This is a strange and unhelpful-seeming comment. Obviously nothing I wrote should be read as denying that EAs are politically diverse (generic references to āEAsā should always be read as implicitly preceded by the word āmanyā).
Iād like to see more folks from across the political spectrum be happily involved in EA.
Things I donāt like so much:*
Gratuitous disrespect, e.g. through deliberately mis-naming your interlocutors.
The apparent assumption than anyone not a leftist must be a libertarian. (Is Joe Biden a libertarian too?)
Employing guilt-by-association tactics, and trying to pick a fight about which subgroups are collectively the worst.
The latter is the worst offense, IMO, and illustrates precisely the kind of tribal/āpoliticized thinking that I strongly hope is never accepted in EA. Iād much prefer a ābig tentā where folks with different views respectfully offer object-level arguments to try to persuade each other to change their minds, rather than this kind of rhetorical sniping. (Seriously, what good do you imagine the latter will achieve?)
Note that my complaint about āDoing EA Lefterā is not that Iāve anything against people trying to argue for views further left than mineāby all means, feel free! My concern was that their recommendations seemed to be presupposing leftism, and brutely commanding others to agree, rather than providing object-level arguments that might persuade the rest of us.
* = (I guess I also think itās bad form to create a burner account for the sole purpose of writing a comment with those other bad features.)
Sorry Richard, I meant no disrepsect. And I appreciate you acknowledging that there are leftsist EAs.
Without wanting to do guilt-by-association, I simply wanted to express that there would have been a clear benefit to having a more left-wing EA, since leftists are more critical of cryptocurrencies etc. There were many EAs who did the right thing warning about cryptocurrency/āSBF, but they were smaller in number, and overlooked by the community. So apologies I went too far maligning all libertarians/ānon-leftists.
Thanks, I appreciate the clarification. (I agree that a general advantage of having a more diverse/āābig tentā coalition is that different ppl/āperspectives may be more or less likely to pick up on different potential problems.)
This is a strange and unhelpful-seeming comment. Obviously nothing I wrote should be read as denying that EAs are politically diverse (generic references to āEAsā should always be read as implicitly preceded by the word āmanyā).
Iād like to see more folks from across the political spectrum be happily involved in EA.
Things I donāt like so much:*
Gratuitous disrespect, e.g. through deliberately mis-naming your interlocutors.
The apparent assumption than anyone not a leftist must be a libertarian. (Is Joe Biden a libertarian too?)
Employing guilt-by-association tactics, and trying to pick a fight about which subgroups are collectively the worst.
The latter is the worst offense, IMO, and illustrates precisely the kind of tribal/āpoliticized thinking that I strongly hope is never accepted in EA. Iād much prefer a ābig tentā where folks with different views respectfully offer object-level arguments to try to persuade each other to change their minds, rather than this kind of rhetorical sniping. (Seriously, what good do you imagine the latter will achieve?)
Note that my complaint about āDoing EA Lefterā is not that Iāve anything against people trying to argue for views further left than mineāby all means, feel free! My concern was that their recommendations seemed to be presupposing leftism, and brutely commanding others to agree, rather than providing object-level arguments that might persuade the rest of us.
* = (I guess I also think itās bad form to create a burner account for the sole purpose of writing a comment with those other bad features.)
Sorry Richard, I meant no disrepsect. And I appreciate you acknowledging that there are leftsist EAs.
Without wanting to do guilt-by-association, I simply wanted to express that there would have been a clear benefit to having a more left-wing EA, since leftists are more critical of cryptocurrencies etc. There were many EAs who did the right thing warning about cryptocurrency/āSBF, but they were smaller in number, and overlooked by the community. So apologies I went too far maligning all libertarians/ānon-leftists.
Thanks, I appreciate the clarification. (I agree that a general advantage of having a more diverse/āābig tentā coalition is that different ppl/āperspectives may be more or less likely to pick up on different potential problems.)