Every once in a while, I see someone write something like “X is neglected in the EA Community”. I dislike that. The part about “in the EA Community” seems almost always unnecessary, and a reflection of a narrow view of the world. Generally, we should just care about whether X is neglected overall.
I assume you don’t have a problem with it when people are making the claim specifically about EA, as opposed to the wider world?
Like if I said “Building teams that come from a variety of relevant backgrounds and diverse demographics is neglected in EA”, even if you disagreed with the statement, you probably wouldn’t mind the “neglected in EA” part?
Although I agree that “neglected in EA” often leads to lazy writing… I think the argument above could be phrased a lot more clearly.
hummm. I don’t know about your specific example; I would need an argument for why it’s better to have this “in the EA community”. but yeah, there are things that can be “neglected in the EA community” if they are specific to the community. like someone to help resolve conflicts within the community for example. so thanks for the clarification. I should specify that the ‘X’ in my original comment was element of general {Interventions, Causes}, and not about the health of the community.
Although, maybe the EA Community has a certain prestige that make it a good position from which to propagate ideas through society. So if, for example, the EA Community broadly acknowledged anti-aging as an important problem, even without working much on it, it might get other people to work on it that would have otherwise worked on something less important. So in that sense it might make sense. But still, I would prefer if it was phrased more explicitly as such, like “The EA Community should acknowledge X has an important problem”.
Every once in a while, I see someone write something like “X is neglected in the EA Community”. I dislike that. The part about “in the EA Community” seems almost always unnecessary, and a reflection of a narrow view of the world. Generally, we should just care about whether X is neglected overall.
I assume you don’t have a problem with it when people are making the claim specifically about EA, as opposed to the wider world?
Like if I said “Building teams that come from a variety of relevant backgrounds and diverse demographics is neglected in EA”, even if you disagreed with the statement, you probably wouldn’t mind the “neglected in EA” part?
Although I agree that “neglected in EA” often leads to lazy writing… I think the argument above could be phrased a lot more clearly.
hummm. I don’t know about your specific example; I would need an argument for why it’s better to have this “in the EA community”. but yeah, there are things that can be “neglected in the EA community” if they are specific to the community. like someone to help resolve conflicts within the community for example. so thanks for the clarification. I should specify that the ‘X’ in my original comment was element of general {Interventions, Causes}, and not about the health of the community.
Although, maybe the EA Community has a certain prestige that make it a good position from which to propagate ideas through society. So if, for example, the EA Community broadly acknowledged anti-aging as an important problem, even without working much on it, it might get other people to work on it that would have otherwise worked on something less important. So in that sense it might make sense. But still, I would prefer if it was phrased more explicitly as such, like “The EA Community should acknowledge X has an important problem”.
Posted a similar version of this comment here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/3166557336733935/?comment_id=3167088476680821&reply_comment_id=3167117343344601
When talking about causes, I’d like to see comments like “there hasn’t been enough analysis of effectiveness of meta-science interventions”.
Sometimes, yeah! Although, I think people over use “more research is needed”