This reads more like a list of suggestions than an argument. You’re making twenty or thirty points, but as far as I’ve read (I admit I didn’t get thru the whole thing) not giving any one of them the level of argumentation that would unpack the issue for a skeptic. There’s a lot that I could dispute, but I feel like arguing things here is a waste of time; it’s just not a good format to discuss so many issues in a single comment section.
I will mention one thing:
The EA community is notoriously homogenous, and the “average EA” is extremely easy to imagine: he is a white male[9] in his twenties or thirties from an upper-middle class family in North America or Western Europe. He is ethically utilitarian and politically centrist; an atheist, but culturally protestant. He studied analytic philosophy, mathematics, computer science, or economics at an elite university in the US or UK. He is neurodivergent. He thinks space is really cool. He highly values intelligence, and believes that his own is significantly above average. He hung around LessWrong for a while as a teenager, and now wears EA-branded shirts and hoodies, drinks Huel, and consumes a narrow range of blogs, podcasts, and vegan ready-meals. He moves in particular ways, talks in particular ways, and thinks in particular ways. Let us name him “Sam”, if only because there’s a solid chance he already is.[10]
It’s one thing to argue that organizations function more efficiently when they are more diverse, or to say that it’s disproportionately important that we recruit different types of people, but rattling off a list of attributes to make a negative stereotype with a dumb joke at their expense makes it extremely difficult to take you seriously. When you write something like this, it is not obvious that you are doing so with inoffensive intentions, and even if you don’t have offensive intentions the propagation of negative stereotypes may cause harm all the same. If you actually believe in tolerance and equality then you would do well to take five minutes out of your day to clarify that there is nothing wrong with the things on your list, in individual or in aggregate, and that you value such people equally within the EA movement.
Also, given the current and irreversible trend towards capitalization of Black, it is prudent to capitalize White as well.
This reads more like a list of suggestions than an argument. You’re making twenty or thirty points, but as far as I’ve read (I admit I didn’t get thru the whole thing) not giving any one of them the level of argumentation that would unpack the issue for a skeptic. There’s a lot that I could dispute, but I feel like arguing things here is a waste of time; it’s just not a good format to discuss so many issues in a single comment section.
I will mention one thing:
It’s one thing to argue that organizations function more efficiently when they are more diverse, or to say that it’s disproportionately important that we recruit different types of people, but rattling off a list of attributes to make a negative stereotype with a dumb joke at their expense makes it extremely difficult to take you seriously. When you write something like this, it is not obvious that you are doing so with inoffensive intentions, and even if you don’t have offensive intentions the propagation of negative stereotypes may cause harm all the same. If you actually believe in tolerance and equality then you would do well to take five minutes out of your day to clarify that there is nothing wrong with the things on your list, in individual or in aggregate, and that you value such people equally within the EA movement.
Also, given the current and irreversible trend towards capitalization of Black, it is prudent to capitalize White as well.