This seems extremely uncharitable. It’s impossible for every good thing to be the top priority, and I really dislike the rhetorical move of criticising someone who says their top priority is X for not caring at all about Y.
In the post you’re replying to Chana makes the (in my view) virtuous move of actually being transparent about what CH’s top priorities are, a move which I think is unfortunately rare because of dynamics like this. You’ve chosen to interpret this as ‘a decision not to have’ [other nice things that you want], apparently realised that it’s possible the thinking here isn’t actually extremely shallow, but then dismissed the possibility of anyone on the team being capable of non-shallow thinking anyway for currently unspecified reasons.
editing this in rather than continuing a thread as I don’t feel able to do protracted discussion at the moment:
Chana is a friend. We haven’t talked about this post, but that’s going to be affecting my thinking.
She’s also, in my view (which you can discount if you like), unusually capable of deep thinking about difficult tradeoffs, which made the comment expressing skepticism about CH’s depth particularly grating.
More generally, I’ve seen several people I consider friends recently put substantial effort into publicly communicating their reasoning about difficult decisions, and be rewarded for this effort with unhelpful criticism.
All that is to say that I’m probably not best placed to impartially evaluate comments like this, but at the end of the day I re-read it and it still feels like what happened is someone responded to Chana saying “our top priority is X” with “it seems possible that Y might be good”, and I called that uncharitable because I’m really, really sure that that possibility has not escaped her notice.
Your reply contains a very strong and in my view, highly incorrect read, and says I am far too judgemental and critical.
rhetorical move of criticising someone who says their top priority is X for not caring at all about Y.
Please review my comment again.
I’m simply pointing to a practice or principle common in many orgs, companies, startups and teams to have principles and flow from them, in addition to “maximizing EV” or “maximizing profits”. This may be wrong or right.
I’m genuinely not judging but keeping it open, like, I literally said this. I specifically suggest writing.
While this wasn’t the focus, I haven’t thought about it, but I probably do think Chana’s writing is virtuous. I actually have very specific reasons to think why the work is shallow, but this is a distinct thing from the principle or choice I’ve talked about. Community health is hard and the team is sort of given an awkward ball to catch.
An actual uncharitable opinion: I understand this is the EA forum, so as one of the challenges of true communication, critiques and devastating things written by “critics” are often masked or coached as insinuations, but I don’t feel like this happened and I kind of resent having to put my comments through these lenses.
BTW, I kind of see Alex L as one of the “best EAs” and I sort of attribute this issue to the forum, and now sort of reinforces my distrust of EA discourse (like, I think there’s an ongoing 50 comment thread or something because a grantmaker asked someone if english was their second language, come on).
This seems extremely uncharitable. It’s impossible for every good thing to be the top priority, and I really dislike the rhetorical move of criticising someone who says their top priority is X for not caring at all about Y.
In the post you’re replying to Chana makes the (in my view) virtuous move of actually being transparent about what CH’s top priorities are, a move which I think is unfortunately rare because of dynamics like this. You’ve chosen to interpret this as ‘a decision not to have’ [other nice things that you want], apparently realised that it’s possible the thinking here isn’t actually extremely shallow, but then dismissed the possibility of anyone on the team being capable of non-shallow thinking anyway for currently unspecified reasons.
editing this in rather than continuing a thread as I don’t feel able to do protracted discussion at the moment:
Chana is a friend. We haven’t talked about this post, but that’s going to be affecting my thinking.
She’s also, in my view (which you can discount if you like), unusually capable of deep thinking about difficult tradeoffs, which made the comment expressing skepticism about CH’s depth particularly grating.
More generally, I’ve seen several people I consider friends recently put substantial effort into publicly communicating their reasoning about difficult decisions, and be rewarded for this effort with unhelpful criticism.
All that is to say that I’m probably not best placed to impartially evaluate comments like this, but at the end of the day I re-read it and it still feels like what happened is someone responded to Chana saying “our top priority is X” with “it seems possible that Y might be good”, and I called that uncharitable because I’m really, really sure that that possibility has not escaped her notice.
Your reply contains a very strong and in my view, highly incorrect read, and says I am far too judgemental and critical.
Please review my comment again.
I’m simply pointing to a practice or principle common in many orgs, companies, startups and teams to have principles and flow from them, in addition to “maximizing EV” or “maximizing profits”. This may be wrong or right.
I’m genuinely not judging but keeping it open, like, I literally said this. I specifically suggest writing.
While this wasn’t the focus, I haven’t thought about it, but I probably do think Chana’s writing is virtuous. I actually have very specific reasons to think why the work is shallow, but this is a distinct thing from the principle or choice I’ve talked about. Community health is hard and the team is sort of given an awkward ball to catch.
An actual uncharitable opinion: I understand this is the EA forum, so as one of the challenges of true communication, critiques and devastating things written by “critics” are often masked or coached as insinuations, but I don’t feel like this happened and I kind of resent having to put my comments through these lenses.
BTW, I kind of see Alex L as one of the “best EAs” and I sort of attribute this issue to the forum, and now sort of reinforces my distrust of EA discourse (like, I think there’s an ongoing 50 comment thread or something because a grantmaker asked someone if english was their second language, come on).