The Nonlinear Library EA - Émile P. Torres's history of dishonesty and harassment by anonymous-for-obvious-reasons
May 1, 2024
38:22
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Émile P. Torres's history of dishonesty and harassment, published by anonymous-for-obvious-reasons on May 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This is a cross-post and you can see the original here, written in 2022. I am not the original author, but I thought it was good for more EAs to know about this.
I am posting anonymously for obvious reasons, but I am a longstanding EA who is concerned about Torres's effects on our community.
An incomplete summary
Introduction
This post compiles evidence that Émile P. Torres, a philosophy student at Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany, has a long pattern of concerning behavior, which includes gross distortion and falsification, persistent harassment, and the creation of fake identities.
Note: Since Torres has recently claimed that they have been the target of threats from anonymous accounts, I would like to state that I condemn any threatening behavior in the strongest terms possible, and that I have never contacted Torres or posted anything about Torres other than in this Substack or my Twitter account. I have no idea who is behind these accounts.
To respect Torres's privacy and identity, I have also omitted their first name from the screenshots and replaced their previous first name with 'Émile'.
Table of contents
Introduction
My story
Stalking and harassment
Peter Boghossian
Helen Pluckrose
Demonstrable falsehoods and gross distortions
"Forcible" removal
"Researcher at CSER"
Giving What We Can
Brief digression on effective altruism
More falsehoods and distortions
Hilary Greaves
Andreas Mogensen
Nick Beckstead
Tyler Cowen
Olle Häggström
Sockpuppetry
"Alex Williams"
Conclusion
My story
Before I discuss Torres's behavior, I will provide some background about myself and my association with effective altruism (EA). I hope this information will help readers decide what biases I may have and subject my arguments to the appropriate degree of critical scrutiny.
I first heard about EA upon attending Aaron Swartz's memorial in January 2013. One of the speakers at that event was Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell, a charity evaluator for which Aaron had volunteered.
Karnofsky described Aaron as someone who "believed in trying to maximize the good he accomplished with each minute he had." I resonated with that phrase, and in conversation with some friends after the memorial, I learned that Aaron's approach, and GiveWell's, were examples of what was, at the time, a new movement called "effective altruism."
Despite my sympathy for EA, I never got very involved with it, due to a combination of introversion and the sense that I hadn't much to offer. I have donated a small fraction of my income to the Against Malaria Foundation for the last nine years, but I have never taken the Giving What We Can pledge, participated in a local EA group, or volunteered or worked for an EA organization.
I decided to write this article after a friend forwarded me one of Torres's critical pieces on longtermism. I knew enough about this movement -- which emerged out of EA -- to quickly identify some falsehoods and misrepresentations in Torres's polemic. So I was surprised to find, when I checked the comments on Twitter, that no one else was pointing out these errors.
A few weeks later, I discovered that this was just one of a growing number of articles by Torres that attacked these ideas and their proponents. Since I also noticed several factual inaccuracies in these other publications, I got curious and decided to look into Torres's writings more closely.
I began to follow Torres's Twitter presence with interest and to investigate older Twitter feuds that Torres occasionally references. After looking into these and systematically checking the sources Torres cites in support of their various allegations, I found Torres's behavior much more troublin...
This is a cross-post and you can see the original here, written in 2022. I am not the original author, but I thought it was good for more EAs to know about this.
I am posting anonymously for obvious reasons, but I am a longstanding EA who is concerned about Torres's effects on our community.
An incomplete summary
Introduction
This post compiles evidence that Émile P. Torres, a philosophy student at Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany, has a long pattern of concerning behavior, which includes gross distortion and falsification, persistent harassment, and the creation of fake identities.
Note: Since Torres has recently claimed that they have been the target of threats from anonymous accounts, I would like to state that I condemn any threatening behavior in the strongest terms possible, and that I have never contacted Torres or posted anything about Torres other than in this Substack or my Twitter account. I have no idea who is behind these accounts.
To respect Torres's privacy and identity, I have also omitted their first name from the screenshots and replaced their previous first name with 'Émile'.
Table of contents
Introduction
My story
Stalking and harassment
Peter Boghossian
Helen Pluckrose
Demonstrable falsehoods and gross distortions
"Forcible" removal
"Researcher at CSER"
Giving What We Can
Brief digression on effective altruism
More falsehoods and distortions
Hilary Greaves
Andreas Mogensen
Nick Beckstead
Tyler Cowen
Olle Häggström
Sockpuppetry
"Alex Williams"
Conclusion
My story
Before I discuss Torres's behavior, I will provide some background about myself and my association with effective altruism (EA). I hope this information will help readers decide what biases I may have and subject my arguments to the appropriate degree of critical scrutiny.
I first heard about EA upon attending Aaron Swartz's memorial in January 2013. One of the speakers at that event was Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell, a charity evaluator for which Aaron had volunteered.
Karnofsky described Aaron as someone who "believed in trying to maximize the good he accomplished with each minute he had." I resonated with that phrase, and in conversation with some friends after the memorial, I learned that Aaron's approach, and GiveWell's, were examples of what was, at the time, a new movement called "effective altruism."
Despite my sympathy for EA, I never got very involved with it, due to a combination of introversion and the sense that I hadn't much to offer. I have donated a small fraction of my income to the Against Malaria Foundation for the last nine years, but I have never taken the Giving What We Can pledge, participated in a local EA group, or volunteered or worked for an EA organization.
I decided to write this article after a friend forwarded me one of Torres's critical pieces on longtermism. I knew enough about this movement -- which emerged out of EA -- to quickly identify some falsehoods and misrepresentations in Torres's polemic. So I was surprised to find, when I checked the comments on Twitter, that no one else was pointing out these errors.
A few weeks later, I discovered that this was just one of a growing number of articles by Torres that attacked these ideas and their proponents. Since I also noticed several factual inaccuracies in these other publications, I got curious and decided to look into Torres's writings more closely.
I began to follow Torres's Twitter presence with interest and to investigate older Twitter feuds that Torres occasionally references. After looking into these and systematically checking the sources Torres cites in support of their various allegations, I found Torres's behavior much more troublin...