I think this comment provides a useful perspective. And your second paragraph sounds to me like highlighting that EA’s largely “pull the rope sideways”, in Robin Hanson’s terms:
The policy world can thought of as consisting of a few Tug-O-War “ropes” set up in this high dimensional policy space. [...]
If, however, you actually want to improve policy, if you have a secure enough position to say what you like, and if you can find a relevant audience, then prefer to pull policy ropes sideways. Few will bother to resist such pulls, and since few will have considered such moves, you have a much better chance of identifying a move that improves policy.
If I wanted to argue against your perspective, I’d say something like “We indeed don’t have strong evidence of political polarisation’s effect on EA. But it will necessarily be the case that we don’t have such evidence until the patterns we’re worried about have already started, and likely reached a point where it’s much harder to stop them than it would be to prevent them now. So even if we’re in a world where polarisation will be a real problem for EA, your critique could be raised for long enough to delay work on the problem. And it’s therefore worth at least scoping out the problem in advance, even if we must rely on analogies and speculative arguments.”
If I wanted to argue against that, I’d probably say something about the analogies and speculative arguments being relatively weak (even for analogies and speculative arguments). And something about how scoping out this problem with a post like this could itself pose risks of increasing partisanship/polarisation within EA, or of drawing a “culture wars spotlight” towards EA.
Overall, I feel fairly unsure which perspective I’d lean towards. Though I do very tentatively feel that this post may have had a higher level/proportion of support than I expected, given the quality of arguments and analogies made.
I think this comment provides a useful perspective. And your second paragraph sounds to me like highlighting that EA’s largely “pull the rope sideways”, in Robin Hanson’s terms:
(Relevant, more recent Hanson post: To Oppose Polarization, Tug Sideways.)
If I wanted to argue against your perspective, I’d say something like “We indeed don’t have strong evidence of political polarisation’s effect on EA. But it will necessarily be the case that we don’t have such evidence until the patterns we’re worried about have already started, and likely reached a point where it’s much harder to stop them than it would be to prevent them now. So even if we’re in a world where polarisation will be a real problem for EA, your critique could be raised for long enough to delay work on the problem. And it’s therefore worth at least scoping out the problem in advance, even if we must rely on analogies and speculative arguments.”
If I wanted to argue against that, I’d probably say something about the analogies and speculative arguments being relatively weak (even for analogies and speculative arguments). And something about how scoping out this problem with a post like this could itself pose risks of increasing partisanship/polarisation within EA, or of drawing a “culture wars spotlight” towards EA.
Overall, I feel fairly unsure which perspective I’d lean towards. Though I do very tentatively feel that this post may have had a higher level/proportion of support than I expected, given the quality of arguments and analogies made.