I agree that it’s important that EA stay open to weird things and not exclude people solely for being low status. I see several key distinctions between early SI/early MIRI and Intentional Insights:
SI was cause focused, II a fundraising org. Causes can be argued on their merits. For fundraising, “people dislike you for no reason” is in and of itself evidence you are bad at fundraising and should stop.
I think this is an important general lesson. Right now “fundraising org” seems to be the default thing for people to start, but it’s actually one of the hardest things to do right and has the worst consequences if it goes poorly. With the exception of local groups, I’d like to see the community norms shift to discourage inexperienced people from starting fundraising groups.
AFAIK, SI wasn’t trying to use the credibility of the EA movement to bolster itself . Gleb is, both explicitly (by repeatedly and persistently listing endorsements he did not receive) and implicitly. As long as he is doing that the proportionate response is criticizing him/distancing him from EA enough to cancel out the benefits.
The effective altruism name wasn’t worth as much when MIRI was getting started. There was no point in faking an endorsement because no one had heard of us. Now that EA has some cachet with people outside the movement there exists the possibility of trying to exploit that cachet, and it makes sense for us to raise the bar on who gets to claim endorsement.
Chronological nitpick: SingInst (which later split into MIRI and CFAR) is significantly older than the EA name and the EA movement, and its birth and growth are attributable in significant part to SingInst and CFAR projects.
My experience (as someone connected to both the rationalist and Oxford/Giving What We Can clusters as EA came into being) is that its birth came out of Giving What We Can, and the communities you mentioned contributed to growth (by aligning with EA) but not so much to birth.
I see several key distinctions between early SI/early MIRI and Intentional Insights:
You can equally draw a list of distinctions which point in the other direction: distinctions that would have made it more worthwhile to exclude MIRI than to exclude InIn. I’ve listed some already.
I agree that it’s important that EA stay open to weird things and not exclude people solely for being low status. I see several key distinctions between early SI/early MIRI and Intentional Insights:
SI was cause focused, II a fundraising org. Causes can be argued on their merits. For fundraising, “people dislike you for no reason” is in and of itself evidence you are bad at fundraising and should stop.
I think this is an important general lesson. Right now “fundraising org” seems to be the default thing for people to start, but it’s actually one of the hardest things to do right and has the worst consequences if it goes poorly. With the exception of local groups, I’d like to see the community norms shift to discourage inexperienced people from starting fundraising groups.
AFAIK, SI wasn’t trying to use the credibility of the EA movement to bolster itself . Gleb is, both explicitly (by repeatedly and persistently listing endorsements he did not receive) and implicitly. As long as he is doing that the proportionate response is criticizing him/distancing him from EA enough to cancel out the benefits.
The effective altruism name wasn’t worth as much when MIRI was getting started. There was no point in faking an endorsement because no one had heard of us. Now that EA has some cachet with people outside the movement there exists the possibility of trying to exploit that cachet, and it makes sense for us to raise the bar on who gets to claim endorsement.
Chronological nitpick: SingInst (which later split into MIRI and CFAR) is significantly older than the EA name and the EA movement, and its birth and growth are attributable in significant part to SingInst and CFAR projects.
My experience (as someone connected to both the rationalist and Oxford/Giving What We Can clusters as EA came into being) is that its birth came out of Giving What We Can, and the communities you mentioned contributed to growth (by aligning with EA) but not so much to birth.
You can equally draw a list of distinctions which point in the other direction: distinctions that would have made it more worthwhile to exclude MIRI than to exclude InIn. I’ve listed some already.