My model of this is that there is a large fraction of beliefs in the normal Overton window of both liberals and conservatives, that are not within the Overton window of this community. From a charitable perspective, that makes sense, lots of beliefs that are accepted as Gospel in the conservative community seem obviously wrong to me, and I am obviously going to argue against them. The same is true for many beliefs in the liberal community. Since many more members of the community are liberal, we are going to see many more “woke” views argued against, for two separate reasons:
Many people assume that all spaces they inhabit are liberal spaces, the EA community is broadly liberal, and so they feel very surprised if they say something that everywhere else is accepted as obvious, suddenly get questioned here (concrete examples that I’ve seen in the past that I am happy to see questioned are: “there do not exist substantial cognitive differences between genders”, “socialized healthcare is universally good”, “we should drastically increase taxes on billionaires”, “racism is obviously one of the most important problems to be working on”).
There are simply many more liberal people so you are going to see many more datapoints of “woke” people feeling attacked, because the baserates for conservatives is already that low
My prediction is that if we were to actually get someone with a relatively central conservative viewpoint, their views would seem even more outlandish to people on the forum, and their perspectives would get even more attacked. Imagine talking about any of the following topics on the forum:
Gay marriage and gay rights are quite bad
Humans are not the result of evolution
The war on drugs is a strongly positive force, and we should increase incarceration rates
(Note, I really don’t hang out much in standard conservative circles, so there is a good chance the above are actually all totally outlandish and the result of stereotypes.)
If I imagine someone bringing up these topics, the response would be absolutely universally negative, to a much larger degree than what we see when woke topics are being discussed.
The thing that I think is actually explaining the data is simply that the EA and Rationality communities have a number of opinions that substantially diverge from the opinions held in basically any other large intellectual community, and so if someone comes in and just assumes that everyone shares the context from one of these other communities, they will experience substantial pushback. The most common community for which this happens is the liberal community, since we have substantial overlap, but this would happen with people from basically any community (and I’ve seen it happen with many people from the libertarian community who sometimes mistakenly believe all of their beliefs are shared in the EA community, and then receive massive pushback as they realize that people are actually overall quite strongly in favor of more redistribution of wealth).
And to be clear, I think this is overall quite good and I am happy about most of these divergences from both liberal and conservative gospel, since they overall seem to point much closer to the actual truth than what those communities seem to generally accept as true (though I wouldn’t at all claim that we are infallible and this is a uniform trend, and think there are probably quite a few topics where the divergences point away from the truth, just that the aggregate seems broadly in the right direction to me).
My model of this is that there is a large fraction of beliefs in the normal Overton window of both liberals and conservatives, that are not within the Overton window of this community. From a charitable perspective, that makes sense, lots of beliefs that are accepted as Gospel in the conservative community seem obviously wrong to me, and I am obviously going to argue against them. The same is true for many beliefs in the liberal community. Since many more members of the community are liberal, we are going to see many more “woke” views argued against, for two separate reasons:
Many people assume that all spaces they inhabit are liberal spaces, the EA community is broadly liberal, and so they feel very surprised if they say something that everywhere else is accepted as obvious, suddenly get questioned here (concrete examples that I’ve seen in the past that I am happy to see questioned are: “there do not exist substantial cognitive differences between genders”, “socialized healthcare is universally good”, “we should drastically increase taxes on billionaires”, “racism is obviously one of the most important problems to be working on”).
There are simply many more liberal people so you are going to see many more datapoints of “woke” people feeling attacked, because the baserates for conservatives is already that low
My prediction is that if we were to actually get someone with a relatively central conservative viewpoint, their views would seem even more outlandish to people on the forum, and their perspectives would get even more attacked. Imagine talking about any of the following topics on the forum:
Gay marriage and gay rights are quite bad
Humans are not the result of evolution
The war on drugs is a strongly positive force, and we should increase incarceration rates
(Note, I really don’t hang out much in standard conservative circles, so there is a good chance the above are actually all totally outlandish and the result of stereotypes.)
If I imagine someone bringing up these topics, the response would be absolutely universally negative, to a much larger degree than what we see when woke topics are being discussed.
The thing that I think is actually explaining the data is simply that the EA and Rationality communities have a number of opinions that substantially diverge from the opinions held in basically any other large intellectual community, and so if someone comes in and just assumes that everyone shares the context from one of these other communities, they will experience substantial pushback. The most common community for which this happens is the liberal community, since we have substantial overlap, but this would happen with people from basically any community (and I’ve seen it happen with many people from the libertarian community who sometimes mistakenly believe all of their beliefs are shared in the EA community, and then receive massive pushback as they realize that people are actually overall quite strongly in favor of more redistribution of wealth).
And to be clear, I think this is overall quite good and I am happy about most of these divergences from both liberal and conservative gospel, since they overall seem to point much closer to the actual truth than what those communities seem to generally accept as true (though I wouldn’t at all claim that we are infallible and this is a uniform trend, and think there are probably quite a few topics where the divergences point away from the truth, just that the aggregate seems broadly in the right direction to me).