I don’t see the two wings being not-very-connected as a necessarily bad thing. Both wings get what they feel they need to achieve impact—either pure epistemics or social capital—without having to compromise with what the other wing needs. In particular, the social-capital wing needs lots of money to scale global health interventions, and most funders who are excited about that just aren’t going to want to be associated with a movement that is significantly about the taboo. I expect that the epistemic branch would, by nature, focus on things that are less funding-constrained.
If EA was “built as a rejection of social desirability,” then it seems that the pure-epistemics branch doesn’t need the social-capital branch (since social-desirability thinking was absent in the early days). And I don’t think it likely that social-capital-branch EAs will just start training guide dogs rather than continuing to do things at high multiples of GiveDirectly after the split. If the social-capital-branch gets too big and starts to falter on epistemics as a result, it can always split again so that there will still be a social-capital-branch with good epistemics.
I don’t see the two wings being not-very-connected as a necessarily bad thing. Both wings get what they feel they need to achieve impact—either pure epistemics or social capital—without having to compromise with what the other wing needs. In particular, the social-capital wing needs lots of money to scale global health interventions, and most funders who are excited about that just aren’t going to want to be associated with a movement that is significantly about the taboo. I expect that the epistemic branch would, by nature, focus on things that are less funding-constrained.
If EA was “built as a rejection of social desirability,” then it seems that the pure-epistemics branch doesn’t need the social-capital branch (since social-desirability thinking was absent in the early days). And I don’t think it likely that social-capital-branch EAs will just start training guide dogs rather than continuing to do things at high multiples of GiveDirectly after the split. If the social-capital-branch gets too big and starts to falter on epistemics as a result, it can always split again so that there will still be a social-capital-branch with good epistemics.