Hey Alex, I wanted to respond earlier but I’ve been quite busy with work!
On your downvote total, this is another case where I’d really like to be able to differentiate voting up the comment for visibility and disagree vote to indicate I’m not a fan of its content. As such I’ve removed my downvote.
I think a charitable look at what the downvoters might be trying to signal is (and I agree) that Émile Torres is not a good-faith interlocutor, and in fact is not trying to aim for dialogue and truth but is trying to (in their eyes) save the world by destroying the EA movement, and thus that there actually isn’t much to learn. There isn’t much new if anything that hasn’t been said before, hence the downvotes. YMMV of course, but I think a sentiment ~around this might be responsible for the negative score.
I think there are some interesting pieces/​threads in the article, but there’s so much crap that gets in the way (I actually tried to respond to some bullet points but in the end I think it would lead to more heat than light). I think the final thought experiment is interesting, especially why the authors think it’s such a slam dunk (and the ways that they subtly try to influence the reader, ‘partying’/​‘trashing’ etc. Imagine I said compare 20 billion flourishing humans living over 100 centuries vs 5 billion humans over 100000 - which world is better)? I feel a better solution (with hindsight) would have been to just quote that part for discussion.
Final thought—I do applaud you for looking for critical articles on EA and trying to discuss the useful parts. It’s a really good trait :)
Hey Alex, I wanted to respond earlier but I’ve been quite busy with work!
On your downvote total, this is another case where I’d really like to be able to differentiate voting up the comment for visibility and disagree vote to indicate I’m not a fan of its content. As such I’ve removed my downvote.
I think a charitable look at what the downvoters might be trying to signal is (and I agree) that Émile Torres is not a good-faith interlocutor, and in fact is not trying to aim for dialogue and truth but is trying to (in their eyes) save the world by destroying the EA movement, and thus that there actually isn’t much to learn. There isn’t much new if anything that hasn’t been said before, hence the downvotes. YMMV of course, but I think a sentiment ~around this might be responsible for the negative score.
I think there are some interesting pieces/​threads in the article, but there’s so much crap that gets in the way (I actually tried to respond to some bullet points but in the end I think it would lead to more heat than light). I think the final thought experiment is interesting, especially why the authors think it’s such a slam dunk (and the ways that they subtly try to influence the reader, ‘partying’/​‘trashing’ etc. Imagine I said compare 20 billion flourishing humans living over 100 centuries vs 5 billion humans over 100000 - which world is better)? I feel a better solution (with hindsight) would have been to just quote that part for discussion.
Final thought—I do applaud you for looking for critical articles on EA and trying to discuss the useful parts. It’s a really good trait :)
Though I accept that some significant sub-portion of EA may well believe this
Very quick answer ofc, lots of nuance to add, but I think this debate really underlies of lot of this tension between the two camps