EA has consensus on shockingly few big questions. I would argue that not coming to widespread agreement is the norm for this community.
Think about:
neartermism v.s. longtermism
GiveWell style CEAs v.s. Open Phil style explicitly non-transparent hits-based giving
Total Utilitarianism v.s. Suffering-focused Ethics
Priors on the hinge-of-history hypothesis
Moral Realism
These are all incredibly important and central to a lot of EA work, but as far as I’ve seen, there isn’t strong consensus.
I would describe the working solution as some combination of:
Pursuing different avenues in parallel
Having different institutions act in accordance with different worldviews
Focusing on work that’s robust to worldview diversification
Anyway, that’s all to say, you’re right, and this is an important question to make progress on, but it’s not really surprising that there isn’t consensus.
EA has consensus on shockingly few big questions. I would argue that not coming to widespread agreement is the norm for this community.
Think about:
neartermism v.s. longtermism
GiveWell style CEAs v.s. Open Phil style explicitly non-transparent hits-based giving
Total Utilitarianism v.s. Suffering-focused Ethics
Priors on the hinge-of-history hypothesis
Moral Realism
These are all incredibly important and central to a lot of EA work, but as far as I’ve seen, there isn’t strong consensus.
I would describe the working solution as some combination of:
Pursuing different avenues in parallel
Having different institutions act in accordance with different worldviews
Focusing on work that’s robust to worldview diversification
Anyway, that’s all to say, you’re right, and this is an important question to make progress on, but it’s not really surprising that there isn’t consensus.