I think Thorstad has written very good stuff-for example on the way in which arguments for small reductions in extinction risk. More politically, his reporting on Scott Alexander and some other figures connected to the communityâs racism is a useful public service and he has every right to be pissed off {EDIT: sentence originally ended here: I meant to say he has every right to be pissed of at people ignore or disparaging the racism stuff]. I donât even necessarily entirely disagree with the meta-level critique being offered here.
But it was still striking to me that someone responded to the complaint that people making the institutional critique tend not to actually have much in the way of actionable information, and to take a âlet me explain why these people came to their obviously wrong viewsâ tone, by posting a bunch of stuff that was mostly like that.
If my tone is sharp itâs also because, like Richard I find the easy, unthinking combination of âthe problem with these people is that they donât care about changing the systemâ with âwhy are they doing meat alternatives and not vegan outreach aimed at a particular ethnic group that makes up <20% of the population or animal sheltersâ to be genuinely enragingly hypocritical and unserious. Thatâs actually somewhat separate from whether EAs are insufficiently sympathetic to anticapitalist or âsocial justiceâ-coded.
Incidentally, while I agree with Jason that itâs âMoskowitz and Tuna ought to be able to personally decide where nearly all the money in the movement is spentâ that is the weird claim that needs defending, my guess is that at least one practical effect of this has been to pull the movement left, not right, on several issues. Open Phil spent money on anti- mass incarceration stuff, and vaguely left-coded macroeconomic policy stuff at a time when the community was not particularly interested in either of those things. Indeed I remember Thorstad singling out critiques of the criminal justice stuff as examples of the community holding left-coded stuff to a higher standard of proof. More recently you must have seen the rationalist complaints on the forum about how Open Phil wonât fund anything âright-codedâ. None of thatâs to say there are no problems in principle with unaccountable billionares of course. After all, our other major billionaire donor was SBF! (Though his politics wasnât really the issue.)
I think Thorstad has written very good stuff-for example on the way in which arguments for small reductions in extinction risk. More politically, his reporting on Scott Alexander and some other figures connected to the communityâs racism is a useful public service and he has every right to be pissed off {EDIT: sentence originally ended here: I meant to say he has every right to be pissed of at people ignore or disparaging the racism stuff]. I donât even necessarily entirely disagree with the meta-level critique being offered here.
But it was still striking to me that someone responded to the complaint that people making the institutional critique tend not to actually have much in the way of actionable information, and to take a âlet me explain why these people came to their obviously wrong viewsâ tone, by posting a bunch of stuff that was mostly like that.
If my tone is sharp itâs also because, like Richard I find the easy, unthinking combination of âthe problem with these people is that they donât care about changing the systemâ with âwhy are they doing meat alternatives and not vegan outreach aimed at a particular ethnic group that makes up <20% of the population or animal sheltersâ to be genuinely enragingly hypocritical and unserious. Thatâs actually somewhat separate from whether EAs are insufficiently sympathetic to anticapitalist or âsocial justiceâ-coded.
Incidentally, while I agree with Jason that itâs âMoskowitz and Tuna ought to be able to personally decide where nearly all the money in the movement is spentâ that is the weird claim that needs defending, my guess is that at least one practical effect of this has been to pull the movement left, not right, on several issues. Open Phil spent money on anti- mass incarceration stuff, and vaguely left-coded macroeconomic policy stuff at a time when the community was not particularly interested in either of those things. Indeed I remember Thorstad singling out critiques of the criminal justice stuff as examples of the community holding left-coded stuff to a higher standard of proof. More recently you must have seen the rationalist complaints on the forum about how Open Phil wonât fund anything âright-codedâ. None of thatâs to say there are no problems in principle with unaccountable billionares of course. After all, our other major billionaire donor was SBF! (Though his politics wasnât really the issue.)