In defense of standards: A fecal thought experiment

CW: Poop, racism, effective altruism drama

Disclaimer: this post uses a deliberately gross thought experiment involving poop as a philosophical argument. Given that thought experiments often include murder and torture, I hope that this is not held against me.

For people outside the rationalist/EA sphere, what I’m arguing for is probably extremely obvious, so it might seem dumb to dedicate this much time to this. I agree, but apparently this is controversial for a large swathe of people, so a formal argument it is.

Introduction:

This post is an argument (perhaps the first of many) in favor of organizations having standards: that it is okay to have a bar of behavior, it is okay to ban people that don’t meet that bar, and it is okay for that bar to be reasonably high. This post will engage with some recent controversy around racism. I start with a thought experiment:

The PS thought experiment:

In a silly and gross alternate universe:

The PS, standing for People for Sanitation, are an activist group, sometimes considered a cult, advocating for the improvement of sanitation in the third world. It’s members are dedicated to raising attention for this cause through the use of extremely provocative performance art.

Colloquially, everyone knows them as the Pants Shitters.

At the beginning of the day, every single day, a PS member will poop directly into their underwear, and keep it there the entire day as they go about their business. They wear white pants so the feces is directly visible. They stay away from restaruants and do not pose a health risk, but their smell on the street is unbearable. Their demand is this: they will poop their pants every day until the whole world has access to adequate sanitation. They hope that such a visible, shocking and confronting act will make the first worlds neglect of those in poverty impossible to ignore.

The PS are often targeted by the government for these actions, but in California, after a protracted legal battle, they have won the right to continue to poop their pants in public on the grounds of free speech and artistic expression.

Many segments of society ostracize the PS. They struggle finding jobs, and are widely mocked. In the effective altruist movement, people are sympathetic to their cause, but not their methods. They point out that the PS’ers protest costs them better paying jobs, and they could do more good by donating that extra money. But a handful of PS’ers argue back on the EA forum, arguing that the constant publicity and conversation around the movement might be guilt tripping enough high-income people to compensate.

One day, a PS’er is invited to an EAGx conference in Boston by a sympathetic EA member. He is not allowed to poop on stage, but still has poop in his pants as he walks around. He really, really smells. A lot of people complain, especially because, in this universe, a large percentage of the population (let’s say 10%) have a highly sensitive senses of smell. They can tolerate brief periods in the prescence of a PS’er, but it’s highly unpleasant. It’s unpleasant for normal people too. However, it’s just one person, so they can largely be avoided.

The next year, the same conference rolls around, except now there is an organiser who is highly sympathetic to the PS. He invites a bunch of speakers, and as a result, there are now a ton of PS’ers who want to attend the conference. Eventually 5% of the speakers belong to PS, and 10% of attendees. A significant portion of the conference hall stinks to high hell, with the areas where the PSer’s hang out being particularly rank. Some people, who don’t have a large sense of smell, have a great time, but others are not so lucky. All in all, a lot of attendees have a pretty shit time.

In the aftermath of this event, all hell breaks loose. People point out that those of the sensitive nose are having their conference ruined, and are being excluded by proxy, with basically none of them showing up. A commentor mentions that the conference was unbearable for them, and that if other conferences have PS’ers in them they will stop showing up. They are accused of cancelling and staging a boycott. Someone writes a comment starting with the phrase “first they came for the pants shitters”. An outraged commenter declares that to exclude the pants shitters is a sign of cultlike thinking. A New York post article comes out, describing the event as “full of pants shitters”, which the conference organizers are highly offended by: only 10% of the attendees had shit in their pants!

The next year, deliberately shitting your pants is explicitly forbidden at the conference. The organizers are accused of being censorious and authoritarian. But the corridors smell pretty damn clean.

Thought experiment discussion

This thought experiment is designed to make a simple point: organizations are allowed to have fucking standards. It is, in fact, both normal and desirable to set a bar for acceptable behavior, and exclude people who do not meet that bar.

In this story, the Pants shitters are good people with a noble cause, even if their methods are ineffective. Nonetheless, it is both allowable, and a good idea, for them to not invite the PS.

First: The decision to have so many PS’ers at the conference is effectively exclusionary to people with sensitive noses (we’ll call them SN’ers). It’s true that they can, theoretically, show up and wear nose plugs and hide from half the conference hall. But this is not a reasonable environment to put them in. In effect, EA must choose between the PS’ers and the SNers: if they don’t exclude the PS’ers, they de facto exclude the SNers. The latter is a larger group and their reasons for “boycotting” the PS’ers make sense, so it is completely reasonable to favour them.

Second: The presence of the PS'ers is unpleasant to most everyone else as well. When you organise a conference, it’s entirely reasonable to accomodate peoples preferences.

Third: The PS’ers have freedom of speech elsewhere, and are free to host their own conference and make their cases elsewhere. EA’s mission is (theoretically) to do the most good, not to host the most speech. They are not obligated to provide their facilities for the PS’ers or anybody else.

Fourth: The PS'ers are a fringe group, and the conference is vastly overrepresenting them, compared to the general population. Why platform the PS’ers, and not a different fringe group that does not ruin your conference?

Fifth: The PSer’s are generating terrible press for EA and making it look like a laughing stock, for a mode of protest that EA thinks is dumb and doesn’t actually endorse.  

Now to rebut some arguments in favor of the pants shitters:

Is it unfair to say the conference was “full of pants shitters”?

