Executive summary: Motivation gaps between advocates and skeptics of a cause can lead to an imbalance in the quality and quantity of arguments on each side, making it difficult to accurately judge the merits of the cause based on the arguments alone.
Key points:
Advocates of a cause (e.g. religion, AI risk) are intrinsically motivated to make high-effort arguments, while skeptics lack inherent motivation to do the same.
This leads to an asymmetry where advocate arguments appear more convincing, even if the cause itself may be flawed.
Counter-motivations like moral backlash, politics, money, annoyance, and entertainment can somewhat close the motivation gap for skeptics, but introduce their own biases.
In-group criticism alone is insufficient due to issues like jargon barriers, agreement bias, evaporative cooling, and conflicts of interest.
To account for motivation gaps, adjust the weight given to each side’s arguments, be more charitable to critics, seek out neutral parties to evaluate the cause, and signal boost high-effort critiques.
EA should make an extra effort to highlight good-faith criticism to encourage more productive engagement from skeptics.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: Motivation gaps between advocates and skeptics of a cause can lead to an imbalance in the quality and quantity of arguments on each side, making it difficult to accurately judge the merits of the cause based on the arguments alone.
Key points:
Advocates of a cause (e.g. religion, AI risk) are intrinsically motivated to make high-effort arguments, while skeptics lack inherent motivation to do the same.
This leads to an asymmetry where advocate arguments appear more convincing, even if the cause itself may be flawed.
Counter-motivations like moral backlash, politics, money, annoyance, and entertainment can somewhat close the motivation gap for skeptics, but introduce their own biases.
In-group criticism alone is insufficient due to issues like jargon barriers, agreement bias, evaporative cooling, and conflicts of interest.
To account for motivation gaps, adjust the weight given to each side’s arguments, be more charitable to critics, seek out neutral parties to evaluate the cause, and signal boost high-effort critiques.
EA should make an extra effort to highlight good-faith criticism to encourage more productive engagement from skeptics.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.