Incentive to preserve social connections may override desire for truth-seeking
EA/the rationalist diaspora is supposed to protect the practice of healthy disagreement and earnest truthseeking by lifting up people who’re good at it, rewarding the bringers of bad news, and so on. I find the existence of that community to be so protective against broader societal pressures to be lazy about truthseeking that I can’t imagine how things would be better if you got rid of it.
It’s very possible that we’re not doing that well enough and in some way it’s failing (there are, indeed, many social pressures relating to community that undermine truthseeking), but we shouldn’t just accept that as inevitable. If it’s failing, we need to talk about that.
I think if we really just try to build a moral community around the broadest notion of EA (epistemically rigorous optimization of/dialog between shared values, essentially), I think that’ll turn out to be in some ways… less intense than the community people are expecting, but it’ll still be a community, that’s still a shared morality that inspires some affection between people, informal ledgers of favors, a shared language, an ongoing dialog, mutual respect and trust.
I agree that it’s great that EA values truth-seeking. However, I’m not sure a social community is essential to acting according to this value, since this value could be incorporated on the level of projects and organisations just as well.
For example, consider the scientific method and thinking in a sciency way. Although we can speak of ‘the scientific community’ it’s a community with fairly weak social ties. And most things happen on the level of projects and organisations. These (science) projects and organisations usually heavily incorporate scientific thinking.
For an individual’s experience and choices there are usually many ‘communities’ relevant at the same time, e.g. their colleagues, school-mates, country of residence, people sharing their language etc. However, each of these ‘communities’ have a differently sized impact on their experience and choices. What I’m arguing for is increasing the ‘grasp’ of projects and organisations and decreasing the grasp of the wider EA community.
EA/the rationalist diaspora is supposed to protect the practice of healthy disagreement and earnest truthseeking by lifting up people who’re good at it, rewarding the bringers of bad news, and so on. I find the existence of that community to be so protective against broader societal pressures to be lazy about truthseeking that I can’t imagine how things would be better if you got rid of it.
It’s very possible that we’re not doing that well enough and in some way it’s failing (there are, indeed, many social pressures relating to community that undermine truthseeking), but we shouldn’t just accept that as inevitable. If it’s failing, we need to talk about that.
I think if we really just try to build a moral community around the broadest notion of EA (epistemically rigorous optimization of/dialog between shared values, essentially), I think that’ll turn out to be in some ways… less intense than the community people are expecting, but it’ll still be a community, that’s still a shared morality that inspires some affection between people, informal ledgers of favors, a shared language, an ongoing dialog, mutual respect and trust.
I agree that it’s great that EA values truth-seeking. However, I’m not sure a social community is essential to acting according to this value, since this value could be incorporated on the level of projects and organisations just as well.
For example, consider the scientific method and thinking in a sciency way. Although we can speak of ‘the scientific community’ it’s a community with fairly weak social ties. And most things happen on the level of projects and organisations. These (science) projects and organisations usually heavily incorporate scientific thinking.
For an individual’s experience and choices there are usually many ‘communities’ relevant at the same time, e.g. their colleagues, school-mates, country of residence, people sharing their language etc. However, each of these ‘communities’ have a differently sized impact on their experience and choices. What I’m arguing for is increasing the ‘grasp’ of projects and organisations and decreasing the grasp of the wider EA community.