Responses To The Brent Dill Affair
These have been going around semi-public- distributed without specific restriction on where they go, but through whispernet. I figured an actual post linking them would be useful to let people less connected know what’s going on.
We have an email with a preliminary report from the CFAR Alumni Community Disputes Council in relation to the Brent Dill affair, in this pastebin. Password is mittenscautious, it has been re-redacted to make correlating information harder. Tl;dr they think Brent Dill is not a “bad actor”, that he is “fundamentally oriented towards helping people grow“, and recommend CFAR leadership against barring him from CFAR spaces. Also, the version I got was already redacted by someone earlier in the process, but people who directly received it report that the ACDC email outed one of the victims. No as yet formal statement from CFAR on the matter.
Duncan Sabien- the CFAR Chief Operating Officer (EDIT: he tells me he’s in the process of stepping down from CFAR), might be remembered for their Punch Buggy thing which I had forgotten credited Brent Dill with inspiration, or for Dragon Army, published a post on Facebook with a proposal for how Brent Dill should respond, and saying that he did not think based on what was public that he deserved to be villainized. It was originally friends only, but was authorised by Duncan for distribution to a public Discord channel on Doissetep containing me without enjoining the people in that channel against further distribution. (I will be entirely upfront here: Giving this to me without binding me against distributing such that it winds up public on Tumblr was not his intention, I was explicitly requested by them to not post it around after I first put it into a Facebook group, I just don’t think there’s actually a social rule obligating me to actually abide by such a request made retroactively after information has been placed into a public location, and have Duncan’s own agreement over Messenger that I am in fact not bound. You may judge me as you will.)
I invite people to make their own analysis of these emails/posts; I hear some are in progress by others. Rather than writing 2000 words on what I think, I’ll leave it to others, because I’m fairly busy today and I think distributing the information is the important part. I will say that people looking forward to resilience against the next predator should probably not count the current one handled just yet.
If you’re not involved in the rationalist community in some capacity, I recommend skipping this post.
The short version is that I think the mass email recorded in the first linked pastebin is very bad. I hope they apologize or retract all or part of it.
this trio of judges is obviously corrupt
question: if the corruption is clear to any human with a shred of moral sense and a bit of intelligence, why did they feel like they could publish this and not be laughed out of their positions of power?
-> when they wrote this they didnt expect it to see the light of day
-> they were trivially irrational because they expected their audience to be selectively irrational in the same direction as them
| people arent idiots like this (antistrategic for their stated goals; goals: evaluate and ameliorate future harm) unless there is some outside incentive pressure
| the email reads as if brent were writing it (content-wise, idk style-wise)
-> brent has a reality distortion field wrt acdc trio of judges and their ontologies are weak enough that they will just copy/paste from brent
-?-> brent has something the trio of judges want or something someone pressuring the trio of judges wants
they are not actually making anticipations of future-harm. they are claiming that brent not a “bad actor”.
which ~ “your abusive parents love you”
in that it doesnt change the fact that they will continue to cause harm.
then description of benefits they think brent brings.
implicit argument -> acdc: “brent is doing good things and these good things compensate for bad stuff brent does when they hurt people (which we will not comment on whether we anticipate them doing again)”
–
on the level on which their brain computes strategy:
| the trio thinks brent gives benefit in their eyes or in the eyes of someone pressuring them or both
| this benefit outweighs harms and future harms
| they believe that they cant argue this in terms of analyzing what harms they anticipate brent making in the future and dont believe they can argue that brent wouldnt harm people in the future
–
even if the trio thought information brent outputs is worth sacrificing human beings to be tortured upon his alter (which i believe they vaguely believed but also thought the thought was repulsive so tried to think around thinking about it and still somehow act in the world as if this belief were true without acknowledging or investigating it), their visible judicial process does not optimize for good worlds
they arent analyzing or thinking directly or openly about the harms they anticipate brent doing. they are writing a character sheet on brents internal motivations. they arent running the algorithms of a good judge.
