Hi Larks, thank you for taking the time to articulate your concerns! I will respond to a few below:
Concern 1: passing off evidential burden
• I agree it would be preferable if we would have a made a solid case for why gender diversity is important in this post.
-> To explain this choice: we did not feel like we could do this topic justice in the limited time we had available for this so decided to prioritize sharing the information in this post instead. Another reason for focusing on the content of the post above is that we had a somewhat rare opportunity to get this many people’s input on the topic all at once—which I would say gave us some comparative advantage for writing about this rather than writing about why/whether gender diversity is important.
• As you specifically mention that you think “relying on posts that received a lot of justified criticism” is a bad idea, do you have suggestions for different posts that you found better?
Concern 2: “Some of your proposals, like adopting “the patriarchy” as a cause area, or rejecting impartiality in favour of an “ethics of care”, are major and controversial changes”
• Something I’d like to point out here: these are not our proposals. As we mention in the post, ‘The views we describe in this post don’t necessarily correspond with our (Veerle Bakker’s & Alexandra Bos’) own but rather we are describing others’ input.′ For more details on this process, I’d recommend taking a look at the Methodology & Limitations if you haven’t already.
-> Overall, I think the reasons you mention for not taking on the proposals under ‘Adjusting attributes of EA thought’ are very fair and I probably agree with you on them.
• A second point regarding your concern: I think you are conflating the underlying reasons participants suspected are behind the gender gap with the solutions they propose.
However,
saying ‘X might be the cause of problem Y’, is not the same as saying:
‘we should do the opposite from X so that problem Y is solved’
Therefore, I don’t feel that, for instance, your claim that a proposal in this post was to adopt “the patriarchy” as cause area fairly represents the written content. What we wrote is that “One of these topics is how EA does not focus specifically on gender inequality issues in its thinking (e.g. ‘the patriarchy’ is not a problem recommended to work on by the EA community).” This isa description of a concern some of the participants described, not a solution they proposed. The same goes for your interpretation that the proposal is “rejecting impartiality in favour of an ethics of care”.
Hi Larks, thank you for taking the time to articulate your concerns! I will respond to a few below:
Concern 1: passing off evidential burden
• I agree it would be preferable if we would have a made a solid case for why gender diversity is important in this post.
-> To explain this choice: we did not feel like we could do this topic justice in the limited time we had available for this so decided to prioritize sharing the information in this post instead. Another reason for focusing on the content of the post above is that we had a somewhat rare opportunity to get this many people’s input on the topic all at once—which I would say gave us some comparative advantage for writing about this rather than writing about why/whether gender diversity is important.
• As you specifically mention that you think “relying on posts that received a lot of justified criticism” is a bad idea, do you have suggestions for different posts that you found better?
Concern 2: “Some of your proposals, like adopting “the patriarchy” as a cause area, or rejecting impartiality in favour of an “ethics of care”, are major and controversial changes”
• Something I’d like to point out here: these are not our proposals. As we mention in the post, ‘The views we describe in this post don’t necessarily correspond with our (Veerle Bakker’s & Alexandra Bos’) own but rather we are describing others’ input.′ For more details on this process, I’d recommend taking a look at the Methodology & Limitations if you haven’t already.
-> Overall, I think the reasons you mention for not taking on the proposals under ‘Adjusting attributes of EA thought’ are very fair and I probably agree with you on them.
• A second point regarding your concern: I think you are conflating the underlying reasons participants suspected are behind the gender gap with the solutions they propose.
However,
saying ‘X might be the cause of problem Y’, is not the same as saying:
‘we should do the opposite from X so that problem Y is solved’
Therefore, I don’t feel that, for instance, your claim that a proposal in this post was to adopt “the patriarchy” as cause area fairly represents the written content. What we wrote is that “One of these topics is how EA does not focus specifically on gender inequality issues in its thinking (e.g. ‘the patriarchy’ is not a problem recommended to work on by the EA community).” This is a description of a concern some of the participants described, not a solution they proposed. The same goes for your interpretation that the proposal is “rejecting impartiality in favour of an ethics of care”.