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As far as not interacting with someone, there are lots of people I ignore on the basis of bad behavior. As far as not taking the types of concerns they raise seriously, I'd like to think that it's possible to separate the person from the concerns.

For example, in my discipline (philosophy) there is a truly excellent ranking of philosophy departments. It's also run by a terrible human being. Most of us still use the ranking, just with the warning not to engage with this individual, which we repeat to our students. 

Pleasantly surprised by this (ditto for David Mathers' comment). Maybe I will try this? I care a great deal about this issue, but not (yet) enough to burn my ability to speak with EAs.

I'm starting to think that I need to write these up. I thought you folks knew. I don't think the EA community will react very well if I do write these up, so I have tended to hold off.

It is possible that many complaints about Torres are true and also that Torres raises important concerns. I would not like to see personal criticism of Torres become a substitute for engagement with criticism by Torres.

I sometimes worry that concern about Torres has made the community less receptive to any criticism of racism, whether or not raised by Torres. That strikes me as an outcome that should definitely be avoided.

I’d like to hope that academics are aiming for a level of understanding above that of a typical user on an Internet forum.

All academic works have a right to reply. Many journals print response papers and it is a live option to submit responses to critical papers, including mine. It is also common to respond to others in the context of a larger paper. The only limit to the right of academic reply is that the response must be of suitable quality and interest to satisfy expert reviewers.

That's fair! But I also think most op-eds on any topic are pretty bad. As for academic papers, I have to say it took me at least a year to write anything good about EA, and that was on a research-only postdoc with 50% of my research time devoted to longtermism. 

There's an awful lot that has been written on these topics, and catching up on the state of the art can't be rushed without bad results. 

Strongly agree. I think there's also a motivation gap in knowledge acquisition. If you don't think there's much promise in an idea or a movement, it usually doesn't make sense to spend years learning about it. This leads to large numbers of very good academics writing poorly-informed criticisms. But this shouldn't be taken to indicate that there's nothing behind the criticisms. It's just that it doesn't pay off career-wise for these people to spend years learning enough to press the criticisms better.

Glad it helped! All credit to Nicholas who wrote 99% of it. If you have a minute, I uploaded a talk version of the paper last week. Would love to hear what you think, especially re accessibility: 

You folks impress me! But seriously, that's a big ask.