Good dissection, but it’s a bit hopeless to try to win a debate like this because you can’t really argue when the problem is that we have the wrong worldview and the “ways of talking of global capitalism”. If effective altruism stopped dealing with empiricism, probabilities and statistics then it just wouldn’t be effective anymore. So we can take people’s calls for radical change and try to see if they work according to solid criteria, but that will never satisfy them. They will turn away the moment that you try to bring up V*P because they just don’t think that way. And given that the current groups who do support radical change of socioeconomic systems are incredibly ideologically fragmented and seem to fail to muster the level of funding and personal commitment that EA does, it doesn’t seem to be a very fruitful target demographic for us to win more support.
I do expect that we will be steadily more focused on evaluating various types of political change in the future, but that is a function of the resources of the movement. The time and money that it would take to do a systematic evaluation of “should we overthrow the chains of the bourgeoisie” would take away from other things. Remember that this way of thinking is scarce outside of continental philosophy and similar subsets of academia. I don’t expect it to have a significant impact upon the movement’s strength.
I wonder if we could gain headway by emphasizing just how awful the track record of radical political change really is. (I’ll give you a hint: it’s worse than the track record of bad charities.) But that seems likely to just provoke unnecessary controversy and debate without changing anyone’s mind. So the tone and measure of your writing is good. This kind of patient response to criticism helps to keep the rhetoric level calm and low while we focus on more important messages.
As a side note, I would caution everyone to think about the potential downsides if we did evaluation of radical political change. Just like the unfortunate but necessary situation with AI research, it would probably put off a large number of people who would begin to see us as radicals, communists, revolutionaries, or something of the sort. And those would be the people who have the funds and influence that we actually need.
(but I am not an expert in movement building—hopefully someone can correct me if I asserted anything dubious.)
Yes, I’d like to clarify I don’t think we should think in terms of “winning the debate” but rather “understanding our critics and seeing what we can learn from them”.
Good dissection, but it’s a bit hopeless to try to win a debate like this because you can’t really argue when the problem is that we have the wrong worldview and the “ways of talking of global capitalism”. If effective altruism stopped dealing with empiricism, probabilities and statistics then it just wouldn’t be effective anymore. So we can take people’s calls for radical change and try to see if they work according to solid criteria, but that will never satisfy them. They will turn away the moment that you try to bring up V*P because they just don’t think that way. And given that the current groups who do support radical change of socioeconomic systems are incredibly ideologically fragmented and seem to fail to muster the level of funding and personal commitment that EA does, it doesn’t seem to be a very fruitful target demographic for us to win more support.
I do expect that we will be steadily more focused on evaluating various types of political change in the future, but that is a function of the resources of the movement. The time and money that it would take to do a systematic evaluation of “should we overthrow the chains of the bourgeoisie” would take away from other things. Remember that this way of thinking is scarce outside of continental philosophy and similar subsets of academia. I don’t expect it to have a significant impact upon the movement’s strength.
I wonder if we could gain headway by emphasizing just how awful the track record of radical political change really is. (I’ll give you a hint: it’s worse than the track record of bad charities.) But that seems likely to just provoke unnecessary controversy and debate without changing anyone’s mind. So the tone and measure of your writing is good. This kind of patient response to criticism helps to keep the rhetoric level calm and low while we focus on more important messages.
As a side note, I would caution everyone to think about the potential downsides if we did evaluation of radical political change. Just like the unfortunate but necessary situation with AI research, it would probably put off a large number of people who would begin to see us as radicals, communists, revolutionaries, or something of the sort. And those would be the people who have the funds and influence that we actually need.
(but I am not an expert in movement building—hopefully someone can correct me if I asserted anything dubious.)
Yes, I’d like to clarify I don’t think we should think in terms of “winning the debate” but rather “understanding our critics and seeing what we can learn from them”.
Yeah, of course. You’ve got an A+ attitude on all this.