I do too, FWIW. I read this post and its comments because I’m considering donating to/through ACE, and I wanted to understand exactly what ACE did and what the context was. Reading through a sprawling, nearly 15k-word discussion mostly about social justice and discourse norms was not conducive to that goal.
Presumably knowing the basis of ACE’s evaluations is one of the most important thing to know about ACE? And knowing to what degree social justice principles are part of that evaluation (and to what degree those principles conflict with evaluating cost-effectiveness) seems like a pretty important part of that.
Knowing the basis of ACE’s evaluations is of course essential to deciding whether to donate to/through them and I’d be surprised if esantorella disagreed. It’s just that this post and discussion is not only or even mostly about that. In my view, it would have been a far more valuable/better post if it were focused more tightly on that serious issue and the evidence for and against it, and left out altogether small issues like publishing and taking down bad blog posts, and the general discourse norms discussion was in a separate post labelled appropriately.
Makes sense. I think the current issues discussed feel like the best evidence we have, and do we feel like pretty substantial evidence on this topic, but it doesn’t seem necessary to discuss that fully here.
My claim is just that I doubt you thought that if the rate of posts like this was 50% lower, you would have been substantially more likely to get involved with EA; I’d be very interested to hear I was wrong about that.
I think that isn’t the right counterfactual since I got into EA circles despite having only minimal (and net negative) impressions of EA-related forums. So your claim is narrowly true, but if instead the counterfactual was if my first exposure to EA was the EA forum, then I think yes the prominence of this kind of post would have made me substantially less likely to engage.
But fundamentally if we’re running either of these counterfactuals I think we’re already leaving a bunch of value on the table, as expressed by EricHerboso’s post about false dilemmas.
I bounce off posts like this. Not sure if you’d consider me net positive or not. :)
I do too, FWIW. I read this post and its comments because I’m considering donating to/through ACE, and I wanted to understand exactly what ACE did and what the context was. Reading through a sprawling, nearly 15k-word discussion mostly about social justice and discourse norms was not conducive to that goal.
Presumably knowing the basis of ACE’s evaluations is one of the most important thing to know about ACE? And knowing to what degree social justice principles are part of that evaluation (and to what degree those principles conflict with evaluating cost-effectiveness) seems like a pretty important part of that.
Knowing the basis of ACE’s evaluations is of course essential to deciding whether to donate to/through them and I’d be surprised if esantorella disagreed. It’s just that this post and discussion is not only or even mostly about that. In my view, it would have been a far more valuable/better post if it were focused more tightly on that serious issue and the evidence for and against it, and left out altogether small issues like publishing and taking down bad blog posts, and the general discourse norms discussion was in a separate post labelled appropriately.
Makes sense. I think the current issues discussed feel like the best evidence we have, and do we feel like pretty substantial evidence on this topic, but it doesn’t seem necessary to discuss that fully here.
I am glad to have you around, of course.
My claim is just that I doubt you thought that if the rate of posts like this was 50% lower, you would have been substantially more likely to get involved with EA; I’d be very interested to hear I was wrong about that.
I think that isn’t the right counterfactual since I got into EA circles despite having only minimal (and net negative) impressions of EA-related forums. So your claim is narrowly true, but if instead the counterfactual was if my first exposure to EA was the EA forum, then I think yes the prominence of this kind of post would have made me substantially less likely to engage.
But fundamentally if we’re running either of these counterfactuals I think we’re already leaving a bunch of value on the table, as expressed by EricHerboso’s post about false dilemmas.