(This is an adaptation of a post on my blog.)
EA is one of several movements I have seen which have tried to address the problem of a lack of diversity, either demographic diversity (i.e. too many men, too many white people) or ideological diversity (too many programmers, too many technolibertarians). The first category of efforts are often ugly and counterproductive, and in other movements I've witnessed the debate itself scaring members of the targeted demographic away. Without rehashing the debate on the merits of diversity, given that a person has decided they want to increase movement diversity, here are some common failure modes I have witnessed:
- exaggerating the demographics to make your point, in a way that suggests that there are no members of the target demographic currently or at least none whose contributions are meaningful.
useful ways of making this criticism: “we’re 70% male. why is that?” "we want more people from developing countries." "the majority of EAs are just out of college."
ways of making this criticism which have frustrated me: “why aren’t women involved in this movement?” "EAs are from all over the world - well, if the only countries in the world are America, Britain, and Australia" "if EA wants to appeal to anyone who isn't an autistic white nerd...
- suggesting that the movement needs members of the target demographic by appealing to sexist/racist/offensive stereotypes (”we’re not warm and empathetic enough. that’s why we need more women in the movement”. "the reason we don't have enough black people is because we're too intellectual and data-focused.")
- suggesting that the movement recruit by appealing to offensive stereotypes (“if we want more non-white people we need spicier food and fewer long position papers”)
- tokenizing the members of the target demographic who you do have ( “hey, will you be the organization president? you don’t have to do any work but we need a black person on the leadership board” )
- not asking people in the groups you're trying to reach what they think or recommend ( “As a man, I’m concerned that we have too many men, and here’s how I think we should go about fixing it”)
- treating the members of the targeted demographic who you do have like they’re zoo animals ( “A woman interested in Our Movement? Cool! Those are so rare, you know. But we’re getting more of them. Look, over there - that’s a new one.” )
I really agree here - other factors that make Facebook conversations particularly inflammatory include Facebook's lack of threading, so you can't easily see who a person is responding to and if the tone of the response is appropriate to the original post, the way Facebook comment threads rapidly stack up with hundreds of comments, some only tangentially related to the original post, and the wide variance in moderation schemes. I've been disillusioned by some of the conversations on Facebook, but this comment made me more optimistic that is a platform issue, not a problem with open discussion of EA concerns.
I've noticed that Facebook seems to "bump" discussions that get new comments to the top of the group feed. This seems like a sufficient explanation: a topic that's controversial will get more comments, which will bump it to the top of the group, which will get it more attention, which will get it more comments, etc. Controversy feedback loop!