Welcome to Rationality Zurich [Edit With Your Details] 2018-04-23T16:11:58.896Z

Comment by Felix Denker (felix-denker) on The sad state of Rationality Zürich - Effective Altruism Zürich included · 2018-03-03T18:20:59.934Z · LW · GW

I (somewhat charitbly) believe that both of these were honest misunderstandings on Roland's part and don't think he has been intentionally untruthful anywhere.

Comment by Felix Denker (felix-denker) on The sad state of Rationality Zürich - Effective Altruism Zürich included · 2018-03-02T07:01:38.437Z · LW · GW

Roland, it isn't about the object level or any particular one specific thing. I gave some examples for illustration, but none of them are cruxes for me.

Let me be more specific. The problem is not that you hold and voice any particular opinions, the problem is that your opinion forming and voicing process is such that it is unproductive for us to engage with you.

I have known you for 2 years and have not seen you improve in this regard.

Comment by Felix Denker (felix-denker) on The sad state of Rationality Zürich - Effective Altruism Zürich included · 2018-03-01T17:08:03.906Z · LW · GW

This is Marko. First I want to say that everything Roland says here is either correct or plausible to me, except for one misunderstanding: I am indeed an EA, just not an organizer of EA Zurich, and I don’t tell EA Zurich what to do.

Roland, you seem to be confused about who the „instigator“ is. The answer is, each one of us three has preferred you not to be at meetups for some time, each for his own reasons, it just took a while for that to become common knowledge. Noone had to persuade anyone.

As Roland notes, a lot of our reasons for the decision to exclude him are social/emotional. But even if we were just „task groups“ I think he would be a net negative contributor to both LW and EA.

Roland’s views are often very categorical: „Effective Altruists are the new hippies“, „Christianity is a death cult“, etc. This simplistic thinking makes it hard to learn from him and for him to learn from others.

Roland has some pet topics such as 9/11 truth and Thai prostitutes that he brings up frequently and that derail and degrade the quality of discussion.

Roland is generally hostile towards altruism and advocates against current EA endeavors, without constructively offering improvements or alternatives.

I also expect (low confidence) that the number of people who do not come to meetups because Roland was there is higher than 1.

I wholeheartedly agree with Elo’s advice. I am not interested in mediation, but would reluctantly agree to it if other community members think that's a good idea.