At worst, it’s mild hyperbole. While the great majority of people there were not pants shitters, they were dense enough that everybody encountered pants shitters. Also, it is not unfair to highlight the most unusual part of a conference: Most conferences do not have a sizeable contingent of pants poopers. This one did.

Is banning pants shitters a cultlike damaging of free idea exchange?

Whatever you do here, some group is going to leave your organisation: either the pants shitters or the people who don’t like smelling shit all day. The net effect of continuing to invite PS is that most of the people showing up to the conference will be pants shitters or pants shitting sympathisers. This situation is extremely insular and damaging to the free exchange of ideas!

Is banning PS cancel culture?

There definitely are real cases of people being dogpiled or harrassed on twitter for wildly disproportionate reasons, and these “cancellings” should be opposed. But frankly, I think some people have gone so far into the other direction that they have lost the plot, to the point where “not attending a conference”, “being selective about a guest list” and “explaining why you don’t like a person” all get you labelled as part of some rabid mob.

“cancel culture” is poorly defined enough that banning PS probably fits under some description. It is, nevertheless, a completely reasonable thing to do. The urge to fight “cancelling” does not override peoples right to freedom of critical speech and association. You cannot obligate somebody to wade through shit.

Pants shitters and Racists

If you are paying attention to EA drama, you will know that this is loosely based on the recent manifest controversy, where a number of speakers with ties to scientific racism were invited speakers. An attendee estimated that around 10% of attendees were aligned with the racists, and were using offensive slurs to signal ingroup status. The arguments in favor of the PS conference are all based on actual arguments I have seen defending manifest on and around the EA forum.

I don’t want this to be taken as a 1:1 comparison. For example the conference was run by manifold, which has extensive ties to EA but is not an EA org. I also don’t want to focus too hard on the individual personalities at the conference: My argument is here is that we should ban virulent racists. If you agree, but think there were no virulent racists at the conference, I strongly disagree but that is out of the scope of this post.

Some may have a problem with me comparing virulent racists to people who deliberately shit their pants. And indeed, the comparison is not equal: racists are way, way worse. Compared to the pants shitters, racists are much more disgusting, and much more full of shit.

The pants shitters are good people with noble aims and unconventional means. Their ideology has no legacy of discrimination, murder or genocide.  They do not make people cry alone at night, because people hate and exclude them based on genetics that they have no control over. Their vision for the world is one of peace, freedom and equality.

Racists, on the other hand, have been responsible for some of the worst atrocities and injustices in history. From chattel slavery, to colonialism, to Jim Crow, to the holocaust, to racist mass shootings today, people who believe in racial superiority have piles of corpses at their back, and a subset of them will happily start it up again if they get the chance.

If PS’ers gather on their own, they create a local biohazard. If the racists gather on their own, they create Charlottseville. I would not have a problem with someone deliberately hosting a pants shitter conference, but if you deliberately host a racist conference, you are actively making the world a worse place.

My point is this: since racists are much worse than pants shitters, if you are okay with banning pants shitters, you should be okay with banning racists. In fact, you should be much more okay with it.

Most African Americans probably do not want to go to conferences where a sizeable minority of people are spreading the idea that they are genetically inferior. This is an entirely reasonable opinion to have. You can be welcoming to racists or black people, but not both.

When you don’t explicitly exclude certain groups, you de-facto exclude others. There is no way to build a “big tent” that includes both virulent anti-black racists and Black Americans. Nor one that includes homophobes and gay people, or sexual harrassers and their victims. People have freedom of association, and they are fully justified in walking out.

I also think it’s important to stress that, in exclusionary situations like this, it is not always moral to side with the larger excluded group. For example, you can’t make a space welcoming to both gay people and virulent homophobes. Even if the latter group is larger, the former should be ones you welcome, because the latter group is being unreasonable.

The “meta” level can be a place of cowardice. Sometimes there is no way to avoid making a choice. You have to dig down into the dirt and figure out which group you want in your movement, and which group you are okay with driving away. And if you’re okay with driving away a pants-shitter, you should be okay with driving away a virulent racist.

I get that there is large amount of disagreement over the definition of the word “racist”, as there is for any number of politically charged words. And if you are making decisions based on the word, it is important to be reasonable with it, and not exclude people for silly tumblr reasons. But this is true for any policy and any word, and that doesn’t stop us from having laws. I think there are many people that most people would comfortably label as full-on racist, even if, like david duke, they don’t self-label as such. I’ve been using the term “virulent racism” to be clear that I’m not advocating banning people that are merely a little ignorant or uneducated.

Most concerns of overreach also apply to the pants shitters, by the way. In enforcing a “no pants-shitting” policy, you may catch innocent people with incontinence, or people that through no fault of their own smell bad. This is an argument for being careful and reasonable and letting people defend themselves, not an argument for having no rules.

Most major organisations in the west has figured this out already. If you shit your pants deliberately at work, you will be fired. If you go around the lunchroom of Meta saying slurs and trying to persuade people that Hungarians are genetically inferior, you are going to get fired. This is because major organisations have more than two braincells, and are not going to burn their company to the ground and drive good people away to protect a bunch of annoying assholes.

Here is my logical argument, laid out. I hope that those that disagree with me engage with it intellectually and logically, without resorting to tribalism.

1.       It is okay, and probably a good idea, for EA to ban pants-shitters due to their exclusionary effects.

2.       Virulent racists are at least as exclusionary, and morally worse, than pants-shitters.

3.       Therefore, it is okay, and probably a good idea, for EA to ban virulent racists.

If you disagree with 3’s conclusion, then you should explain whether you disagree with statement 1, 2, or the “therefore” of statement 3.