I also strongly share this worry about selection effects. There are additional challenges to those mentioned already: the more EA looks like an answer, rather than a question, the more inclined anyone who doesn’t share that answer is simply to ‘exit’, rather than ‘voice’, leading to an increasing skew over time of what putative experts believe. A related issue is that, if you want to work on animal welfare or global development you can do that without participating in EA, which is much harder if you want to work on longtermism.
Further, it’s a sort of double counting if you consider people as experts because they work in a particular organisation when they would only realistically be hired if they had a certain worldview. If FHI hired 100 more staff, and they were polled, I’m not sure we should update our view on what the expert consensus is any more than I should become more certain of the day’s events by reading different copies of the same newspaper. (I mean no offence to FHI or its staff, by the way, it’s just a salient example).
I also strongly share this worry about selection effects. There are additional challenges to those mentioned already: the more EA looks like an answer, rather than a question, the more inclined anyone who doesn’t share that answer is simply to ‘exit’, rather than ‘voice’, leading to an increasing skew over time of what putative experts believe. A related issue is that, if you want to work on animal welfare or global development you can do that without participating in EA, which is much harder if you want to work on longtermism.
Further, it’s a sort of double counting if you consider people as experts because they work in a particular organisation when they would only realistically be hired if they had a certain worldview. If FHI hired 100 more staff, and they were polled, I’m not sure we should update our view on what the expert consensus is any more than I should become more certain of the day’s events by reading different copies of the same newspaper. (I mean no offence to FHI or its staff, by the way, it’s just a salient example).