Pretty hard to say, but the ‘hero worship’ comment (in the sense of ‘where opinions of certain people automatically get much more support instead of people thinking for themselves’) seems pretty accurate.
Insofar as this is a thing, it has a few bad effects: (i) means that more meme-y ideas get overrepresented relative to boring ideas; (ii) EA ideas don’t get stress-tested enough, or properly ‘voted’ on by crowds; (iii) there’s a problem of over-updating (“80k thinks everyone should earn to give!”; “80k thinks no-one should earn to give!” etc), especially on messages (like career advice) that are by their nature very person- and context-relative.
What mistake do you most commonly see EAs making?
Pretty hard to say, but the ‘hero worship’ comment (in the sense of ‘where opinions of certain people automatically get much more support instead of people thinking for themselves’) seems pretty accurate.
Insofar as this is a thing, it has a few bad effects: (i) means that more meme-y ideas get overrepresented relative to boring ideas; (ii) EA ideas don’t get stress-tested enough, or properly ‘voted’ on by crowds; (iii) there’s a problem of over-updating (“80k thinks everyone should earn to give!”; “80k thinks no-one should earn to give!” etc), especially on messages (like career advice) that are by their nature very person- and context-relative.