cheese made out of live maggots sounds not only very weird but also bad and possibly unethical? so i don’t love this comparison; i assume you think even the very weird ea stuff is fundamentally good and ethical, even if you might disagree that it’s the highest priority good and ethical thing to focus on.
My response was that work you thought was positive on the basis of complicated reasoning is unusually likely to turn out to be negative for reasons you missed, and this is a real risk of trying to go so far from well-explored territory. So I’ll endorse this aspect of the metaphor.
I still think it works for some causes. I met people who thought it wasn’t just bad, but evil to do wild animal welfare stuff. I’m not sure why, maybe their introduction to the idea was about predator euthanasia or something.
On FB someone replied:
My response was that work you thought was positive on the basis of complicated reasoning is unusually likely to turn out to be negative for reasons you missed, and this is a real risk of trying to go so far from well-explored territory. So I’ll endorse this aspect of the metaphor.
[EDIT: also see Counterproductive Altruism: The Other Heavy Tail]
I still think it works for some causes. I met people who thought it wasn’t just bad, but evil to do wild animal welfare stuff. I’m not sure why, maybe their introduction to the idea was about predator euthanasia or something.