This is a fantastic comment. And there’s an EA who’s able to interpret the continental/lefty/Frankfurt memeplex for a majority analytical/decoupling/mistake-theory audience, I think this could be a very high-impact thing to do on the Forum! Part of why EA is bad at dealing with criticism like this is (imo) that a lot of the time we don’t really understand what the critics are saying, and as you point out: “I feel like a lot of cruxes of how you receive these criticisms are dependent on what memeplex you buy into.”
Definitely going to spend a lot of my weekend reading the articles and adding to collaborative review that’s going around.
One major thing you do bring up in this review is that it is a very lefty-oriented piece of criticism. To me, this is just confirming my priors that EA needs to eventually recognise this is where its biggest piece of pushback is going to come from, both in the intellectual space and what ordinary peoples opinions of EA will be informed by (especially the younger the age profile). While we might be able to ‘EA-Judo’ away from some of the criticisms, or turn others into purely empirical disagreements where we are ready to update, there are others where the movement might have to be more openly about ‘Cause X reduces suffering, decreases x-Risk, and decreases the chance of a global revolution against capitalism and that’s ok’. (So, personal note, reviewing lefty critiques of EA has just shot up my list of things I want to post about on the Forum)
This is a fantastic comment. And there’s an EA who’s able to interpret the continental/lefty/Frankfurt memeplex for a majority analytical/decoupling/mistake-theory audience, I think this could be a very high-impact thing to do on the Forum! Part of why EA is bad at dealing with criticism like this is (imo) that a lot of the time we don’t really understand what the critics are saying, and as you point out: “I feel like a lot of cruxes of how you receive these criticisms are dependent on what memeplex you buy into.”
Definitely going to spend a lot of my weekend reading the articles and adding to collaborative review that’s going around.
One major thing you do bring up in this review is that it is a very lefty-oriented piece of criticism. To me, this is just confirming my priors that EA needs to eventually recognise this is where its biggest piece of pushback is going to come from, both in the intellectual space and what ordinary peoples opinions of EA will be informed by (especially the younger the age profile). While we might be able to ‘EA-Judo’ away from some of the criticisms, or turn others into purely empirical disagreements where we are ready to update, there are others where the movement might have to be more openly about ‘Cause X reduces suffering, decreases x-Risk, and decreases the chance of a global revolution against capitalism and that’s ok’. (So, personal note, reviewing lefty critiques of EA has just shot up my list of things I want to post about on the Forum)