Haven’t read the draft, just this comment thread, but it seems to me the quoted section is somewhat unclear and that clearing it up might reduce the commenter’s concerns.
You write here about interpreting some objections so that they become “empirical disagreements”. But I don’t see you saying exactly what the disagreement is. The claim explicitly stated is that “true claims might be used to ill effect in the world”—but that’s obviously not something you (or EAs generally) disagree with.
Then you suggest that people on the anti-EA side of the disagreement are “discouraging people from trying to do good effectively,” which may be a true description of their behavior, but may also be interpreted to include seemingly evil things that they wouldn’t actually do (like opposing whatever political reforms they actually support, on the basis that they would help people too well). That’s presumably a misinterpretation of what you’ve written, but that interpretation is facilitated by the fact that the disagreement at hand hasn’t been explicitly articulated.
Haven’t read the draft, just this comment thread, but it seems to me the quoted section is somewhat unclear and that clearing it up might reduce the commenter’s concerns.
You write here about interpreting some objections so that they become “empirical disagreements”. But I don’t see you saying exactly what the disagreement is. The claim explicitly stated is that “true claims might be used to ill effect in the world”—but that’s obviously not something you (or EAs generally) disagree with.
Then you suggest that people on the anti-EA side of the disagreement are “discouraging people from trying to do good effectively,” which may be a true description of their behavior, but may also be interpreted to include seemingly evil things that they wouldn’t actually do (like opposing whatever political reforms they actually support, on the basis that they would help people too well). That’s presumably a misinterpretation of what you’ve written, but that interpretation is facilitated by the fact that the disagreement at hand hasn’t been explicitly articulated.