A nice middle ground between “not talking about our reasons for supporting different causes at all” and “having people try to persuade others that their cause is the most important one” could be to simply encourage more truth-seeking, collaborative discussion about causes.
So rather than having people lay out their case for different causes (which risks causing people to get defensive and further entrenching peoples’ sense of affiliation to a certain cause, and a divide between different “groups” in the movement) it would be nice to see more discussion where people who support different causes explicitly try and find out where their disagreements lie, and learn from each other. I’m thinking of the kind of discussion that was had between Eliezer, Luke and Holden, for example, where they discussed their views on the far future and eventually found they didn’t disagree as much as they thought they did. This kind of thing seems really valuable, both in terms of learning and bringing people closer together.
A nice middle ground between “not talking about our reasons for supporting different causes at all” and “having people try to persuade others that their cause is the most important one” could be to simply encourage more truth-seeking, collaborative discussion about causes.
So rather than having people lay out their case for different causes (which risks causing people to get defensive and further entrenching peoples’ sense of affiliation to a certain cause, and a divide between different “groups” in the movement) it would be nice to see more discussion where people who support different causes explicitly try and find out where their disagreements lie, and learn from each other. I’m thinking of the kind of discussion that was had between Eliezer, Luke and Holden, for example, where they discussed their views on the far future and eventually found they didn’t disagree as much as they thought they did. This kind of thing seems really valuable, both in terms of learning and bringing people closer together.