The reaction to this post (and my comments) exemplifies a dynamic I’ve seen before on the Forum, where people’s posts are disregarded, criticized, downvoted etc because they are emotional, impressionistic, openly angered or outraged, emphatic… etc, and praised for being detached, dry, measured, caveat-ed… We should care about epistemics, but I think sometimes readers of the Forum are not charitable enough to people who communicate in different ways to them.
Maybe because those caveats are really important, if you want to actually improve things and not just cause chaos.
Like, there’s a failure mode that’s really common where there’s anger at a problem, and that anger fuels solutions that wouldn’t actually solve the problem, then try to implement it and get surprised at how much the policy is failing, never considering that caveats and measures always mattered, and they’re just too angry to notice the problems with their solution.
It’s a good thing that EA rejects the notion in practice on social media, that controversy and anger = good. They aren’t that good in practice.
I agree that controversy and anger aren’t good per se, but people can be broadly right and also angry. Sometimes anger is pretty appropriate, even though critical distance and wisdom is also appropriate. I think people have over-updated from ‘I shouldn’t take people seriously just because they are emotional/angry’ to ‘if people are emotional/angry, I shouldn’t take them seriously’.
I also suspect that people care more about how anger is expressed, than the presence of it. E.g., Will McAskill and Rob Wiblin, in their recent statements on FTX, expressed anger -Will said ‘I am outraged’ and Rob said ‘I am fucking appalled’. But their statements were generally well-received, I suspect because though they stated they were angry, their tone was nonetheless detached.
Maybe because those caveats are really important, if you want to actually improve things and not just cause chaos.
Like, there’s a failure mode that’s really common where there’s anger at a problem, and that anger fuels solutions that wouldn’t actually solve the problem, then try to implement it and get surprised at how much the policy is failing, never considering that caveats and measures always mattered, and they’re just too angry to notice the problems with their solution.
It’s a good thing that EA rejects the notion in practice on social media, that controversy and anger = good. They aren’t that good in practice.
I agree that controversy and anger aren’t good per se, but people can be broadly right and also angry. Sometimes anger is pretty appropriate, even though critical distance and wisdom is also appropriate. I think people have over-updated from ‘I shouldn’t take people seriously just because they are emotional/angry’ to ‘if people are emotional/angry, I shouldn’t take them seriously’.
I also suspect that people care more about how anger is expressed, than the presence of it. E.g., Will McAskill and Rob Wiblin, in their recent statements on FTX, expressed anger -Will said ‘I am outraged’ and Rob said ‘I am fucking appalled’. But their statements were generally well-received, I suspect because though they stated they were angry, their tone was nonetheless detached.