I’m somewhat more pessimistic that disillusioned people have useful critiques, at least on average. EA asks people to swallow a hard pill “set X is probably the most important stuff by a lot”, where X doesn’t include that many things. I think this is correct (i.e. the set will be somewhat small), but it means that a lot of people’s talents & interests probably aren’t as [relatively] valuable as they previously assumed.
That sucks, and creates some obvious & strong motivated reasons to lean into not-great criticisms of set X. I don’t even think this is conscious, just vague ‘feels like this is wrong’ when people say [thing I’m not the best at/dislike] is the most important. This is not to say set X doesn’t have major problems
They might more often have useful community critiques imo, e.g. more likely to notice social blind spots that community leaders are oblivious to.
I would guess both that disillusioned people have low value critiques on average, and that there are enough of them that if we could create an efficient filtering process, there would be gold in there.
Though another part of the problem is that the most valuable people are generally the busiest, and so when they decide they’ve had enough they just leave and don’t put a lot of effort into giving feedback.
I’m somewhat more pessimistic that disillusioned people have useful critiques, at least on average. EA asks people to swallow a hard pill “set X is probably the most important stuff by a lot”, where X doesn’t include that many things. I think this is correct (i.e. the set will be somewhat small), but it means that a lot of people’s talents & interests probably aren’t as [relatively] valuable as they previously assumed.
That sucks, and creates some obvious & strong motivated reasons to lean into not-great criticisms of set X. I don’t even think this is conscious, just vague ‘feels like this is wrong’ when people say [thing I’m not the best at/dislike] is the most important. This is not to say set X doesn’t have major problems
They might more often have useful community critiques imo, e.g. more likely to notice social blind spots that community leaders are oblivious to.
Also, I am concerned about motivated reasoning within the community, but don’t really know how to correct for this. I expect the most-upvoted critiques will be the easy-to-understand plausible-sounding ones that assuage the problem above or social feelings, but not the correct ones about our core priorities. See some points here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pxALB46SEkwNbfiNS/the-motivated-reasoning-critique-of-effective-altruism
What does ‘iml’ stand for?
typo, imo. (in my opinion)
I would guess both that disillusioned people have low value critiques on average, and that there are enough of them that if we could create an efficient filtering process, there would be gold in there.
Though another part of the problem is that the most valuable people are generally the busiest, and so when they decide they’ve had enough they just leave and don’t put a lot of effort into giving feedback.