The list of achievements in the post contains items like “played a big part in creating the YIMBY movement” (A bit of an overstatement imo), and “sparked a renaissance in forecasting” (made a bunch of fun online prediction markets). To be clear, I like both these things!
But if you are going to include relatively minor things like this in the “pros” column, it’s disingenuous to leave out things like ” accidently created a cult” out of the “cons” column (plus the worse stuff I’m trying to avoid mentioning directly here).
Either we can list all the benefits and all the harms caused by EA, or we can just list the very seriously good stuff and the very seriously bad stuff. If you list all of the benefits, and only the super mega bad harms, you aren’t making an honest argument. Although I wouldn’t have even had a problem if he’d just stated upfront that he was writing an unbalanced defence.
The list of achievements in the post contains items like “played a big part in creating the YIMBY movement” (A bit of an overstatement imo), and “sparked a renaissance in forecasting” (made a bunch of fun online prediction markets). To be clear, I like both these things!
But if you are going to include relatively minor things like this in the “pros” column, it’s disingenuous to leave out things like ” accidently created a cult” out of the “cons” column (plus the worse stuff I’m trying to avoid mentioning directly here).
Either we can list all the benefits and all the harms caused by EA, or we can just list the very seriously good stuff and the very seriously bad stuff. If you list all of the benefits, and only the super mega bad harms, you aren’t making an honest argument. Although I wouldn’t have even had a problem if he’d just stated upfront that he was writing an unbalanced defence.