Good post. Maybe it’d be valuable to start discussions on other online forums and try to gather external perspectives on EA, instead of just discussing what hypothetical external perspectives might look like here amongst ourselves :) For example, most of Less Wrong knows what EA is, but over half don’t identify as EA. This thread has lots of non-EA LWers explaining themselves. Maybe we can come up with a list of questions and try to administer an informal survey to further our understanding?
(Yes, we have many people from the LW demographic already… but smart people concerned with cognitive biases seem like good EA recruits if they’re less likely to see their good intentions go awry. So I think more people from that demographic are still highly valuable on the margin. The EA movement is currently full of smart thoughtful people, but it’s growing fast, and there are only so many people who are smart and thoughtful… what will happen when less intelligent, less thoughtful people dominate?)
There are also intelligent, thoughtful people outside of LW.
Also, while I agree that keeping the tone among EAs thoughtful, I would be extremely sad if we didn’t encourage particular people or groups from being interested in EA because they aren’t “intelligent enough.”
Good post. Maybe it’d be valuable to start discussions on other online forums and try to gather external perspectives on EA, instead of just discussing what hypothetical external perspectives might look like here amongst ourselves :) For example, most of Less Wrong knows what EA is, but over half don’t identify as EA. This thread has lots of non-EA LWers explaining themselves. Maybe we can come up with a list of questions and try to administer an informal survey to further our understanding?
(Yes, we have many people from the LW demographic already… but smart people concerned with cognitive biases seem like good EA recruits if they’re less likely to see their good intentions go awry. So I think more people from that demographic are still highly valuable on the margin. The EA movement is currently full of smart thoughtful people, but it’s growing fast, and there are only so many people who are smart and thoughtful… what will happen when less intelligent, less thoughtful people dominate?)
There are also intelligent, thoughtful people outside of LW.
Also, while I agree that keeping the tone among EAs thoughtful, I would be extremely sad if we didn’t encourage particular people or groups from being interested in EA because they aren’t “intelligent enough.”
This is also how the movement gets an elitist reputation that seems quite harmful.
Fair points.