Masrani seemed to jump to a strange, uncharitable, and incorrect conclusion about the history of longtermist thought.
Masrani wrote:
I will primarily focus on The case for strong longtermism, listed as “draft status” on both Greaves and MacAskill’s personal websites as of November 23rd, 2020. It has generated quite a lot of conversation within the effective altruism (EA) community despite its status, including multiple podcast episodes on 80000 hours podcast (one, two, three), a dedicated a multi-million dollar fund listed on the EA website, numerous blog posts, and an active forum discussion. (Update 21/12/2020: Oops I was sloppy with the chronology in this paragraph—Patrick points out that the paper formalizes and extends ideas that have existed in the community for a while.)”
I appreciate that Masrani was willing to say “oops” and acknowledged having made a mistake here
But I think that this is a strange mistake to have made
I think it had seemed to me that a single draft status paper led to all of those consequences, I’d find that very surprising, and I’d therefore at least google the term “longtermism” to check if that’s indeed the case
And at that point, I’d quickly find mentions of the term that predate the paper
And many of the links given in the paragraph itself clearly show publication dates that precede the draft paper
And the draft paper itself mentions prior work that makes it clear that this paper wasn’t the first presentation of ideas in this vicinity
So this seems to me like weak evidence of (1) a failure to read the paper carefully and (2) a willingness to quickly jump to uncharitable interpretations.
And some things mentioned in other comments of mine here also seem to me like weak evidence of the same things.
(But I do worry that this comment in particular sounds kind-of personal and attacking, and I apologise if it does—that’s not my intent.)
Masrani seemed to jump to a strange, uncharitable, and incorrect conclusion about the history of longtermist thought.
Masrani wrote:
I appreciate that Masrani was willing to say “oops” and acknowledged having made a mistake here
But I think that this is a strange mistake to have made
I think it had seemed to me that a single draft status paper led to all of those consequences, I’d find that very surprising, and I’d therefore at least google the term “longtermism” to check if that’s indeed the case
And at that point, I’d quickly find mentions of the term that predate the paper
And many of the links given in the paragraph itself clearly show publication dates that precede the draft paper
And the draft paper itself mentions prior work that makes it clear that this paper wasn’t the first presentation of ideas in this vicinity
So this seems to me like weak evidence of (1) a failure to read the paper carefully and (2) a willingness to quickly jump to uncharitable interpretations.
And some things mentioned in other comments of mine here also seem to me like weak evidence of the same things.
(But I do worry that this comment in particular sounds kind-of personal and attacking, and I apologise if it does—that’s not my intent.)