I think that people who are really enthusiastic about EA are pretty likely to stick around even when they’re infuriated by things EAs are saying.
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If you know someone (eg yourself) who you think is a counterargument to this claim of mine, feel free to message me.
I would guess it depends quite a bit on these people’s total exposure to EA at the time when they encounter something they find infuriating (or even just somewhat off / getting a vibe that this community probably is “not for them”).
If we’re imagining people who’ve already had 10 or even 100 hours of total EA exposure, then I’m inclined to agree with your claim and sentiment. (Though I think there would still be exceptions, and I suspect I’m at least a bit more into “try hard to avoid people bouncing for reasons unrelated to actual goal misalignment” than you.)
I’m less sure for people who are super new to EA as a school of thought or community.
We don’t need to look at hypothetical cases to establish this. My memory of events 10 years ago is obviously hazy but I’m fairly sure that I had encountered both GiveWell’s website and Overcoming Biasyears before I actually got into EA. At that time I didn’t understand what they were really about, and from skimming they didn’t clear my bar of “this seems worth engaging with”. I think Overcoming Bias seemed like some generic libertarian blog to me, and at the time I thought libertarians were deluded and callous; and for GiveWell I had landed on some in-the-weeds page on some specific intervention and I was like “whatever I’m not that interested in malaria [or whatever the page was about]”. Just two of the many links you open, glance at for a few seconds, and then never (well, in this case luckily not quite) come back to.
This case is obviously very different from what we’re discussing here. But I think it serves to reframe the discussion by illustrating that there are a number of different reasons for why someone might bounce from EA depending on a number of that person’s properties, with the amount of prior exposure being a key one. I’m skeptical that any blanket statement of type “it’s OK if people bounce for reason X” will do a good job at describing a good strategy for dealing with this issue.
I would guess it depends quite a bit on these people’s total exposure to EA at the time when they encounter something they find infuriating (or even just somewhat off / getting a vibe that this community probably is “not for them”).
If we’re imagining people who’ve already had 10 or even 100 hours of total EA exposure, then I’m inclined to agree with your claim and sentiment. (Though I think there would still be exceptions, and I suspect I’m at least a bit more into “try hard to avoid people bouncing for reasons unrelated to actual goal misalignment” than you.)
I’m less sure for people who are super new to EA as a school of thought or community.
We don’t need to look at hypothetical cases to establish this. My memory of events 10 years ago is obviously hazy but I’m fairly sure that I had encountered both GiveWell’s website and Overcoming Bias years before I actually got into EA. At that time I didn’t understand what they were really about, and from skimming they didn’t clear my bar of “this seems worth engaging with”. I think Overcoming Bias seemed like some generic libertarian blog to me, and at the time I thought libertarians were deluded and callous; and for GiveWell I had landed on some in-the-weeds page on some specific intervention and I was like “whatever I’m not that interested in malaria [or whatever the page was about]”. Just two of the many links you open, glance at for a few seconds, and then never (well, in this case luckily not quite) come back to.
This case is obviously very different from what we’re discussing here. But I think it serves to reframe the discussion by illustrating that there are a number of different reasons for why someone might bounce from EA depending on a number of that person’s properties, with the amount of prior exposure being a key one. I’m skeptical that any blanket statement of type “it’s OK if people bounce for reason X” will do a good job at describing a good strategy for dealing with this issue.