I’d be curious to know: what do you most disagree with the Effective Altruism philosophy, worldview or community about?
I had a response that a few people I respect thought was interesting, so I’m reposting it here:
Insufficient sense of heroic responsibility. “Reality doesn’t grade on a curve.” It doesn’t matter (that much) whether EA did or did not get more things “right” about covid than conventional experts, it matters that millions of people died, and we’re still not prepared enough for the next (bigger) pandemic. (similar story in the other cause areas).
Not enough modeling/Fermi/backchaining/coming up with concrete Theories of Change/Victory in decision-guiding ways.
Too much time spent responding to dumb criticisms, insufficient time spent seeking out stronger criticisms.
Overly deferential (especially among the junior EAs) to the larger players. See Ozzie Gooen: “I run into a bunch of people who assume that the EA core is some type of agentic super-brain that makes all moves intentionally. So if something weird is going on, it must be for some eccentric reason of perfect wisdom. ” https://www.facebook.com/ozzie.gooen/posts/10165633038585363
Insufficient willingness to give/receive lots of frank object-level feedback. I suspect (though am uncertain) this is part of why many people have inaccurate/wrong models of why their grants were rejected (as opposed to e.g. mainly because grantmakers were too busy, or because of motivated cognition making up excuses). See negative comments on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/.../frank-feedback… as an illustration of what I mean.
Too much time focused on status-grabs/motivated cognition to pretend/lie that what you are doing is important, insufficient time on trying to do actually important things.
A while ago, Spencer Greenberg asked:
I had a response that a few people I respect thought was interesting, so I’m reposting it here: