Thank you as well, it definitely is worth something. I’ve been thinking about this for the past couple of days and I can’t come up with a very satisfying answer, and this will likely be a bit of a digression so I apologize for that.
I think the short answer is perhaps not very much. (There may be others who are more imaginative than I who can come up with actual actionable things here.) The EA Forum in particular tends to value evidence based, well sourced and impartially argued posts. This is a good thing in many cases, but it does create trades offs in terms of being “welcoming”[1], and I think this is one of them: I recognize and respect that many people who oppose abortion do it from a place of believing that a fetus is a person and caring very deeply about the lives of unborn children, but the corollary to that is a reduction to the rights of bodily autonomy and self-determination of a huge number of people. It’s very challenging for me personally to find the desire and follow through to sit down and spend hours putting together a post that argues for respect for my rights because, to put it simply, the idea that I need to argue that my rights and the rights of roughly half the worlds population should be valued and respected in this type of format (or at all, even) in the context of a movement that values doing good is extremely disheartening and demotivating, particularly when those rights are already being eroded across the world. I imagine that there are people who are invested enough in EA and/or longtermism that the emotional and time costs of doing that will be worth it, but I don’t think I am.
Also, this is a relatively minor point and I only mention because you do seem to care about this and I in no way mean to come off as accusatory as I sincerely believe it was without malice or bad intent, but writing off people’s sincerely held beliefs and priorities as a result of partisanship or tribalism or assuming that a question will fall on deaf ears does have a chilling effect, at least for me. I have done my best to engage with this post respectfully and in good faith, even when I strongly disagree with many parts of it, and these comments make me feel like my disagreements are being treated as incorrect received knowledge rather than considered and examined beliefs that are treated with respect.
I put this in quotes because it doesn’t quite sit well with me, but I’m not sure what would work better—it’s not that I feel that a post that is of “lower quality” by these standard wouldn’t be welcome, necessarily, but that it would probably be met with a lot of questions and demands to have it conform more to those standards—which is, to some extent, fair enough, as every space is obviously allowed to have its own discursive norms, but it does come with costs in some cases.
Thanks for your reply. No worries if you feel like you weren’t able to come up with a satisfying answer—given that you’re engaging in a dialogue where you reasonably perceive your counterpart to be going after your rights, your reaction has been very understandable.
I’d like to apologize for the characterization of your sincerely held views as tribalism. It wasn’t empathetic or helpful to our dialogue.
Thank you as well, it definitely is worth something. I’ve been thinking about this for the past couple of days and I can’t come up with a very satisfying answer, and this will likely be a bit of a digression so I apologize for that.
I think the short answer is perhaps not very much. (There may be others who are more imaginative than I who can come up with actual actionable things here.) The EA Forum in particular tends to value evidence based, well sourced and impartially argued posts. This is a good thing in many cases, but it does create trades offs in terms of being “welcoming”[1], and I think this is one of them: I recognize and respect that many people who oppose abortion do it from a place of believing that a fetus is a person and caring very deeply about the lives of unborn children, but the corollary to that is a reduction to the rights of bodily autonomy and self-determination of a huge number of people. It’s very challenging for me personally to find the desire and follow through to sit down and spend hours putting together a post that argues for respect for my rights because, to put it simply, the idea that I need to argue that my rights and the rights of roughly half the worlds population should be valued and respected in this type of format (or at all, even) in the context of a movement that values doing good is extremely disheartening and demotivating, particularly when those rights are already being eroded across the world. I imagine that there are people who are invested enough in EA and/or longtermism that the emotional and time costs of doing that will be worth it, but I don’t think I am.
Also, this is a relatively minor point and I only mention because you do seem to care about this and I in no way mean to come off as accusatory as I sincerely believe it was without malice or bad intent, but writing off people’s sincerely held beliefs and priorities as a result of partisanship or tribalism or assuming that a question will fall on deaf ears does have a chilling effect, at least for me. I have done my best to engage with this post respectfully and in good faith, even when I strongly disagree with many parts of it, and these comments make me feel like my disagreements are being treated as incorrect received knowledge rather than considered and examined beliefs that are treated with respect.
I put this in quotes because it doesn’t quite sit well with me, but I’m not sure what would work better—it’s not that I feel that a post that is of “lower quality” by these standard wouldn’t be welcome, necessarily, but that it would probably be met with a lot of questions and demands to have it conform more to those standards—which is, to some extent, fair enough, as every space is obviously allowed to have its own discursive norms, but it does come with costs in some cases.
Thanks for your reply. No worries if you feel like you weren’t able to come up with a satisfying answer—given that you’re engaging in a dialogue where you reasonably perceive your counterpart to be going after your rights, your reaction has been very understandable.
I’d like to apologize for the characterization of your sincerely held views as tribalism. It wasn’t empathetic or helpful to our dialogue.