Agreed. Though it depends on what your strengths are what role you wish to play in the research-and-doing community. I think it’s fine that a lot of people defer to others on the logical foundations of probability and utility, but I still think some of us should be investigating it
I agree. People can specialize in what works for them. Division of labor is reasonable.
That’s fine as long as there are some people working on the foundational research stuff and some of them are open to serious debate. I think EA has people doing that sort of research but I’m concerned that none of them are open to debate. So if they’re mistaken, there’s no good way for anyone who knows to fix it (and conversely, any would-be critic who is mistaken has no good way to receive criticism from EA and fix their own mistake).
To be fair, I don’t know of any Popperian experts who are very open to debate, either, besides me. I consider lack of willingness to debate a very large, widespread problem in the world.
I think working on that problem – poor openness to debate – might do more good than everything EA is currently doing. Better debates would e.g. improve science and could make a big difference to the replication crisis.
Another way better openness to debate would do good is: currently EA has a lot of high-effort, thoughtful arguments on topics like animal welfare, AI alignment, clean water, deworming, etc. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of charities, with a ton of money, which do significantly less effective (or even counter-productive) things and won’t listen, give counter arguments, or debate. Currently, EA tries to guide people to donate to better charities. It’d potentially be significantly higher leverage (conditional on ~being right) to debate the flawed charities and win, so then they change to use their money in better ways. I think many EAs would be very interested in participating in those debates; the thing blocking progress here is poor societal norms about debate and error correction. I think if EA’s own norms were much better on those topics, then it’d be in a better position to call out the problem, lead by example, and push for change in ways that many observers find rational and persuasive.
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I agree. People can specialize in what works for them. Division of labor is reasonable.
That’s fine as long as there are some people working on the foundational research stuff and some of them are open to serious debate. I think EA has people doing that sort of research but I’m concerned that none of them are open to debate. So if they’re mistaken, there’s no good way for anyone who knows to fix it (and conversely, any would-be critic who is mistaken has no good way to receive criticism from EA and fix their own mistake).
To be fair, I don’t know of any Popperian experts who are very open to debate, either, besides me. I consider lack of willingness to debate a very large, widespread problem in the world.
I think working on that problem – poor openness to debate – might do more good than everything EA is currently doing. Better debates would e.g. improve science and could make a big difference to the replication crisis.
Another way better openness to debate would do good is: currently EA has a lot of high-effort, thoughtful arguments on topics like animal welfare, AI alignment, clean water, deworming, etc. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of charities, with a ton of money, which do significantly less effective (or even counter-productive) things and won’t listen, give counter arguments, or debate. Currently, EA tries to guide people to donate to better charities. It’d potentially be significantly higher leverage (conditional on ~being right) to debate the flawed charities and win, so then they change to use their money in better ways. I think many EAs would be very interested in participating in those debates; the thing blocking progress here is poor societal norms about debate and error correction. I think if EA’s own norms were much better on those topics, then it’d be in a better position to call out the problem, lead by example, and push for change in ways that many observers find rational and persuasive.