Thank you for writing this post that I disliked. It is, for the record, well written.
I’m sure I’ll fail to dig up links, but I’ve seen intralefty dissent about the “bodies” thing, so I’m really not inclined to try to be more appealing to someone who really likes the word “bodies”.
You wrote
go nuts in the comments
And the nuts I’d like to go today consist of my pet theory that language is the number one ailment of the left, and the very last lever we should try in increasing retention (which, by the way, I don’t inherently endorse. I’m not google or amazon, I don’t think volume of customers is the most important thing for EA and certainly may not be the best thing for EA, but that is a totally different rant).
The crux about the “ways of knowing/being” and “lived experience” is actually standpoint epistemology (SE). Seems like not a small literature, I’ve just figured EA has enough philosophy majors that one of them can handle it which is one reason I haven’t gotten around to doing a writeup on it for the forum myself (the enterprising reader will notice that there’s still a couple months left of the redteaming contest, nudge nudge). The way I tend to break it down when I’m in your shoes is literally ask “when do you think SE would outperform expertise from someone who’s trying really hard but doesn’t have skin in the game?”, then I use cancer to show SE’s limitations (we do not trust cancer patients more than cancer specialists when we’re reasoning about what causes tumors to grow or shrink), then I just say “I believe that such n such cause area is a region of the world where SE can be outperformed by so n so experts”. And I’d rather identify cruxes, agree to disagree, and go our separate ways than hand out speech welfare to SE. A rather strong version of the claim is that even racism, a domain that tends to make SE look it’s best, doesn’t inherently require you to have skin in the game if you want to come up with ways to fix it, but I don’t think a properly EA rejection of SE is necessarily an endorsement of this strong version.
A rather uncharitable take is that after several years in the left I decided that they were mostly defined by an arms race to see who could complain most poetically and had very little to do with fixing anything, and there’s an associated claim that memeplexes are upstream of behavior, that you can detect this tendency to merely complain in the vocabulistics. Now you might point out the good works in the community—people earnestly looking for levers in the CJR space, or food not bombs volunteers—but I would claim that if you look at their information diets, there’s a great deal of zines and artworks that have this poeticism problem. My pet theory is that this information diet contributes to burnout, because it’s all very “capitalism is unbelievably intractable ⇒ it’s most likely better to minimize your impact on the world and not be categorical-imperativey about the petty crimes you commit because such n such poem made the crime sexy”, it’s not conducive to any movement with any useful properties at all.
So no, my friend, it’s going to be a hard pass from me on language as a lever to increase our lefty retention. They have systematic ambition-killing agitants in their memeplex, and the best thing we can do for them is help them out of that.
Thank you for writing this post that I disliked. It is, for the record, well written.
I’m sure I’ll fail to dig up links, but I’ve seen intralefty dissent about the “bodies” thing, so I’m really not inclined to try to be more appealing to someone who really likes the word “bodies”.
You wrote
And the nuts I’d like to go today consist of my pet theory that language is the number one ailment of the left, and the very last lever we should try in increasing retention (which, by the way, I don’t inherently endorse. I’m not google or amazon, I don’t think volume of customers is the most important thing for EA and certainly may not be the best thing for EA, but that is a totally different rant).
The crux about the “ways of knowing/being” and “lived experience” is actually standpoint epistemology (SE). Seems like not a small literature, I’ve just figured EA has enough philosophy majors that one of them can handle it which is one reason I haven’t gotten around to doing a writeup on it for the forum myself (the enterprising reader will notice that there’s still a couple months left of the redteaming contest, nudge nudge). The way I tend to break it down when I’m in your shoes is literally ask “when do you think SE would outperform expertise from someone who’s trying really hard but doesn’t have skin in the game?”, then I use cancer to show SE’s limitations (we do not trust cancer patients more than cancer specialists when we’re reasoning about what causes tumors to grow or shrink), then I just say “I believe that such n such cause area is a region of the world where SE can be outperformed by so n so experts”. And I’d rather identify cruxes, agree to disagree, and go our separate ways than hand out speech welfare to SE. A rather strong version of the claim is that even racism, a domain that tends to make SE look it’s best, doesn’t inherently require you to have skin in the game if you want to come up with ways to fix it, but I don’t think a properly EA rejection of SE is necessarily an endorsement of this strong version.
A rather uncharitable take is that after several years in the left I decided that they were mostly defined by an arms race to see who could complain most poetically and had very little to do with fixing anything, and there’s an associated claim that memeplexes are upstream of behavior, that you can detect this tendency to merely complain in the vocabulistics. Now you might point out the good works in the community—people earnestly looking for levers in the CJR space, or food not bombs volunteers—but I would claim that if you look at their information diets, there’s a great deal of zines and artworks that have this poeticism problem. My pet theory is that this information diet contributes to burnout, because it’s all very “capitalism is unbelievably intractable ⇒ it’s most likely better to minimize your impact on the world and not be categorical-imperativey about the petty crimes you commit because such n such poem made the crime sexy”, it’s not conducive to any movement with any useful properties at all.
So no, my friend, it’s going to be a hard pass from me on language as a lever to increase our lefty retention. They have systematic ambition-killing agitants in their memeplex, and the best thing we can do for them is help them out of that.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MCuvxbPKCkwibpcPz/how-to-talk-to-lefties-in-your-intro-fellowship?commentId=YwQme9B2nHoH6fXeo