Can you say more about how you see intuition pumps as a potential way for longtermism to avoid political attacks? Seems to me we use them all the time.
I think EA and longtermism are both coming under attack now because they are a currently visible/trendy competitor in the moral marketplace of ideas. I don’t have a great explanation for why people do this, but it’s a traditional human hobby. It just seems like a typical case of attacking a perceived outgroup, either because they seem like a legitimate threat to one’s own influence or because you think your followers will enjoy the roast.
Can you say more about how you see intuition pumps as a potential way for longtermism to avoid political attacks? Seems to me we use them all the time.
The thought is to tailor the intuition pump for your audience, e.g. if your audience is left-wing, leverage moral intuitions they already have.
The thought is to tailor the intuition pump for your audience
I would expect this would make the problem worse, because these attacks come from people looking for stuff to quote, and if you are saying different things to different people they can quote the stuff you said in one context to people in another.
I guess I’m not sure when the point is that you transition from writing straightforward academic articles to writing politically-targeted articles. Hossenfelder said she skipped reading the more recent work (i.e. MacAskill’s “Doing Good Better”) in favor of looking at old papers published before longtermism/EA was in the news. So unless weird little nascent philosophical movements are couching their arguments in language appealing to every possible future political critic years before those critics will deign to even read the paper, it doesn’t seem like this strategy could have prevented Hossenfelder’s criticism.
Can you say more about how you see intuition pumps as a potential way for longtermism to avoid political attacks? Seems to me we use them all the time.
I think EA and longtermism are both coming under attack now because they are a currently visible/trendy competitor in the moral marketplace of ideas. I don’t have a great explanation for why people do this, but it’s a traditional human hobby. It just seems like a typical case of attacking a perceived outgroup, either because they seem like a legitimate threat to one’s own influence or because you think your followers will enjoy the roast.
The thought is to tailor the intuition pump for your audience, e.g. if your audience is left-wing, leverage moral intuitions they already have.
I would expect this would make the problem worse, because these attacks come from people looking for stuff to quote, and if you are saying different things to different people they can quote the stuff you said in one context to people in another.
I guess I’m not sure when the point is that you transition from writing straightforward academic articles to writing politically-targeted articles. Hossenfelder said she skipped reading the more recent work (i.e. MacAskill’s “Doing Good Better”) in favor of looking at old papers published before longtermism/EA was in the news. So unless weird little nascent philosophical movements are couching their arguments in language appealing to every possible future political critic years before those critics will deign to even read the paper, it doesn’t seem like this strategy could have prevented Hossenfelder’s criticism.