I donated a lot. Both in absolute and percentage terms. I gave a percentage many times higher than even most well off EAs. I think it would have been selfish to just keep the money. But I don’t have any particularly great feelings about how I donated. ‘Things are complicated’ can be an applause light. Sometimes things aren’t all that complicated. But this topic sure is. Saying ‘those who criticize the movement as a whole are deeply intellectually unserious’ just seems unserious to me. The movement has a lot of structural problems. Both ‘extremely positive’ and ‘extremely negative’ impacts seem very plausible to me. Probability is distributed over a very wide range.
Im not sure what normal community members can really do. Decision making is incredibly centralized. But surely we have some responsibility to be serious about downsides. The existence of annoying critics does not absolve us. Though we also have a responsibility not to be overly negative. Or maybe the real answer is we dont have much of either responsibility since two people have almost all the power. But this suggests maybe we should take our talents elsewhere.
I donated a lot. Both in absolute and percentage terms. I gave a percentage many times higher than even most well off EAs. I think it would have been selfish to just keep the money. But I don’t have any particularly great feelings about how I donated. ‘Things are complicated’ can be an applause light. Sometimes things aren’t all that complicated. But this topic sure is. Saying ‘those who criticize the movement as a whole are deeply intellectually unserious’ just seems unserious to me. The movement has a lot of structural problems. Both ‘extremely positive’ and ‘extremely negative’ impacts seem very plausible to me. Probability is distributed over a very wide range.
Im not sure what normal community members can really do. Decision making is incredibly centralized. But surely we have some responsibility to be serious about downsides. The existence of annoying critics does not absolve us. Though we also have a responsibility not to be overly negative. Or maybe the real answer is we dont have much of either responsibility since two people have almost all the power. But this suggests maybe we should take our talents elsewhere.
I quite like this comment, and am interested who the “two people” are who have almost all the power?
Is one of them me? ;).