Hello Linch, Sean and Marisa capture the reasons well. I have had several people outside EA/LT ask about the Torres essays and I didn’t have a great response to point them to so this response is written for them. I also posted it here in case others have a similar use for it.
Thanks for the response, from you and others! I think I had a large illusion of transparency about how obviously wrong Torres’ critiques are to common-sense reason and morality. Naively I’d have thought that they’d come across as clearly dumb to target audiences the way (e.g.) the 2013 Charity Navigator critique of EA did. But I agree that if you and others think that many people who could potentially do useful work in EA (e.g., promising members of local groups, or academic collaborators at Cambridge) would otherwise have read Torres’ article and been persuaded, then I agree that pointing out the obvious ways in which he misrepresents longtermism makes sense and is a good use of time!
I still vaguely have the gut feeling of “don’t feed the energy creatures” where it’s unwise to dedicate a lot of time to exhaustively try to engage with someone arguing in bad faith. So my first pass is that 1-2k words spent on quickly dissecting the biggest misrepresentations should be enough. But I think this feeling isn’t very data- or reason- driven, and I don’t have a principled policy of how applicable that feeling is in this case.
I don’t think people being “persuaded” by Torres is the primary concern — rather, I think Torres could make people feel vaguely icky or concerned about longtermism, even if they still basically “believe in it”, in a way that makes them less likely to get fully engaged / more likely to bounce off toward other EA topics. Even if those other topics are also very valuable, it seems good to have a reaction piece like this to counter the “ick” reactions and give people an easy way to see the full set of relevant arguments before they bounce.
Hello Linch, Sean and Marisa capture the reasons well. I have had several people outside EA/LT ask about the Torres essays and I didn’t have a great response to point them to so this response is written for them. I also posted it here in case others have a similar use for it.
Thanks for the response, from you and others! I think I had a large illusion of transparency about how obviously wrong Torres’ critiques are to common-sense reason and morality. Naively I’d have thought that they’d come across as clearly dumb to target audiences the way (e.g.) the 2013 Charity Navigator critique of EA did. But I agree that if you and others think that many people who could potentially do useful work in EA (e.g., promising members of local groups, or academic collaborators at Cambridge) would otherwise have read Torres’ article and been persuaded, then I agree that pointing out the obvious ways in which he misrepresents longtermism makes sense and is a good use of time!
I still vaguely have the gut feeling of “don’t feed the energy creatures” where it’s unwise to dedicate a lot of time to exhaustively try to engage with someone arguing in bad faith. So my first pass is that 1-2k words spent on quickly dissecting the biggest misrepresentations should be enough. But I think this feeling isn’t very data- or reason- driven, and I don’t have a principled policy of how applicable that feeling is in this case.
I don’t think people being “persuaded” by Torres is the primary concern — rather, I think Torres could make people feel vaguely icky or concerned about longtermism, even if they still basically “believe in it”, in a way that makes them less likely to get fully engaged / more likely to bounce off toward other EA topics. Even if those other topics are also very valuable, it seems good to have a reaction piece like this to counter the “ick” reactions and give people an easy way to see the full set of relevant arguments before they bounce.