some effective altruists reject longtermism, I'd argue that longtermists are considered a proper subset of Effective Altruists. The wikipedia article on Longtermism highlights directly the relationship,

and it'd be damn near impossible to argue Toby Ord and Will MacAskill, who collectively coined the phrase, are not Effective Altruists!

@EdwardKmett This is a fair point; I'm not entirely sure that one could be longtermist without also being an effective altruist (maybe someone who only cared about the very long-term future of their country or city would fit that bill?). There could be a question, then, if scandals in subsets of movements could be enough for the whole movement to be in scandal (i.e. scandals involving Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists embroiling the entire modern feminist movement in scandal). It would be incumbent on showing that Longtermism is indeed a proper subset of Effective Altruism (it can't exist outside of it) and that scandals involving Longtermists should be considered scandals for the whole Effective Altruism movement. I'll allow some discourse on this and weigh-in based on that.

@CadeMataya On the TERF front, there are effective altruists that hold all things crypto to be negative utility, but yet the movement still gets painted with a broad brush in the FTX scam.

Longtermism really comes down to saying that when someone is is as irrelevant as where someone is when calculating quality adjusted life years, and then measuring the number of people in the future and deciding that therefore we should do everything we can to improve the lives of the unborn masses. All of the steps in that argument are EA arguments.

Most objections about longtermism coming from within the EA community come from folks softmaxing on outcomes as a form of deference, quibbling with the process that yields the claims of gajillions of future lives and thereby indicating that perhaps we shouldn't put all our eggs in that basket, discounting QALYs for net present value, or generally disliking the outcomes of the ideas.

It is EA ideas on both sides of the fence.

A hypothetical non-EA "longtermism" would just be something else that happened to get assigned the same label, and I'd argue isn't something anybody can really point to as actually existing today.

Maybe some kind of nihilistic negative utilitarian somewhere has a version of it in a blog post?

hot take: “bed net EAs” : longtermists :: agile practitioners : waterfall practitioners

Or basically - an un(der)specified criterion of doing consequentialism well is definining “when do you ‘resolve’ your consequences”

@StevenK Good question! When I drafted the market, what I had in mind were publishers that themselves had an article on Wikipedia (CNN, Fox, etc.) as a means of safeguarding against someone with an obscure blog from publishing articles that would count. There are outliers and sources that are not credible that have Wikipedia articles, though, so that may be amended.

@L I don't think the land purchase being talked about by a major publication would lead to positive resolution (at least under current information, where there is no evidence of embezzlement/fraud/illegal activities). EAs seem to be split whether it was an effective use of money. Not clear if suboptimal use of money would clear the "misbehhavior" bar. Plus, it is not clear which major philosophical voice or donor they would tie to that (but the resolution criteria require that there is such a person)

@harfe Agree.

The land purchases by itself wouldn't constitute scandal, unless some sort of corruption or conflict of interests arise.

Something sexual in nature (like the scandal that hit oxfam in 2018) would clear the bar, but there's no indication of that. Mind you that this Oxfam example took like 8 years to come to light.