That wasn’t really what I was saying, and I don’t think you’re steelmanning the intersectionalist perspective, although I agree with your description of the crux. I think many (maybe most?) people who like intersectionality would agree that prioritization is sometimes necessary and useful.
An attempt to steelman intersectionality for a moment: - problems are usually interwoven and complex - separating problems from their contexts can cause more problems - saying one problem is more important than another has negative side effects, because we are trying to fix a broken hammer with broken hammer (comparison culture is a cause of many problems, is a belief of many progressives, I believe)
I am unsure this is incompatible with prioritization, which in my view is simply a practical consequence of not having infinite resources. I think they’d agree, and would not take issue with, for example, someone dedicating their life to only climate change, as long as that person did not go around saying climate change is more important than all the other important issues, and also saw how climate change is related to, for example, improving international governance, or reducing corruption and worked with those efforts rather than in competition with/undermining them.
I think viewing most intersectionality proponents as people who cannot ever work on one thing because they literally need to address all problems at once is an overly literal interpretation, although it’s possible to get this impression if there are a few loud ones like this (I don’t know enough to know).
The disagreement seems to be more about whether it is helpful to compare the importance of issues in a public way. Comparing things, whilst necessary and important, can have side effects such as making some people feel bad about a the good thing that they are doing because it isn’t the best thing a person in theory could be doing. We are familiar with this from 80K’s mistakes.
I was focusing more on the marketing side like Cullen, and wondering whether worldview diversification might be a way to better connect with intersectionality proponents via a message like this:
problems are complicated and sometimes entangled, and we can work on many at once, on a group level, but also our resources are finite, so when allocating them, trade-offs will need to be made
I find your steelman convincing (would love more intersectionalists to confirm though!).
Re: downsides of intercause prioritization. Beyond making people feel bad about their work, systematic prioritization can systematically misallocate resources, while a more informal, holistic and intersectional approach is less likely to make this kind of mistake.
Arguably, while EAs are very well aware of the importance of hit-based giving, they are overly focused on a few cause areas. Meanwhile my (naive) impression is that intersectionalists are succesfully tackling a much wider array of problem areas and interventions, from community help to international aid and political lobbying.
I do not think it is a stretch to think that prioritization frameworks are partly to blame for cause convergence in the EA community.
That wasn’t really what I was saying, and I don’t think you’re steelmanning the intersectionalist perspective, although I agree with your description of the crux. I think many (maybe most?) people who like intersectionality would agree that prioritization is sometimes necessary and useful.
An attempt to steelman intersectionality for a moment:
- problems are usually interwoven and complex
- separating problems from their contexts can cause more problems
- saying one problem is more important than another has negative side effects, because we are trying to fix a broken hammer with broken hammer (comparison culture is a cause of many problems, is a belief of many progressives, I believe)
I am unsure this is incompatible with prioritization, which in my view is simply a practical consequence of not having infinite resources. I think they’d agree, and would not take issue with, for example, someone dedicating their life to only climate change, as long as that person did not go around saying climate change is more important than all the other important issues, and also saw how climate change is related to, for example, improving international governance, or reducing corruption and worked with those efforts rather than in competition with/undermining them.
I think viewing most intersectionality proponents as people who cannot ever work on one thing because they literally need to address all problems at once is an overly literal interpretation, although it’s possible to get this impression if there are a few loud ones like this (I don’t know enough to know).
The disagreement seems to be more about whether it is helpful to compare the importance of issues in a public way. Comparing things, whilst necessary and important, can have side effects such as making some people feel bad about a the good thing that they are doing because it isn’t the best thing a person in theory could be doing. We are familiar with this from 80K’s mistakes.
I was focusing more on the marketing side like Cullen, and wondering whether worldview diversification might be a way to better connect with intersectionality proponents via a message like this:
problems are complicated and sometimes entangled, and we can work on many at once, on a group level, but also our resources are finite, so when allocating them, trade-offs will need to be made
I find your steelman convincing (would love more intersectionalists to confirm though!).
Re: downsides of intercause prioritization. Beyond making people feel bad about their work, systematic prioritization can systematically misallocate resources, while a more informal, holistic and intersectional approach is less likely to make this kind of mistake.
Arguably, while EAs are very well aware of the importance of hit-based giving, they are overly focused on a few cause areas. Meanwhile my (naive) impression is that intersectionalists are succesfully tackling a much wider array of problem areas and interventions, from community help to international aid and political lobbying.
I do not think it is a stretch to think that prioritization frameworks are partly to blame for cause convergence in the EA community.