I find it hard to understand which responses were categorized as “intellectual weirdness” and I’m not sure which lessons to draw. E.g., we might be concerned about being off-putting to people who are most able to contribute to top cause areas by presenting weird ideas too prominently (“don’t talk about electron suffering to newbies”). Or we might think EAs are getting obsessed with weird ideas of little practical relevance and should engage more with what common sense has to say (“don’t spend your time thinking about electron suffering”). Or we might be concerned about PR risk, etc.
I think that all three of the concerns you mentioned were shared by some subset of the respondents.
Given the nature of the survey, it’s hard to say that any one of those lessons is most important, but the one that felt most present at the event (to me) was more about publicizing weird ideas than pursuing them in the first place. My impression was that most attendees didn’t see it as a problem for people to work on things like, say, psychedelics (to pick a cause that’s closer to the mainstream than electron suffering). But they don’t want a world where someone who first hears about EA is likely to hear about it as “a group of people doing highly speculative research into ideas that aren’t obviously connected to the public good”.
There was also some concern that “weirder” areas don’t naturally lend themselves to rigorous examination, such that our research standards might slip the further we get from the best-established cause areas.
I think the lumping is present only in this post, so hopefully the concerns will remain separate elsewhere. Thanks for taking the time to tease apart those issues.
I find it hard to understand which responses were categorized as “intellectual weirdness” and I’m not sure which lessons to draw. E.g., we might be concerned about being off-putting to people who are most able to contribute to top cause areas by presenting weird ideas too prominently (“don’t talk about electron suffering to newbies”). Or we might think EAs are getting obsessed with weird ideas of little practical relevance and should engage more with what common sense has to say (“don’t spend your time thinking about electron suffering”). Or we might be concerned about PR risk, etc.
I think that all three of the concerns you mentioned were shared by some subset of the respondents.
Given the nature of the survey, it’s hard to say that any one of those lessons is most important, but the one that felt most present at the event (to me) was more about publicizing weird ideas than pursuing them in the first place. My impression was that most attendees didn’t see it as a problem for people to work on things like, say, psychedelics (to pick a cause that’s closer to the mainstream than electron suffering). But they don’t want a world where someone who first hears about EA is likely to hear about it as “a group of people doing highly speculative research into ideas that aren’t obviously connected to the public good”.
There was also some concern that “weirder” areas don’t naturally lend themselves to rigorous examination, such that our research standards might slip the further we get from the best-established cause areas.
I share this perception; I think I’d prefer if we didn’t lump these different concerns together as “Intellectual weirdness.”
I think the lumping is present only in this post, so hopefully the concerns will remain separate elsewhere. Thanks for taking the time to tease apart those issues.