EA, being a fallible movement, is wrong about a lot of things. A lot of people that are not aligned with EA have completely valid reasons for not doing so. If you excessively filter for people that already agree with you on everything, you risk creating a groupthink atmosphere where alternative ideas have no real way to enter the discourse. Take this to the extreme and you pretty much end up with a cult.
Also, EA is not representative of the general public, and thus will have a hard time knowing how ideas and policies are received by or impact broader demographics. Having normal people around to provide sanity checks is a useful byproduct of hiring more generally, rather than finding people already adjacent to this very small and odd subculture.
Very strong agree. The ‘cons’ in the above list are not clearly negatives from an overall view of ‘make sure we actually do the most good, and don’t fall into epistemic echo chambers’ perspective.
EA, being a fallible movement, is wrong about a lot of things. A lot of people that are not aligned with EA have completely valid reasons for not doing so. If you excessively filter for people that already agree with you on everything, you risk creating a groupthink atmosphere where alternative ideas have no real way to enter the discourse. Take this to the extreme and you pretty much end up with a cult.
Also, EA is not representative of the general public, and thus will have a hard time knowing how ideas and policies are received by or impact broader demographics. Having normal people around to provide sanity checks is a useful byproduct of hiring more generally, rather than finding people already adjacent to this very small and odd subculture.
Very strong agree. The ‘cons’ in the above list are not clearly negatives from an overall view of ‘make sure we actually do the most good, and don’t fall into epistemic echo chambers’ perspective.