IMO it’s pretty outrageous to make a piece entitled “The EA case for [X]” when you yourself do not call yourself identify as an effective altruist and the [X] in question is extremely toxic to most everyone on the outside. It’s like if I made a piece “the feminist case for Benito Mussolini” where I made clear that I am not a feminist but feminists should be supporting Mussolini.
It’s like if I made a piece “the feminist case for Benito Mussolini” where I made clear that I am not a feminist but feminists should be supporting Mussolini.
I guess I don’t share your intuition there. Obviously you should try to accurately represent feminist premises and drive sound inferences, and object-level criticisms would be very appropriate if you failed in this, but the writing such a post itself seems fine to me if it passed the ideological turing test. It reminds me of how students and lawyers often have to write arguments for something from the perspective of someone else, even if they don’t believe it.
It seems very strange to me to think that this post is bad, but a word-for-word identical post would be good if the author self-identified as an EA. The title is meant to describe the content of the post, and the post is about how EA premises might support Trump.
Re: extremely toxic, most people who would see this post are left-wing, that is obvious.
I don’t think that a word-for-word identical where the author self-identified as an EA would be good. I think it would be less bad, and I might not clamor for the title to be changed.
The problem is that this post blew up on Twitter and a lot of people’s image of EA was downgraded because of it. To me, that’s very unfair; this post is wrong on the substance, this is an extremely unpopular opinion within EA, and the author doesn’t even identify as an EA so the post does not provide any evidence that people who identify as EA think this way. Changing the title would alleviate most of the reputational damage to EA (or well it would have if it was done earlier) and does not seem too big an ask.
IMO it’s pretty outrageous to make a piece entitled “The EA case for [X]” when you yourself do not call yourself identify as an effective altruist and the [X] in question is extremely toxic to most everyone on the outside. It’s like if I made a piece “the feminist case for Benito Mussolini” where I made clear that I am not a feminist but feminists should be supporting Mussolini.
That seems not true to me? Trump and Kamala are roughly equally popular.
I guess I don’t share your intuition there. Obviously you should try to accurately represent feminist premises and drive sound inferences, and object-level criticisms would be very appropriate if you failed in this, but the writing such a post itself seems fine to me if it passed the ideological turing test. It reminds me of how students and lawyers often have to write arguments for something from the perspective of someone else, even if they don’t believe it.
It seems very strange to me to think that this post is bad, but a word-for-word identical post would be good if the author self-identified as an EA. The title is meant to describe the content of the post, and the post is about how EA premises might support Trump.
Re: extremely toxic, most people who would see this post are left-wing, that is obvious.
I don’t think that a word-for-word identical where the author self-identified as an EA would be good. I think it would be less bad, and I might not clamor for the title to be changed.
The problem is that this post blew up on Twitter and a lot of people’s image of EA was downgraded because of it. To me, that’s very unfair; this post is wrong on the substance, this is an extremely unpopular opinion within EA, and the author doesn’t even identify as an EA so the post does not provide any evidence that people who identify as EA think this way. Changing the title would alleviate most of the reputational damage to EA (or well it would have if it was done earlier) and does not seem too big an ask.