I downvoted this comment because it’s not relevant to the purpose of this conversation. I shared my personal opinion to illustrate a psychological dynamic that can occur; the fact that you disagree with me about Scott does not invalidate the pattern I was trying to illustrate (and in fact, you missed the point that I was referring to CEA staff and others I spoke with afterwards as EA leadership, not Scott).
If you think for some reason our disagreement about Scott Alexander is relevant to potential explanations for people refusing to acknowledge their relationship to EA, please explain that and I will revise my comment here.
I will acknowledge that my description is at least a little glib, but I didn’t take that much time to perfect how I was describing my feelings about Scott because it wasn’t relevant to my point.
Thanks, that’s a great reason to downvote my comment and I appreciate you explaining why you did it (though it has gotten some upvotes so I wouldn’t have noticed anyone downvoted except that you mentioned it). And yes, I misread whom your paragraph was referring to; thanks for the clarification.
However, you’re incorrect that those factual errors aren’t relevant. Your feelings toward EA leadership are based on a false factual premise, and we shouldn’t be making decisions about branding with the goal of appealing to people who are offended based on their own misunderstanding.
I think there’s something to what you’re saying about factual errors, but not at the level of diagnosing the problem. Instead, I’d argue that whether or not my opinion is based on factual errors[1] is more relevant to the treatment than the diagnosis.
Let’s say for arguments sake that I’m totally wrong: I got freaked out by an EA influencer, I approached EA leaders, they gave me a great response, and yet here I am complaining on the EA forum about it. My claim, though, isn’t that EA leaders doing something wrong leads to EA-adjacency. It’s that people feeling like EA leaders have done wrong leads to EA-adjacency.
Given that what I was trying to emphasize is the cause of the behavior, whether someone having a sense of being betrayed by leadership is based on reality or a hallucination is irrelevant—it’s still the explanation for why they are not acknowledging their EA connections (I am positing).
However, you are definitely correct that when strategizing how to address EA adjacency/brand issues, if that’s something you want to try to do, it helps to know whether the feelings people are having are based on facts or some kind of myth. In the case of the FTX trauma, @Mjreard is pointing out that there may be a myth of some sort at play in the minds of the people doing the denying. In the case of brand confusion, I think the root cause is something in lack of clarity around how EA factions relate to each other. In the case of leadership betrayal, I’d argue it’s because the people I spoke with genuinely let me down, and you might argue it’s because I’m totally irrational or something :) But nevertheless, identifying the feeling I’m having is still useful to begin the conversation.
(For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re irrational, you’re just mistaken about Scott being racist and what happened with the Cade Metz article. If someone in EA is really racist, and you complain to EA leadership and they don’t do anything about it, you could reasonably be angry with them. If the person in question is not in fact racist, and you complain about them to CEA and they don’t do anything about it, they made the right call and you’d be upset due to the mistaken beliefs, but conditional on those beliefs, it wasn’t irrational to be upset.)
I downvoted this comment because it’s not relevant to the purpose of this conversation. I shared my personal opinion to illustrate a psychological dynamic that can occur; the fact that you disagree with me about Scott does not invalidate the pattern I was trying to illustrate (and in fact, you missed the point that I was referring to CEA staff and others I spoke with afterwards as EA leadership, not Scott).
If you think for some reason our disagreement about Scott Alexander is relevant to potential explanations for people refusing to acknowledge their relationship to EA, please explain that and I will revise my comment here.
I will acknowledge that my description is at least a little glib, but I didn’t take that much time to perfect how I was describing my feelings about Scott because it wasn’t relevant to my point.
Thanks, that’s a great reason to downvote my comment and I appreciate you explaining why you did it (though it has gotten some upvotes so I wouldn’t have noticed anyone downvoted except that you mentioned it). And yes, I misread whom your paragraph was referring to; thanks for the clarification.
However, you’re incorrect that those factual errors aren’t relevant. Your feelings toward EA leadership are based on a false factual premise, and we shouldn’t be making decisions about branding with the goal of appealing to people who are offended based on their own misunderstanding.
Cool, I adjusted my vote, thanks for addressing.
I think there’s something to what you’re saying about factual errors, but not at the level of diagnosing the problem. Instead, I’d argue that whether or not my opinion is based on factual errors[1] is more relevant to the treatment than the diagnosis.
Let’s say for arguments sake that I’m totally wrong: I got freaked out by an EA influencer, I approached EA leaders, they gave me a great response, and yet here I am complaining on the EA forum about it. My claim, though, isn’t that EA leaders doing something wrong leads to EA-adjacency. It’s that people feeling like EA leaders have done wrong leads to EA-adjacency.
Given that what I was trying to emphasize is the cause of the behavior, whether someone having a sense of being betrayed by leadership is based on reality or a hallucination is irrelevant—it’s still the explanation for why they are not acknowledging their EA connections (I am positing).
However, you are definitely correct that when strategizing how to address EA adjacency/brand issues, if that’s something you want to try to do, it helps to know whether the feelings people are having are based on facts or some kind of myth. In the case of the FTX trauma, @Mjreard is pointing out that there may be a myth of some sort at play in the minds of the people doing the denying. In the case of brand confusion, I think the root cause is something in lack of clarity around how EA factions relate to each other. In the case of leadership betrayal, I’d argue it’s because the people I spoke with genuinely let me down, and you might argue it’s because I’m totally irrational or something :) But nevertheless, identifying the feeling I’m having is still useful to begin the conversation.
Obviously, I don’t think my opinion is based on factual errors, but that’s neither here nor there.
(For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re irrational, you’re just mistaken about Scott being racist and what happened with the Cade Metz article. If someone in EA is really racist, and you complain to EA leadership and they don’t do anything about it, you could reasonably be angry with them. If the person in question is not in fact racist, and you complain about them to CEA and they don’t do anything about it, they made the right call and you’d be upset due to the mistaken beliefs, but conditional on those beliefs, it wasn’t irrational to be upset.)