In my view, there is some defining tension in rationalist and EA thought regarding epistemic vs. instrumental emphasis on truth: adopting a mindset of rationality/honesty is probably a good mindset—especially to challenge biases and set community standards—but it’s ultimately for instrumental purposes (although, for instrumental purposes, it might be better to think of your mindset as one of honesty/rationality, recursivity problems aside). I don’t think there is much conflict at the level of “lie about what you support”: that’s obviously going to be bad overall. But there are valid questions at the level of “how straightforward/consistent should I be about the way all near-termist cause areas/effects pale in comparison to expected value from existential risk reduction?” It might be the case that it’s obvious that certain health and development causes fail to compare on a long-term scale, but that doesn’t mean heavily emphasizing that is necessarily a good idea, for community health and other reasons like you mention.
In my view, there is some defining tension in rationalist and EA thought regarding epistemic vs. instrumental emphasis on truth: adopting a mindset of rationality/honesty is probably a good mindset—especially to challenge biases and set community standards—but it’s ultimately for instrumental purposes (although, for instrumental purposes, it might be better to think of your mindset as one of honesty/rationality, recursivity problems aside). I don’t think there is much conflict at the level of “lie about what you support”: that’s obviously going to be bad overall. But there are valid questions at the level of “how straightforward/consistent should I be about the way all near-termist cause areas/effects pale in comparison to expected value from existential risk reduction?” It might be the case that it’s obvious that certain health and development causes fail to compare on a long-term scale, but that doesn’t mean heavily emphasizing that is necessarily a good idea, for community health and other reasons like you mention.