I downvoted this post, so I want to explain why. I don’t think this post actually adds much to the forum, or to EA more generally. You have mostly just found a strawperson to beat up on, and I don’t think many of your rebuttals are high quality, nor do they take her on good faith (to use a rat term I loathe, you are in ‘soldier mindset’).
I can’t really see a benefit to doing so; demarcating our ‘opponents’ only serves to cut us off from them, and to become ‘intellectually incurious’ about why they might feel that way or how we might change their minds. This does, over time, make things harder for us—funders start turning their noses up at EAs, policymakers don’t want to listen, influential people in industry can write us off as unserious.
There are numerous other potential versions of this post. It could have been a thought-provoking critique of Peter Singer for engaging in debate theatre. It could have tried to steelperson her arguments. It could have even tried to trace the intellectual lineage of those arguments to understand why she has ended up with this particular inconsistent set of them! All of those would have been useful for understanding why people hate us, and how we can make them hate us less. I am not a fan of this trend of cheerleading against our haters, and I worry about the consequences of the broader environment it has and is fostering :(
I downvoted this post, so I want to explain why. I don’t think this post actually adds much to the forum, or to EA more generally. You have mostly just found a strawperson to beat up on, and I don’t think many of your rebuttals are high quality, nor do they take her on good faith (to use a rat term I loathe, you are in ‘soldier mindset’).
I can’t really see a benefit to doing so; demarcating our ‘opponents’ only serves to cut us off from them, and to become ‘intellectually incurious’ about why they might feel that way or how we might change their minds. This does, over time, make things harder for us—funders start turning their noses up at EAs, policymakers don’t want to listen, influential people in industry can write us off as unserious.
There are numerous other potential versions of this post. It could have been a thought-provoking critique of Peter Singer for engaging in debate theatre. It could have tried to steelperson her arguments. It could have even tried to trace the intellectual lineage of those arguments to understand why she has ended up with this particular inconsistent set of them! All of those would have been useful for understanding why people hate us, and how we can make them hate us less. I am not a fan of this trend of cheerleading against our haters, and I worry about the consequences of the broader environment it has and is fostering :(