Alright, so even if you buy the above, it’s not clear why you shouldn’t just delete me for this.
So, now, reaching wildly with this comment:
I’m guessing that the oppo research in OR-6 isn’t going to pick up on a EA forum moderator using different given name than their legal name. That would be a dubious meme even for US politics, I hope.
On the other hand, in some sense, there might be some value to expressing some sense of humor? To be clear, even if perfectly executed, I doubt that my joke had any direct value—no one from Salem or the Portland suburbs (OR-6) is going to think, “Wow these people get it, EA for prez!”.
But yeah, if executed well, it’s sort of in the right direction, or something. To explain this, and getting more serious in tone:
The context for this belief is that yes, there’s a bunch of sensitivities for EA in politics. But one hazard that people haven’t expressed is sort of esoteric and hard to prevent:
It’s that it can be unsettling to people to seeing this uTiLiTaRiAn thing actually start working. The very act of being or appearing competent, even effective, might come across as scary and offputting to some people[1].
EA doesn’t have a good response to this, PR-wise right now. Maybe some key to this is some kind of humor, or some other kind of awareness/messaging/competency, that is orthogonal from setting up equations or long research papers.
Maybe one aspect of this concern is less that “being good” is bad, it’s that “being good” involves a lot of actions, progress, and realized decisions. This has implications people generally don’t like. For example, other candidates aren’t going to win, or other instances of projects or ideas are going to look less good in comparison.
Alright, so even if you buy the above, it’s not clear why you shouldn’t just delete me for this.
So, now, reaching wildly with this comment:
I’m guessing that the oppo research in OR-6 isn’t going to pick up on a EA forum moderator using different given name than their legal name. That would be a dubious meme even for US politics, I hope.
On the other hand, in some sense, there might be some value to expressing some sense of humor? To be clear, even if perfectly executed, I doubt that my joke had any direct value—no one from Salem or the Portland suburbs (OR-6) is going to think, “Wow these people get it, EA for prez!”.
But yeah, if executed well, it’s sort of in the right direction, or something. To explain this, and getting more serious in tone:
The context for this belief is that yes, there’s a bunch of sensitivities for EA in politics. But one hazard that people haven’t expressed is sort of esoteric and hard to prevent:
It’s that it can be unsettling to people to seeing this uTiLiTaRiAn thing actually start working. The very act of being or appearing competent, even effective, might come across as scary and offputting to some people[1].
EA doesn’t have a good response to this, PR-wise right now. Maybe some key to this is some kind of humor, or some other kind of awareness/messaging/competency, that is orthogonal from setting up equations or long research papers.
Please don’t ban me.
Maybe one aspect of this concern is less that “being good” is bad, it’s that “being good” involves a lot of actions, progress, and realized decisions. This has implications people generally don’t like. For example, other candidates aren’t going to win, or other instances of projects or ideas are going to look less good in comparison.