I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of the argumentation style of this post.
It makes some good points, but too much of it is designed to circumvent rational discussion of what action the community should take for my liking, by using social pressure. It also encourages EA to focus on maintaining its image more than I would see as healthy (optics is important, but it shouldn’t become EA’s main concern).
FWIW, I’m not a fan of race science posts here either. I agree with you that it’s hardly the most relevant topic and it creates a big distraction. However, if the community decided to ban such topics from the forum I would not want it to do so on the basis of many of the things you’ve said here.
Additionally, asking a bunch of orgs to issue a statement would cause a bunch of unnecessary politicization and wouldn’t really help our reputation. Talking about an issue associates you with that issue and our critics would continue to use these issues to bludgeon EA because they have no reason not to.
My current take is:
1) We can’t really do anything to prevent our opponents using this criticism against us and “wokeness” is on the decline, so EA will be fine reputationally, we just have to wait this out. 2) There’s a tension between focusing on optics and focusing on being excellent. I used to think that there wasn’t so much of a tension, but once a community starts focusing too much on optics, it seems to be quite easy for it to continue sliding in that direction, making this more of a tension than one might expect. I believe that the community should focus more on being excellent and that will draw the kinds of people we’re looking for to us, even if some fraction of them find certain aspects frustrating. 3) Regarding the reputational impact on particular cause areas, I think we should try really hard to further establish these cause areas as their own entities outside of EA. There are many people who might be interested in these causes, but not interested in EA and it would also provide some degree of reputational separation. 4) I believe that there are advantages to specialization in that groups focused on individual cause areas can focus more on ‘getting the thing done’, whilst EA can focus more on epistemics and thinking things through from first principles. Insofar as EA makes providing epistemic support one of its goals, it’s important for us to try to avoid this kind of internal politicization.
I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of the argumentation style of this post.
It makes some good points, but too much of it is designed to circumvent rational discussion of what action the community should take for my liking, by using social pressure. It also encourages EA to focus on maintaining its image more than I would see as healthy (optics is important, but it shouldn’t become EA’s main concern).
FWIW, I’m not a fan of race science posts here either. I agree with you that it’s hardly the most relevant topic and it creates a big distraction. However, if the community decided to ban such topics from the forum I would not want it to do so on the basis of many of the things you’ve said here.
Additionally, asking a bunch of orgs to issue a statement would cause a bunch of unnecessary politicization and wouldn’t really help our reputation. Talking about an issue associates you with that issue and our critics would continue to use these issues to bludgeon EA because they have no reason not to.
My current take is:
1) We can’t really do anything to prevent our opponents using this criticism against us and “wokeness” is on the decline, so EA will be fine reputationally, we just have to wait this out.
2) There’s a tension between focusing on optics and focusing on being excellent. I used to think that there wasn’t so much of a tension, but once a community starts focusing too much on optics, it seems to be quite easy for it to continue sliding in that direction, making this more of a tension than one might expect. I believe that the community should focus more on being excellent and that will draw the kinds of people we’re looking for to us, even if some fraction of them find certain aspects frustrating.
3) Regarding the reputational impact on particular cause areas, I think we should try really hard to further establish these cause areas as their own entities outside of EA. There are many people who might be interested in these causes, but not interested in EA and it would also provide some degree of reputational separation.
4) I believe that there are advantages to specialization in that groups focused on individual cause areas can focus more on ‘getting the thing done’, whilst EA can focus more on epistemics and thinking things through from first principles. Insofar as EA makes providing epistemic support one of its goals, it’s important for us to try to avoid this kind of internal politicization.