I was surprised to find that I felt slightly uncomfortable positioning myself on the āanimal welfareā side of the debate week scale. I guess I generally think of myself as more of a āglobal health & developmentā 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 āat homeā with GHD)? Obviously those kinds of personal factors shouldnāt influence our judgments about an objective question like the debate week question is asking. But I guess they inevitably do.
I donāt know if this observation is even worth sharing, but there it is, fwiw. I guess Iād just like to encourage folks to be aware of their personal biases and try to bracket them as best they can. (Iād like to think of all EAs as ultimately āon the same sideā even when we disagree about particular questions of cause prioritization, so I feel kind of bad that I evidently have separate mental categories of āGHD folksā and āAW folksā as though it were some kind of political/ācoalitional competition.)
I speculate that we may base on self-identification on a more general question like āHow important do I think GH is vis-a-vis AW?ā 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 doesnāt line up that well with our own broader self-identification.
I was surprised to find that I felt slightly uncomfortable positioning myself on the āanimal welfareā side of the debate week scale. I guess I generally think of myself as more of a āglobal health & developmentā 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 āat homeā with GHD)? Obviously those kinds of personal factors shouldnāt influence our judgments about an objective question like the debate week question is asking. But I guess they inevitably do.
I donāt know if this observation is even worth sharing, but there it is, fwiw. I guess Iād just like to encourage folks to be aware of their personal biases and try to bracket them as best they can. (Iād like to think of all EAs as ultimately āon the same sideā even when we disagree about particular questions of cause prioritization, so I feel kind of bad that I evidently have separate mental categories of āGHD folksā and āAW folksā as though it were some kind of political/ācoalitional competition.)
I speculate that we may base on self-identification on a more general question like āHow important do I think GH is vis-a-vis AW?ā 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 doesnāt line up that well with our own broader self-identification.