Thanks! Glad to hear you found the framing new and useful, and sorry to hear you found it confusingly written.
On the point about “EA tenets”: if you mean normative tenets, then yes, how much you want to update on others’ views on that front might be different from how much you want to update on others’ empirical beliefs. I think the natural dividing line here would be whether you consider normative tenets more like beliefs (in which case you update when you see others disagreeing—along the lines of this post, say) or more like preferences (in which case you don’t). My own guess is that they’re more like beliefs—i.e. we should take the fact that most people reject temporal impartiality as at least some evidence against longtermism—but thanks for noting that there’s a distinction one might want to make here.
On the three bullet points: I agree with the worries on all counts! As you sort of note, these could be seen as difficulties with “implementing the policy” appropriately, rather than problems with the policy in the abstract, and that is how I see them. But I take the point that if an idea is hard enough to implement then there might not be much practically to be learned from it.
Thanks! Glad to hear you found the framing new and useful, and sorry to hear you found it confusingly written.
On the point about “EA tenets”: if you mean normative tenets, then yes, how much you want to update on others’ views on that front might be different from how much you want to update on others’ empirical beliefs. I think the natural dividing line here would be whether you consider normative tenets more like beliefs (in which case you update when you see others disagreeing—along the lines of this post, say) or more like preferences (in which case you don’t). My own guess is that they’re more like beliefs—i.e. we should take the fact that most people reject temporal impartiality as at least some evidence against longtermism—but thanks for noting that there’s a distinction one might want to make here.
On the three bullet points: I agree with the worries on all counts! As you sort of note, these could be seen as difficulties with “implementing the policy” appropriately, rather than problems with the policy in the abstract, and that is how I see them. But I take the point that if an idea is hard enough to implement then there might not be much practically to be learned from it.