Why we decided to cancel the EA Munich meetup with Professor Robin Hanson

We (the EA Munich Organisation Team) have decided to cancel our August 2020 meetup with Professor Robin Hanson.

Decision process:

Mid-July, we invited Professor Hanson to give a talk at our August meetup. We expected 25-30 attendees. He agreed to give a talk on reforming tort law, and we finalized the announcements by the beginning of August. We then advertised the meetup at several additional institutions. In this process, on Tu, 4 Aug, some of Professor Hanson’s work and criticisms of that work were brought to our attention:

This material sparked a great amount of debate within the Organizing Team. The strongest consideration in favour of continuing the event was that we did not want to further "cancel culture" or make it so that only uncontroversial ideas could be shared in EA spaces. However, we're aware that many people have found Hanson's writing on rape and "redistribution" of sex to be offensive and disturbing. We got in touch with CEA, who said they could see either decision about the event being reasonable, given different considerations. Eventually, the decision whether to cancel or not was made solely by the EA Munich local group. By voting, cancellation received 6 votes in favour, with 1 vote against and 1 neutral.

When we decided to cancel the talk, we made plans to hold an alternate event: a discussion for the EA Munich community about “cancel culture” and how the group might handle controversial topics and speakers in the future. To keep this discussion to a manageable size, it will be available to people who were already involved in the Munich group.

We made the following mistakes during the organisation:

  • We did not have a clear method of determining whether speakers were a good fit for our meetups or not before contacting them.
  • We did not communicate the situation with Professor Hanson and potential attendees early or transparently.

The reasons for canceling the event are as follows (although there is disagreement about their strength and validity within our group) :

  • We aim to do the most good. With this in mind, we wanted to avoid the possibility that individuals may connect controversial statements of Professor Hanson unrelated to his talk to the EA community. This could cause harm to the aims of the EA movement in general. Especially, we are a group that regularly introduces new people to effective altruism, and want to continue that into the future.

  • We were not confident that we would be able to host the talk in a way that would be beneficial to the local EA community, especially in moderating controversial issues.

  • We had issues with some of the controversial statements Professor Hanson has made in the past, and about their long term consequences. Even if professor Hanson was only engaging in hypotheticals, people often interpret these as prescriptions or use the fact that a high-status individual has made these statements to lend them credibility. Specifically, women's rights have been suppressed for most of human history, and we believe that the rise of emancipatory women's movements has been a tremendous humanitarian achievement over the last few hundred years. Statements such as Hanson's might rekindle misogynistic sentiments and destroy some of the progress made so far, even if that is not Professor Hanson's intention. In a similar vein, we see the discussion around the tweet concerning Juneteenth. We also believe that Professor Hanson perhaps underestimates the impact of these statements.

How we aim to improve

  • We will discuss & implement a process to identify controversies around potential speakers
  • We will also evolve our criteria regarding speaker selection
  • We will improve the communication with speakers, and seek their feedback earlier

We weren't all familiar with Professor Hanson's work or did not think of past controversies, but we saw (and still believe) that he has raised interesting and valuable ideas. For those interested in the material that would have been presented, in the following talk from Oct 2019, Professor Hanson presents his proposal on reforming tort law, which may be similar to what he planned to present: https://youtu.be/rPdHXw05SvU

The statements we have provided here are necessarily simplifying and don’t capture all nuanced opinions of all Organizing Team members.

The EA Munich group has existed since fall 2015. We are a team of 8 volunteers, and not used to great amounts of public pressure like we’re facing at the moment. Neither are we skilled at public relations. We acted independently of CEA, although we sought advice in face of the situation. We acknowledge we have made several mistakes in our handling of this situation, but are sincerely motivated to resolve these!

Signed,

The Effective Altruism Munich Organisation team