I agree with your edit more than with the rest of your comment.
It would be uncharitable to interpret “takes” to be about people’s specific views. Instead, it’s about things like the following:
Do I learn something from talking to this person? When I dig deeper into the reasons why they believe what they believe, do I find myself surprised by good arguments or depth of thought, or something of the like? Or does it just seem like they’re parroting something or are ideologically clouded and can’t seem to reason well? Do they seem interested in truth-seeking, intellectually honest, etc? Do they seem to have “good judgment” or do they make arguments where it feels like the conclusions don’t even follow from their premises and they’re just generally off about the way things work? [There are tons of other factors that go into this; I’m just gesturing at some of the things.]
Regarding competence, there’s no single axis but that doesn’t mean the concept isn’t meaningful. Lots of concepts work like that – they’re fuzzy but still meaningful.
To be fair, some things might be less about competence and more about not having equally “high standards.” For instance, I notice that sometimes people new to EA make posts on some specific topic that are less thorough than some post from 5-10 years ago that long-term EAs would consider “canonical.” And these new posts don’t add new considerations or even miss important considerations discussed in the older post. In that case, the new person may still be “competent” in terms of intelligence or even reasoning ability, but they would lack a kind of obsessiveness and high standards about what they’re doing (otherwise they’d probably have done more reading about the topic they were going to make a top-level post about – instead of asking questions, which is always an option!). So, it could also be a cultural thing that’s more about lack of obsessiveness (“not bothering to read most of what seems relevant”) or high standards, rather than (just) about “competence.”
(And, for what it’s worth, I think it’s totally forgivable to occasionally make posts that weren’t aware of everything that’s previously been written. It would be absurd to expect newcomers to read everything. It just gets weird if most of someone’s posts are “worse than redundant” in that way and if they make lots of such posts and they’re all confidently phrased so you get the impression that the person writing the post is convinced they’ll be changing the minds of lots of EAs.)
I can imagine a world where the things you wrote, like “Do I learn something from talking to that person”, are the sole measure of “posting quality”. I don’t personally think such a world is favorable (e.g. I’d rather someone who often posts smart things stay off the forum if they promote bigoted views). But I also don’t think that’s the world we’re in.
People cannot separate judgement of these things from judgement of a person’s views, even if they think they can. In practice, forum posts are often judged by the views they express (“capitalism is bad” is frowned upon), and even worse, by their style of reasoning (STEM-like arguments and phrasing is much more accepted, quantification and precision are encouraged even when inappropriate). Object-level engagement is appreciated over other forms, disregarding that it is only sometimes right to engage this way.
As I see it, the vision of a rational, logical, strongly truth-seeking forum is an illusion, and this illusion is used to drive out people with more diverse backgrounds or who come from underrepresented schools of thought.
High Standards
I personally have very high standards. There are many posts I want to write, but I really want them to be thorough and convincing, and to engage with relevant materials. You can see the result—I have written none! Is this actually helpful?
I think there can be value in posts that reiterate old content, perhaps even when they leave out important bits or have problematic logic. I have two reasons:
The forum guides the movement not only through building a common knowledge base, but also through representing the growing community’s views. If, for example, 8 years ago someone had written that it’s acceptable to work for a tobacco company in order to donate to high impact charities—how would you know how many current EAs share that view? The view itself is not an empirical question, and the old post’s karma tells you nothing about this. A new post, letting the community reengage with the ideas, might.
As noted in the OP and elsewhere, EAs love to criticise EA. I’m in favor of that—there are lots of problems, and we need to notice and fix them. Alas, many are noticed but then not fixed. If 8 years ago someone had written about how diversity of experience is important, but nowadays the movement is still composed almost entirely of people from Western countries, and most community building resources also go there—it means no meaningful action is being taken to fix the problem, so it needs to be reiterated.
I agree with your edit more than with the rest of your comment.
It would be uncharitable to interpret “takes” to be about people’s specific views. Instead, it’s about things like the following:
Do I learn something from talking to this person? When I dig deeper into the reasons why they believe what they believe, do I find myself surprised by good arguments or depth of thought, or something of the like? Or does it just seem like they’re parroting something or are ideologically clouded and can’t seem to reason well? Do they seem interested in truth-seeking, intellectually honest, etc? Do they seem to have “good judgment” or do they make arguments where it feels like the conclusions don’t even follow from their premises and they’re just generally off about the way things work? [There are tons of other factors that go into this; I’m just gesturing at some of the things.]
Regarding competence, there’s no single axis but that doesn’t mean the concept isn’t meaningful. Lots of concepts work like that – they’re fuzzy but still meaningful.
To be fair, some things might be less about competence and more about not having equally “high standards.” For instance, I notice that sometimes people new to EA make posts on some specific topic that are less thorough than some post from 5-10 years ago that long-term EAs would consider “canonical.” And these new posts don’t add new considerations or even miss important considerations discussed in the older post. In that case, the new person may still be “competent” in terms of intelligence or even reasoning ability, but they would lack a kind of obsessiveness and high standards about what they’re doing (otherwise they’d probably have done more reading about the topic they were going to make a top-level post about – instead of asking questions, which is always an option!). So, it could also be a cultural thing that’s more about lack of obsessiveness (“not bothering to read most of what seems relevant”) or high standards, rather than (just) about “competence.”
(And, for what it’s worth, I think it’s totally forgivable to occasionally make posts that weren’t aware of everything that’s previously been written. It would be absurd to expect newcomers to read everything. It just gets weird if most of someone’s posts are “worse than redundant” in that way and if they make lots of such posts and they’re all confidently phrased so you get the impression that the person writing the post is convinced they’ll be changing the minds of lots of EAs.)
Views vs. “Other Things”
I can imagine a world where the things you wrote, like “Do I learn something from talking to that person”, are the sole measure of “posting quality”. I don’t personally think such a world is favorable (e.g. I’d rather someone who often posts smart things stay off the forum if they promote bigoted views). But I also don’t think that’s the world we’re in.
People cannot separate judgement of these things from judgement of a person’s views, even if they think they can. In practice, forum posts are often judged by the views they express (“capitalism is bad” is frowned upon), and even worse, by their style of reasoning (STEM-like arguments and phrasing is much more accepted, quantification and precision are encouraged even when inappropriate). Object-level engagement is appreciated over other forms, disregarding that it is only sometimes right to engage this way.
As I see it, the vision of a rational, logical, strongly truth-seeking forum is an illusion, and this illusion is used to drive out people with more diverse backgrounds or who come from underrepresented schools of thought.
High Standards
I personally have very high standards. There are many posts I want to write, but I really want them to be thorough and convincing, and to engage with relevant materials. You can see the result—I have written none! Is this actually helpful?
I think there can be value in posts that reiterate old content, perhaps even when they leave out important bits or have problematic logic. I have two reasons:
The forum guides the movement not only through building a common knowledge base, but also through representing the growing community’s views. If, for example, 8 years ago someone had written that it’s acceptable to work for a tobacco company in order to donate to high impact charities—how would you know how many current EAs share that view? The view itself is not an empirical question, and the old post’s karma tells you nothing about this. A new post, letting the community reengage with the ideas, might.
As noted in the OP and elsewhere, EAs love to criticise EA. I’m in favor of that—there are lots of problems, and we need to notice and fix them. Alas, many are noticed but then not fixed. If 8 years ago someone had written about how diversity of experience is important, but nowadays the movement is still composed almost entirely of people from Western countries, and most community building resources also go there—it means no meaningful action is being taken to fix the problem, so it needs to be reiterated.