John—this is a refreshingly concise, visually funny, & insightful post.
I guess a key tradeoff here is that the ‘repulsive-but-impactful’ work might be great for finding neglected ideas, causes, and interventions, but might be quite toxic to EA ‘community safety’ and ‘movement-building’—insofar as repulsive ideas tend to make people within EA feel ‘unsafe’ or offended, and make people outside EA think that EA is weird and gross. Also, most ‘repulsive’ ideas are strongly partisan-coded at the political level, insofar as the Left and Right tend to think very different things are ‘repulsive’.
So, my hunch is that a lot of the low-hanging ‘repulsive-but-impactful’ work is avoided through self-censorship and self-deception and attempted political neutrality.
John—this is a refreshingly concise, visually funny, & insightful post.
I guess a key tradeoff here is that the ‘repulsive-but-impactful’ work might be great for finding neglected ideas, causes, and interventions, but might be quite toxic to EA ‘community safety’ and ‘movement-building’—insofar as repulsive ideas tend to make people within EA feel ‘unsafe’ or offended, and make people outside EA think that EA is weird and gross. Also, most ‘repulsive’ ideas are strongly partisan-coded at the political level, insofar as the Left and Right tend to think very different things are ‘repulsive’.
So, my hunch is that a lot of the low-hanging ‘repulsive-but-impactful’ work is avoided through self-censorship and self-deception and attempted political neutrality.