Thanks for these comments and for the discussion. I do genuinely appreciate discussing things with you—I appreciate the directness and willingness to engage. I also appreciate that given how direct we both are and how rude I sometimes am/seem on here, it can create tension, and that is mainly my fault here.
I think my cruxes are:
I suppose my broader point is that EA is <1% of social movements ‘trying to do social good’ in some broad sense. >98% of the remainder is focused on broadly ‘do what sounds good’ vibes, with a left wing valence, i.e. work on climate change, rich country education, homelessness, identity politics type stuff etc. Over the years, I have seen many proposals to make EA more like the remainder, or even just make it exactly the same as the remainder, in the name of diversity or pluralism.
This strikes me as an Orwellian use of those terms. I don’t think it would in any way create more pluralism or diversity to have EA shift in the direction of doing that kind of stuff. EA offers a distinctive perspective and I think it is valuable to have that in the marketplace of ideas to actually provide a challenge to what remains the overwhelmingly dominant form of thinking about ‘trying to do good’.
I also view the >98% as very epistemically closed; I don’t think they are a good advert for an epistemic promised land for EAs.
There is a powerful social force that I do not understand which means that every organisation that is not explicitly right wing eventually becomes left wing, and I have seen that dynamic at play repeatedly over the last 13 years, and I would view this as the latest example. EA is not focused on areas I would view as particularly left or right valenced at the moment.
I am also very opposed to efforts to make hiring decisions according to demographic considerations. I think the instrumental considerations enumerated for doing this are usually weak on closer examination, and I think the commonsense idea that people who do best on work-related hiring criteria will be best at their job is fundamentally correct and the reason it is fundamentally correct are obvious. The idea that implicit bias against demographic groups could be driving demographic skews in EA also strikes me as extremely implausible. It is violently at odds with my lived experience of being on hiring panels or knowing about them at other organisations, and there being a very strong explicit bias against the typical EA demographic. The idea that implicit bias could be strong enough to overcome this is not credible.
I am aware that I am setting my precious social capital alight in making these arguments (which is, I think, a lesson in itself)
Thanks for these comments and for the discussion. I do genuinely appreciate discussing things with you—I appreciate the directness and willingness to engage. I also appreciate that given how direct we both are and how rude I sometimes am/seem on here, it can create tension, and that is mainly my fault here.
I think my cruxes are:
I suppose my broader point is that EA is <1% of social movements ‘trying to do social good’ in some broad sense. >98% of the remainder is focused on broadly ‘do what sounds good’ vibes, with a left wing valence, i.e. work on climate change, rich country education, homelessness, identity politics type stuff etc. Over the years, I have seen many proposals to make EA more like the remainder, or even just make it exactly the same as the remainder, in the name of diversity or pluralism.
This strikes me as an Orwellian use of those terms. I don’t think it would in any way create more pluralism or diversity to have EA shift in the direction of doing that kind of stuff. EA offers a distinctive perspective and I think it is valuable to have that in the marketplace of ideas to actually provide a challenge to what remains the overwhelmingly dominant form of thinking about ‘trying to do good’.
I also view the >98% as very epistemically closed; I don’t think they are a good advert for an epistemic promised land for EAs.
There is a powerful social force that I do not understand which means that every organisation that is not explicitly right wing eventually becomes left wing, and I have seen that dynamic at play repeatedly over the last 13 years, and I would view this as the latest example. EA is not focused on areas I would view as particularly left or right valenced at the moment.
I am also very opposed to efforts to make hiring decisions according to demographic considerations. I think the instrumental considerations enumerated for doing this are usually weak on closer examination, and I think the commonsense idea that people who do best on work-related hiring criteria will be best at their job is fundamentally correct and the reason it is fundamentally correct are obvious. The idea that implicit bias against demographic groups could be driving demographic skews in EA also strikes me as extremely implausible. It is violently at odds with my lived experience of being on hiring panels or knowing about them at other organisations, and there being a very strong explicit bias against the typical EA demographic. The idea that implicit bias could be strong enough to overcome this is not credible.
I am aware that I am setting my precious social capital alight in making these arguments (which is, I think, a lesson in itself)