Somebody writes about an issue that happens to be a popular mainstream cause and asks, “how can I be most effective at doing good, given that I want to work specifically on this cause?”
I’m not saying the two issues are remotely equivalent. Obviously, to argue “this should be an EA cause area” would require very different arguments, and one might be much stronger than the other. With Ukraine, maybe you could justify it as being adjacent to nuclear risk, but the post wasn’t talking about nuclear risk. Maybe close to being about preventing great power conflict, but the post wasn’t talking about that, either. So, like this post, it is outside of the “standard” EA cause areas.
This comment seems to imply that if somebody is posting about a cause that isn’t within the “standard” cause areas, then they should need to justify posting about it as to why this would be better than other cause areas. They cannot “leave that exercise to the reader.” The first paragraph of this comment makes a meta-level point that suggests people shouldn’t even post about an issue and let readers debate it in the comments (which, in fairness, is not what the author of this post did, when explicitly asking for it not to be debated in the comments after this comment was written). Instead, the author themselves must make a case for the object-level merits of the cause.
It seems others might agree, given that this comment has more karma than the original post (edit: this may or may not be currently true, but it was true at the time of this comment). If people on the forum have these beliefs about meta-level discussion norms, then I ask: why apply it to abortion and not Ukraine?
I strongly suspect that the answer is that people are letting their object-level opinions of issues subtly motivate their meta-level opinions of discussion norms. I’d rather that not happen.
I agree it should apply to both; if your question is why didn’t I object to the previous post I don’t have any specific defense other than having no recollection of seeing the Ukraine post at the time, though maybe I saw it and forgot.
I wasn’t intending to single out you or any specific person when asking that question. More that the community overall seems to collectively have responded differently (in view of up/downvotes). Due to the fact that different people see different posts, it’s hardly a controlled experiment, so it could have been just chance who happened to see the post first and make a first impression.
I notice a similarity to this post.
Somebody writes about an issue that happens to be a popular mainstream cause and asks, “how can I be most effective at doing good, given that I want to work specifically on this cause?”
I’m not saying the two issues are remotely equivalent. Obviously, to argue “this should be an EA cause area” would require very different arguments, and one might be much stronger than the other. With Ukraine, maybe you could justify it as being adjacent to nuclear risk, but the post wasn’t talking about nuclear risk. Maybe close to being about preventing great power conflict, but the post wasn’t talking about that, either. So, like this post, it is outside of the “standard” EA cause areas.
This comment seems to imply that if somebody is posting about a cause that isn’t within the “standard” cause areas, then they should need to justify posting about it as to why this would be better than other cause areas. They cannot “leave that exercise to the reader.” The first paragraph of this comment makes a meta-level point that suggests people shouldn’t even post about an issue and let readers debate it in the comments (which, in fairness, is not what the author of this post did, when explicitly asking for it not to be debated in the comments after this comment was written). Instead, the author themselves must make a case for the object-level merits of the cause.
It seems others might agree, given that this comment has more karma than the original post (edit: this may or may not be currently true, but it was true at the time of this comment). If people on the forum have these beliefs about meta-level discussion norms, then I ask: why apply it to abortion and not Ukraine?
I strongly suspect that the answer is that people are letting their object-level opinions of issues subtly motivate their meta-level opinions of discussion norms. I’d rather that not happen.
I agree it should apply to both; if your question is why didn’t I object to the previous post I don’t have any specific defense other than having no recollection of seeing the Ukraine post at the time, though maybe I saw it and forgot.
I wasn’t intending to single out you or any specific person when asking that question. More that the community overall seems to collectively have responded differently (in view of up/downvotes). Due to the fact that different people see different posts, it’s hardly a controlled experiment, so it could have been just chance who happened to see the post first and make a first impression.