EA - On Loyalty by Nathan Young

Link to original articleWelcome 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: On Loyalty, published by Nathan Young on February 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Epistemic status: I am confident about most individual points but there are probably errors overall. I imagine if there are lots of comments to this piece I'll have changed my mind by the time I've finished reading them.I was having a conversation with a friend, who said that EAs weren't loyal. They said that the community's recent behaviour would made them fear that they would be attacked for small errors. Hearing this I felt sad, and wanted to understand.Tl;drI feel a desire to be loyal. This is an exploration of that. If you don't feel that desire this may not be usefulI think loyalty is a compact between current and future members on what it is to be within a community - "do this and you will be safe"Status matters and loyalty is a "status insurance policy" - even if everyone else doesn't like you, we willI find more interest in where we have been disloyal than where we ought to be loyal.Were we disloyal to Bostrom?Is loyalty even good?Were people disloyal in sharing the Leadership Slack?Going forward I would like thatI have and give a clear sense of how I coordinate with othersI take crises slowly and relaxedly and not panicI am able to trust that people will keep private conversations which discuss no serious wrongdoing secret and have them trust me that I will do the sameI feel that it is acceptable to talk to journalists if helping a directionally accurate story, but that almost all of the time I should consider this a risky thing to doThis account is deliberately incoherent - it contains many views and feelings that I can't turn into a single argument. Feel free to disagree or suggestion some kind of synthesis.IntroTesting situations are when I find out who I am. But importantly, I can change. And living right matters to me perhaps more than anything else (though I am hugely flawed). So should I change here?I go through these 1 by 1 because I think this is actually hard and I don't know the answers. Feel free to nitpick.What is Loyalty (in this article)?I think loyalty is the sense that do right by those who have followed the rules. It's a coordination tool. "You stuck by the rules, so you'll be treated well", "you are safe within these bounds, you don't need to fear".I want to be loyal - for people to think "there goes Nathan, when I abide by community norms, he won't treat me badly".The notion of safety implies a notion of risk. I am okay with that. Sometimes a little fear and ambiguity is good - I'm okay with a little fear around flirting at EAGs because that reduces the amount of it, I'm okay with ambiguity in how to work in a biorisk lab. There isn't always a clear path to "doing the right thing" and if, in hindsight I didn't do it, I don't want your loyalty. But I want our safety, uncertainty, disaster circles to be well calibrated.Some might say "loyalty isn't good" - that we should seek to treat those in EA exactly the same as those outside. For me this equivaltent to saying our circles should be well calibrated - if someone turns out to have broken the norms we care about then I already don't feel a need to be loyal to them.But to me, a sense of ingroup loyalty feel inevitable. I just like you more and differently than those ousisde EA. It feels naïve to say otherwise. Much like "you aren't in traffic, you are trafffic", "I don't just feel feelings, to some extent I am feelings"So let's cut to the chase.The One With The EmailNick Bostrom sent an awful email. He wrote an apology a while back, but he wrote another to avoid a scandal (whoops). Twitter at least did not think he was sorry. CEA wrote a short condemnation. There was a lot of forum upset. Hopefully we can agree on this.Let's look at this through some different frames.The ...