As someone out of the loop in terms of the contextual specifics of said people/organizations, I think there’s a much simpler explanation than those statements being strategic lies. Firstly, those statements resemble expressions of boundaries within a conversation. To oversimplify, they basically translate to “I don’t want to talk about EA”. This is a difference between literal speak (preferred by autistic people for example) and neurotypical speak, where something that would be bizarre/false if interpreted factually is understood as a contextual boundary which is not about the facts and therefore isn’t considered lying.
However, even in a more literal sense, I don’t think those statements are necessarily false, if you take into account the fact that EA is “everything” to some EAs and “just a speck” to others. If I think maths is the most important thing in the world and I belong to a community with some degree of agreement, then it’s easy for me to start accusing people adjacent or on the borders of the community for downplaying the importance of math. Every time someone mentions something math-adjacent but not in a maths-worshipping tone, they’re being disingenuous. But this would be a fallacy where me equating lack of worship for lying says more about my world view than anything else.
A personal example: I identified as an EA for a few years and now I would consider myself “post-EA”, if such a term existed. Both things are possible, that I invested a lot into EA and was inspired significantly by it, and simultaneously that I find relatively few tools moving forwards to be worth attributing to EA conversationally or philosophically. EA isn’t “one consistent thing” and it’s certainly not everything. For example, ranking charities is very EA, but it also exists outside EA, so even if my exposure was through EA, it doesn’t necessarily make sense for me to acknowledge EA in a conversation about charity efficiency. The EA-ness of it doesn’t mean anything to non-EAs, and it barely means anything to me having integrated the perspectives I want to keep vs discard.
As someone out of the loop in terms of the contextual specifics of said people/organizations, I think there’s a much simpler explanation than those statements being strategic lies. Firstly, those statements resemble expressions of boundaries within a conversation. To oversimplify, they basically translate to “I don’t want to talk about EA”. This is a difference between literal speak (preferred by autistic people for example) and neurotypical speak, where something that would be bizarre/false if interpreted factually is understood as a contextual boundary which is not about the facts and therefore isn’t considered lying.
However, even in a more literal sense, I don’t think those statements are necessarily false, if you take into account the fact that EA is “everything” to some EAs and “just a speck” to others. If I think maths is the most important thing in the world and I belong to a community with some degree of agreement, then it’s easy for me to start accusing people adjacent or on the borders of the community for downplaying the importance of math. Every time someone mentions something math-adjacent but not in a maths-worshipping tone, they’re being disingenuous. But this would be a fallacy where me equating lack of worship for lying says more about my world view than anything else.
A personal example: I identified as an EA for a few years and now I would consider myself “post-EA”, if such a term existed. Both things are possible, that I invested a lot into EA and was inspired significantly by it, and simultaneously that I find relatively few tools moving forwards to be worth attributing to EA conversationally or philosophically. EA isn’t “one consistent thing” and it’s certainly not everything. For example, ranking charities is very EA, but it also exists outside EA, so even if my exposure was through EA, it doesn’t necessarily make sense for me to acknowledge EA in a conversation about charity efficiency. The EA-ness of it doesn’t mean anything to non-EAs, and it barely means anything to me having integrated the perspectives I want to keep vs discard.