It seems incredibly important that EA, as a community, maintains extremely high epistemic standards and is a place where we can generally assume that people, while not necessarily having the same worldviews or beliefs as us, can communicate openly and honestly about the reasons for why they’re doing things. A primary reason for this is just the scale and difficulty of the things that we’re doing.
That’s what makes me quite uncomfortable with saying global health and development work is reparation for harms that imperialist countries have caused poor countries! We should work on aid to poor countries because it’s effective, because we have a chance to use a relatively small-to-us amount of money to save lives and wildly improve the conditions of people in poor countries—not because aid represents reparations from formerly imperial countries to formerly subjugated ones
I think many people who identify with social justice and leftist ideologies are worth recruiting and retaining. But I care more about our community having good epistemics in general, about being able to notice when we are doing things correctly and when we are not, and conveying our message honestly seems really important for this. This objection is not “leftists have bad epistemics,” like you mentioned at the start of this article—you should increase recruitment and retention but not lower your own epistemic standards as a communicator to do so.
I think parts of this post are quite good, and I think when you can do low-cost things that don’t lower your epistemic standards (like using social justice focused examples, supporting the increase of diversity in your movement, saying things that you actually believe in order to support your arguments in ways that connect with people). But I think this post at the current moment needs a clear statement of not lowering epistemic standards when doing outreach to be advice that helps overall.
The goal with roping in the anti-imperialist crowd should be “come for the deontological thing (i.e. justice or reparations), stay for the consequentialist thing (i.e. independent of history, looking forward, the next right thing to do is help).” The first part (where we essentially platform deontology) doesn’t actually seem super dangerous to me, in the way that compromising on epistemics is dangerous.
I agree with quinn. I’m not sure what the mechanism is by which we end up with lowered epistemic standards. If an intro fellow is the kind of person who weighs reparative obligations very heavily in their moral calculus, then deworming donations may very well satisfy this obligation for them. This is not an argument that motivates me very much, but it may still be a true argument. And making true arguments doesn’t seem bad for epistemics? Especially at the point where you might be appealing to people who are already consequentialists, just consequentialists with a developed account of justice that attends to reparative obligations.
It seems incredibly important that EA, as a community, maintains extremely high epistemic standards and is a place where we can generally assume that people, while not necessarily having the same worldviews or beliefs as us, can communicate openly and honestly about the reasons for why they’re doing things. A primary reason for this is just the scale and difficulty of the things that we’re doing.
That’s what makes me quite uncomfortable with saying global health and development work is reparation for harms that imperialist countries have caused poor countries! We should work on aid to poor countries because it’s effective, because we have a chance to use a relatively small-to-us amount of money to save lives and wildly improve the conditions of people in poor countries—not because aid represents reparations from formerly imperial countries to formerly subjugated ones
I think many people who identify with social justice and leftist ideologies are worth recruiting and retaining. But I care more about our community having good epistemics in general, about being able to notice when we are doing things correctly and when we are not, and conveying our message honestly seems really important for this. This objection is not “leftists have bad epistemics,” like you mentioned at the start of this article—you should increase recruitment and retention but not lower your own epistemic standards as a communicator to do so.
I think parts of this post are quite good, and I think when you can do low-cost things that don’t lower your epistemic standards (like using social justice focused examples, supporting the increase of diversity in your movement, saying things that you actually believe in order to support your arguments in ways that connect with people). But I think this post at the current moment needs a clear statement of not lowering epistemic standards when doing outreach to be advice that helps overall.
The goal with roping in the anti-imperialist crowd should be “come for the deontological thing (i.e. justice or reparations), stay for the consequentialist thing (i.e. independent of history, looking forward, the next right thing to do is help).” The first part (where we essentially platform deontology) doesn’t actually seem super dangerous to me, in the way that compromising on epistemics is dangerous.
I agree with quinn. I’m not sure what the mechanism is by which we end up with lowered epistemic standards. If an intro fellow is the kind of person who weighs reparative obligations very heavily in their moral calculus, then deworming donations may very well satisfy this obligation for them. This is not an argument that motivates me very much, but it may still be a true argument. And making true arguments doesn’t seem bad for epistemics? Especially at the point where you might be appealing to people who are already consequentialists, just consequentialists with a developed account of justice that attends to reparative obligations.