I’m surprised to hear that people see criticizing EA as incurring social costs. My impression was that many past criticisms of EA have been met with significant praise (e.g., Ben Kuhn’s). One approach for dealing with this could be to provide a forum for anonymous posts + comments.
I think it really depends on who you criticize. I perceive criticizing particular people or organizations as having significant social costs (though I’m not saying whether those costs are merited or not).
anything I write that wouldn’t incur unacceptably high social costs would have to be a highly watered-down version of the original point, and/or involve so much of my time to write carefully that it wouldn’t be worthwhile.
I’m surprised to hear that people see criticizing EA as incurring social costs. My impression was that many past criticisms of EA have been met with significant praise (e.g., Ben Kuhn’s). One approach for dealing with this could be to provide a forum for anonymous posts + comments.
I think it really depends on who you criticize. I perceive criticizing particular people or organizations as having significant social costs (though I’m not saying whether those costs are merited or not).
In my post, I said
I would expect that conditioned on spending a large amount of time to write the criticism carefully, it would be met with significant praise. (This is backed up at least in upvotes by past examples of my own writing, e.g. Another Critique of Effective Altruism, The Power of Noise, and A Fervent Defense of Frequentist Statistics.)