To generalize: people are strongly reinforced in attention dollars for doing this sort of thing. Stating reasonable beliefs doesn’t generate interesting discussion so people extreme-ize. See “EA has a lying problem” where it seemed fairly likely at the outset that the claim would be updated to something less strong in the end.
I think this is a major problem, as it encourages the hijacking of useful things for attention spirals as people compete to be more extreme and results in evaporative cooling of the movement as outsiders are more and more annoyed. I think this has already started.
To generalize: people are strongly reinforced in attention dollars for doing this sort of thing. Stating reasonable beliefs doesn’t generate interesting discussion so people extreme-ize. See “EA has a lying problem” where it seemed fairly likely at the outset that the claim would be updated to something less strong in the end. I think this is a major problem, as it encourages the hijacking of useful things for attention spirals as people compete to be more extreme and results in evaporative cooling of the movement as outsiders are more and more annoyed. I think this has already started.