Although I understand the nationalism example isn’t meant to be analogous, but my impression is this structural objection only really applies when our situation is analogous.
If historically EA paid a lot of attention to nationalism (or trans-humanism, the scepticism community, or whatever else) but had by-and-large collectively ‘moved on’ from these, contemporary introductions to the field shouldn’t feel obliged to cover them extensively, nor treat it the relative merits of what they focus on now versus then as an open question.
Yet, however you slice it, EA as it stands now hasn’t by-and-large ‘moved on’ to be ‘basically longtermism’, where its interest in (e.g) global health is clearly atavistic. I’d be willing to go to bat for substantial slants to longtermism, as (I aver) its over-representation amongst the more highly engaged and the disproportionate migration of folks to longtermism from other areas warrants claims that epistocratic weighting of consensus would favour longtermism over anything else. But even this has limits which ‘greatly favouring longtermism over everything else’ exceeds.
How you choose to frame an introduction is up for grabs, and I don’t think ‘the big three’ is the only appropriate game in town. Yet if your alternative way of framing an introduction to X ends up strongly favouring one aspect (further, the one you are sympathetic to) disproportionate to any reasonable account of its prominence within X, something has gone wrong.
Although I understand the nationalism example isn’t meant to be analogous, but my impression is this structural objection only really applies when our situation is analogous.
If historically EA paid a lot of attention to nationalism (or trans-humanism, the scepticism community, or whatever else) but had by-and-large collectively ‘moved on’ from these, contemporary introductions to the field shouldn’t feel obliged to cover them extensively, nor treat it the relative merits of what they focus on now versus then as an open question.
Yet, however you slice it, EA as it stands now hasn’t by-and-large ‘moved on’ to be ‘basically longtermism’, where its interest in (e.g) global health is clearly atavistic. I’d be willing to go to bat for substantial slants to longtermism, as (I aver) its over-representation amongst the more highly engaged and the disproportionate migration of folks to longtermism from other areas warrants claims that epistocratic weighting of consensus would favour longtermism over anything else. But even this has limits which ‘greatly favouring longtermism over everything else’ exceeds.
How you choose to frame an introduction is up for grabs, and I don’t think ‘the big three’ is the only appropriate game in town. Yet if your alternative way of framing an introduction to X ends up strongly favouring one aspect (further, the one you are sympathetic to) disproportionate to any reasonable account of its prominence within X, something has gone wrong.