I was surprised to find that I felt slightly uncomfortable positioning myself on the ‘animal welfare’ side of the debate week scale. I guess I generally think of myself as more of a ‘global health & development’ person, and might have subconscious concerns about this as an implicit affiliational exercise (even though I very much like and respect a lot of AW folks, I guess I probably feel more “at home” with GHD)? Obviously those kinds of personal factors shouldn’t influence our judgments about an objective question like the debate week question is asking. But I guess they inevitably do.
I don’t know if this observation is even worth sharing, but there it is, fwiw. I guess I’d just like to encourage folks to be aware of their personal biases and try to bracket them as best they can. (I’d like to think of all EAs as ultimately “on the same side” even when we disagree about particular questions of cause prioritization, so I feel kind of bad that I evidently have separate mental categories of “GHD folks” and “AW folks” as though it were some kind of political/coalitional competition.)
I speculate that we may base on self-identification on a more general question like “How important do I think GH is vis-a-vis AW?” It seems clear to me that a voter who takes the specific voting question (SVQ) seriously will almost always vote to the right of their self-identification because the SVQ factors cost-effectiveness in so much more clearly. It seems unremarkable to me that you (and I) may have experienced ~cognitive dissonance because where we publicly stuck our pin doesn’t line up that well with our own broader self-identification.
I was surprised to find that I felt slightly uncomfortable positioning myself on the ‘animal welfare’ side of the debate week scale. I guess I generally think of myself as more of a ‘global health & development’ person, and might have subconscious concerns about this as an implicit affiliational exercise (even though I very much like and respect a lot of AW folks, I guess I probably feel more “at home” with GHD)? Obviously those kinds of personal factors shouldn’t influence our judgments about an objective question like the debate week question is asking. But I guess they inevitably do.
I don’t know if this observation is even worth sharing, but there it is, fwiw. I guess I’d just like to encourage folks to be aware of their personal biases and try to bracket them as best they can. (I’d like to think of all EAs as ultimately “on the same side” even when we disagree about particular questions of cause prioritization, so I feel kind of bad that I evidently have separate mental categories of “GHD folks” and “AW folks” as though it were some kind of political/coalitional competition.)
I speculate that we may base on self-identification on a more general question like “How important do I think GH is vis-a-vis AW?” It seems clear to me that a voter who takes the specific voting question (SVQ) seriously will almost always vote to the right of their self-identification because the SVQ factors cost-effectiveness in so much more clearly. It seems unremarkable to me that you (and I) may have experienced ~cognitive dissonance because where we publicly stuck our pin doesn’t line up that well with our own broader self-identification.