I think a lot of the EA community shares your attitude regarding exuberant people looking to advance different cause areas or interventions, which actually concerns me. I am somewhat encouraged by the disagreement with you regarding your comment that makes this disposition more explicit. Currently, I think that EA, in terms of extension of resources, has much more solicitude for thoughts within or adjacent to recognized areas. Furthermore, an ability to fluently convey ones ideas in EA terms or with an EA attitude is important.
Expanding on jackva re the Popperian insight, having individuals passionately explore new areas to exploit is critical to the EA project and I am a bit concerned that EA is often disinterested in exploring in directions where a proponent lacks some of the EAâs usual trappings and/âor lacks status signals. I would be inclined to be supportive of passion and exuberance in the presentation of ideas where this is natural to the proponent.
I suspect you are right that many of us (myself included) focus more than we ought to on how similar an idea sounds in relation to ideas we are already supporting. I suppose maybe a cruxy aspect of this is how much effort/âtime/âenergy we should spend considering claims that seem unreasonable at first glance?
If someone honestly told me that protecting elephants (as an example) should be EAâs main cause area, the two things that go through my heard first are that either that this person doesnât understand some pretty basic EA concepts[1], or that there is something really important to their argument that I am completely ignorant of.
But depending on how extreme a view it is, I also wonder about their motives. Which is more-or-less what led me to viewing the claim as anti-scouty. If John Doe has been working for elephant protecting (sorry to pick on elephants) for many years and now claims that elephant protection should be a core EA cause area, Iâm automatically asking if John is A) trying to get funding for elephant protection or B) trying to figure out what does the most good and to do that. While neither of those are villainous motives, the second strikes me as a bit more intellectually honest. But this is a fuzzy thing, and I donât have good data to point to.
I also suspect that I myself may have an over-sensitive âbullshit detectorâ (for lack of a more polite term), so that I end up getting false positives sometimes.
I agree that advocacy inspired by other-than-EA frameworks is a concern, I just think that the EA community is already quite inclined to express skepticism for new ideas and possible interventions. So, the worry that someone with high degrees of partiality for a particular cause manages to hijack EA resources is much weaker than the concern that potentially promising cases may be ignored because they have an unfortunate messenger.
the worry that someone with high degrees of partiality for a particular cause manages to hijack EA resources is much weaker than the concern that potentially promising cases may be ignored because they have an unfortunate messenger
I think youâve phrased that very well. As much as I may want to find the people who are âhijackingâ EA resources, the benefit of that is probably outweighed by how it disincentivized people to try new things. Thanks for commenting back and forth with me on this. Iâll try to jump the gun a bit less from now on when it comes to gut feeling evaluations of new causes.
I think a lot of the EA community shares your attitude regarding exuberant people looking to advance different cause areas or interventions, which actually concerns me. I am somewhat encouraged by the disagreement with you regarding your comment that makes this disposition more explicit. Currently, I think that EA, in terms of extension of resources, has much more solicitude for thoughts within or adjacent to recognized areas. Furthermore, an ability to fluently convey ones ideas in EA terms or with an EA attitude is important.
Expanding on jackva re the Popperian insight, having individuals passionately explore new areas to exploit is critical to the EA project and I am a bit concerned that EA is often disinterested in exploring in directions where a proponent lacks some of the EAâs usual trappings and/âor lacks status signals. I would be inclined to be supportive of passion and exuberance in the presentation of ideas where this is natural to the proponent.
I suspect you are right that many of us (myself included) focus more than we ought to on how similar an idea sounds in relation to ideas we are already supporting. I suppose maybe a cruxy aspect of this is how much effort/âtime/âenergy we should spend considering claims that seem unreasonable at first glance?
If someone honestly told me that protecting elephants (as an example) should be EAâs main cause area, the two things that go through my heard first are that either that this person doesnât understand some pretty basic EA concepts[1], or that there is something really important to their argument that I am completely ignorant of.
But depending on how extreme a view it is, I also wonder about their motives. Which is more-or-less what led me to viewing the claim as anti-scouty. If John Doe has been working for elephant protecting (sorry to pick on elephants) for many years and now claims that elephant protection should be a core EA cause area, Iâm automatically asking if John is A) trying to get funding for elephant protection or B) trying to figure out what does the most good and to do that. While neither of those are villainous motives, the second strikes me as a bit more intellectually honest. But this is a fuzzy thing, and I donât have good data to point to.
I also suspect that I myself may have an over-sensitive âbullshit detectorâ (for lack of a more polite term), so that I end up getting false positives sometimes.
Expected value, impartiality, ITN framework, scout mindset, and the like
I agree that advocacy inspired by other-than-EA frameworks is a concern, I just think that the EA community is already quite inclined to express skepticism for new ideas and possible interventions. So, the worry that someone with high degrees of partiality for a particular cause manages to hijack EA resources is much weaker than the concern that potentially promising cases may be ignored because they have an unfortunate messenger.
I think youâve phrased that very well. As much as I may want to find the people who are âhijackingâ EA resources, the benefit of that is probably outweighed by how it disincentivized people to try new things. Thanks for commenting back and forth with me on this. Iâll try to jump the gun a bit less from now on when it comes to gut feeling evaluations of new causes.
I can only aspire to be as good a scout as you, Joseph. Cheers