I feel like this post introduces a helpful contrast.
I am personally partial to the member-first approach. A cause-first approach seems to place a lot of trust into the epistemics of leaders and decision-makers that identify the correct cause. I take this to be an unhealthy strategy generally—I believe a vibrant community of smart, empirically-minded individuals can be trusted to make their own calls, and I think this may often challenge the opinion of leadership or the community at large in a healthy way. Even if many individual calls end up leading to suboptimal individual behaviour, I’d expect the epistemic benefits of a diversity of opinions and thought to outweigh this downside in the long run, even for the centrally boosted causes, which benefit from having their opinions challenged and questioned from people that do not share their views, and having the likelihood of groupthink significantly reduced.
On a more abstract level, I think EA is pretty unique as a community because of its open epistemics, where a variety of views can be pitched and will receive a fair hearing, often leading to positive interventions and initiatives. I worry that a cause-first approach will endanger this and turn EA into “just another” cause-specific organization, even if the selection of the cause is well-motivated at the initial point of choice.
I feel like this post introduces a helpful contrast.
I am personally partial to the member-first approach. A cause-first approach seems to place a lot of trust into the epistemics of leaders and decision-makers that identify the correct cause. I take this to be an unhealthy strategy generally—I believe a vibrant community of smart, empirically-minded individuals can be trusted to make their own calls, and I think this may often challenge the opinion of leadership or the community at large in a healthy way. Even if many individual calls end up leading to suboptimal individual behaviour, I’d expect the epistemic benefits of a diversity of opinions and thought to outweigh this downside in the long run, even for the centrally boosted causes, which benefit from having their opinions challenged and questioned from people that do not share their views, and having the likelihood of groupthink significantly reduced.
On a more abstract level, I think EA is pretty unique as a community because of its open epistemics, where a variety of views can be pitched and will receive a fair hearing, often leading to positive interventions and initiatives. I worry that a cause-first approach will endanger this and turn EA into “just another” cause-specific organization, even if the selection of the cause is well-motivated at the initial point of choice.