It may be useful to consider whether you think your comment would pass a reversal test: if the roles were reversed and it was an EA criticizing another movement, but the criticism was otherwise comparable (e.g. in tone and content), would you also have expressed a broadly positive opinion about it? If yes, that would suggest we are disagreeing about the merits of the letter. If no, it seems it’s primarily a disagreement about the standards we should adopt when evaluating external criticism.
Yes, I’d be broadly positive about it. I might say something like “I know you’re trying to break through so people can hear you, but I think you’re being a little unnecessarily antagonistic. Also I think you’re making a number of mistakes about their movement (or about what’s actually good). I sort of wish you’d been careful to avoid more of those. But despite all that I think this contains a number of pretty insightful takes, and you will be making a gift to them in offering it if they can get past the tone and the errors to appreciate it. I hope they do.
Update: I think I’d actually be less positive on it than this if I thought their antagonism might splash back on other people.
I took that not to be a relevant part of the hypothetical, but actually I’m not so sure. I think for people in the community, it’s creating a public good (for the community) to police their mistakes, so I’m not inclined to let error-filled things slide for the sake of the positives. For people outside the community, I’m not so invested in building up the social fabric, so it doesn’t seem worth trying to punish the errors, so the right move seems to be something like more straightforwardly looking for the good bits.
Thanks for the useful exchange.
It may be useful to consider whether you think your comment would pass a reversal test: if the roles were reversed and it was an EA criticizing another movement, but the criticism was otherwise comparable (e.g. in tone and content), would you also have expressed a broadly positive opinion about it? If yes, that would suggest we are disagreeing about the merits of the letter. If no, it seems it’s primarily a disagreement about the standards we should adopt when evaluating external criticism.
Yes, I’d be broadly positive about it. I might say something like “I know you’re trying to break through so people can hear you, but I think you’re being a little unnecessarily antagonistic. Also I think you’re making a number of mistakes about their movement (or about what’s actually good). I sort of wish you’d been careful to avoid more of those. But despite all that I think this contains a number of pretty insightful takes, and you will be making a gift to them in offering it if they can get past the tone and the errors to appreciate it. I hope they do.
Update: I think I’d actually be less positive on it than this if I thought their antagonism might splash back on other people.
I took that not to be a relevant part of the hypothetical, but actually I’m not so sure. I think for people in the community, it’s creating a public good (for the community) to police their mistakes, so I’m not inclined to let error-filled things slide for the sake of the positives. For people outside the community, I’m not so invested in building up the social fabric, so it doesn’t seem worth trying to punish the errors, so the right move seems to be something like more straightforwardly looking for the good bits.