Thanks David, this is more or less what I was trying to express with my response to Stefan in that thread.
I want to add that “making intellectual progress” has two different benefits: One is the obvious one, figuring out more true things so they can influence our actions to do more good. As you say, we may actually be doing better on that one.
The other one is to attract people to the community by it being an intellectually stimulating place. We might be losing the kind of people who answered ‘stagnation’ in the poll above, as they are not able to participate in the professionalised debates, if they happen in public at all.
On the other hand, this might mean that we are not deterring people anymore who may have felt like they need to be into intellectual debates to join the EA community. I don’t know what the right trade-off is, but I suspect it’s actually more important not to put latter group off.
Thanks David, this is more or less what I was trying to express with my response to Stefan in that thread.
I want to add that “making intellectual progress” has two different benefits: One is the obvious one, figuring out more true things so they can influence our actions to do more good. As you say, we may actually be doing better on that one.
The other one is to attract people to the community by it being an intellectually stimulating place. We might be losing the kind of people who answered ‘stagnation’ in the poll above, as they are not able to participate in the professionalised debates, if they happen in public at all.
On the other hand, this might mean that we are not deterring people anymore who may have felt like they need to be into intellectual debates to join the EA community. I don’t know what the right trade-off is, but I suspect it’s actually more important not to put latter group off.