It seems like you’re ignoring that he said EA has an actively bad reputation, and viewing this as a generic claim about not wanting to share a view others don’t embrace.
I reeeeeaally don’t want to get into harmful stereotypes here obviously so I’ll just pick a few real examples in my own case: when I’ve told old colleagues, family, school-friends etc that I was vegan, an environmentalist, a feminist, I think their reaction was quite a bit worse than simply “I don’t agree.” But maybe we move in different circles.
Of course it may be the case that EA really does have “an awful reputation and most people view the community with contempt and it’s ideas as noxious.” But as any movement grows it’s bound to attract more and more bad (and good) press, and you’re going to feel embarrassed talking about it, and in times of bad press it may well feel like it’s taken over your entire brand and it’s doomed and it’s taken “a special type of failure” to cause this and leadership should “dramatically reevaluate” their involvement in EA i.e. I’m generally expecting people to be more pessimistic than they should be right now.
And even before all this I’d been noticing in myself that I was taking “I’m embarrassed to tell people I’m an EA” as a doom-y sign, but then I realised basically all causes have this effect so that in itself is not sufficient for me to conclude that we’d done a really bad job of PR. So I wanted to point this out to anyone I suspected was thinking similarly.
It seems like you’re ignoring that he said EA has an actively bad reputation, and viewing this as a generic claim about not wanting to share a view others don’t embrace.
I reeeeeaally don’t want to get into harmful stereotypes here obviously so I’ll just pick a few real examples in my own case: when I’ve told old colleagues, family, school-friends etc that I was vegan, an environmentalist, a feminist, I think their reaction was quite a bit worse than simply “I don’t agree.” But maybe we move in different circles.
Of course it may be the case that EA really does have “an awful reputation and most people view the community with contempt and it’s ideas as noxious.” But as any movement grows it’s bound to attract more and more bad (and good) press, and you’re going to feel embarrassed talking about it, and in times of bad press it may well feel like it’s taken over your entire brand and it’s doomed and it’s taken “a special type of failure” to cause this and leadership should “dramatically reevaluate” their involvement in EA i.e. I’m generally expecting people to be more pessimistic than they should be right now.
And even before all this I’d been noticing in myself that I was taking “I’m embarrassed to tell people I’m an EA” as a doom-y sign, but then I realised basically all causes have this effect so that in itself is not sufficient for me to conclude that we’d done a really bad job of PR. So I wanted to point this out to anyone I suspected was thinking similarly.