I think there is something going on in this comment that I wouldn’t put in the category of “outside view”. Instead I would put it in the category of “perceiving something as intuitively weird, and reacting to it”.
I think there’s two things going on here.
The first is that weirdness and outside view are often deeply correlated, although not the same thing. In many ways the feeling of weirdness is a schelling fence. It protects people from sociopaths, joining cults, and other things that are a bad idea but they can’t quite articulate in words WHY it’s a bad idea.
I think you’re right that the best interventions will many times be weird, so in this case its’ a schelling fence that you have to ignore if you want to make any progress from an inside view… but it’s still worth noting that weirdness is there and good data.
The second thing going on is that it seems like many EA institutions have adopted the neoliberal stategy of gaining high status, infiltrating academia, and using that to advance EA values. From this perspective, it’s very important to avoid an aura of weirdness for the movement as a whole, even if any given individual weird intervention might have high impact. This is hard to talk about because being too loud about the strategy makes it less effective, which means that sometimes people have to say things like “outside view” when what they really mean is “you’re threatening our long term strategy but we can’t talk about it.” Although obviously in this particular case the positive impact on this strategy outweighs the potential negative impact of the weirdness aura.
I feel comfortable stating this because it’s a random EA forum post and I’m not in a position of power at an EA org, but were I in that position, I’d feel much less comfortable posting this.
I think there’s two things going on here.
The first is that weirdness and outside view are often deeply correlated, although not the same thing. In many ways the feeling of weirdness is a schelling fence. It protects people from sociopaths, joining cults, and other things that are a bad idea but they can’t quite articulate in words WHY it’s a bad idea.
I think you’re right that the best interventions will many times be weird, so in this case its’ a schelling fence that you have to ignore if you want to make any progress from an inside view… but it’s still worth noting that weirdness is there and good data.
The second thing going on is that it seems like many EA institutions have adopted the neoliberal stategy of gaining high status, infiltrating academia, and using that to advance EA values. From this perspective, it’s very important to avoid an aura of weirdness for the movement as a whole, even if any given individual weird intervention might have high impact. This is hard to talk about because being too loud about the strategy makes it less effective, which means that sometimes people have to say things like “outside view” when what they really mean is “you’re threatening our long term strategy but we can’t talk about it.” Although obviously in this particular case the positive impact on this strategy outweighs the potential negative impact of the weirdness aura.
I feel comfortable stating this because it’s a random EA forum post and I’m not in a position of power at an EA org, but were I in that position, I’d feel much less comfortable posting this.