The number of upvotes here seems like a self-parody of EA’s criticism fetish. In what universe do critical sociologists or whomever steer your map closer to the territory, or keep you focused on actually helping people? I challenge anyone who’d downvote this comment to come up with a way to make my priors around who generates heat and who generates light resolvable by bet.
Appreciate the pushback, but also think the upvotes are likely not representative of EAs reflexively thinking every criticism is great no matter how useless/uncharitable/etc. I think just from skimming this post, it was reasonable for me to have the reaction “Nice, some more people interested in x-risks/dystopias, and studying it from a critical sociological perspective, whatever that means. [Looking into it for 2 minutes without spotting anything really interesting] Thanks for sharing.”, and that that’s more representative of the upvotes.
That said, I also am now and then surprised by the amount of upvotes some EA criticism content here gets despite what I perceive to be relatively low usefulness. I’m probably convinced though that this collective behavior is optimal given that criticism is hard and feels socially abrasive and adversarial, and to encourage it coming forward we should bias towards upvoting even just for approving the energy somebody put into the general process of improving EA. EAs as a community should just also realize that a critical post having 400+ upvotes doesn’t necessarily reflect agreement or quality. (I’m also a fan of the idea to introduce agreement votes for posts themselves.)
The number of upvotes here seems like a self-parody of EA’s criticism fetish. In what universe do critical sociologists or whomever steer your map closer to the territory, or keep you focused on actually helping people? I challenge anyone who’d downvote this comment to come up with a way to make my priors around who generates heat and who generates light resolvable by bet.
Appreciate the pushback, but also think the upvotes are likely not representative of EAs reflexively thinking every criticism is great no matter how useless/uncharitable/etc. I think just from skimming this post, it was reasonable for me to have the reaction “Nice, some more people interested in x-risks/dystopias, and studying it from a critical sociological perspective, whatever that means. [Looking into it for 2 minutes without spotting anything really interesting] Thanks for sharing.”, and that that’s more representative of the upvotes.
E.g. one example for EAs responding in a calibrated way to criticism is imo this recent thread about a book that’s very critical of EA and that seems to receive appropriate pushback for its flaws: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YFGkyDjKvsr9tHzkS/book-post-the-good-it-promises-the-harm-it-does-critical
That said, I also am now and then surprised by the amount of upvotes some EA criticism content here gets despite what I perceive to be relatively low usefulness. I’m probably convinced though that this collective behavior is optimal given that criticism is hard and feels socially abrasive and adversarial, and to encourage it coming forward we should bias towards upvoting even just for approving the energy somebody put into the general process of improving EA. EAs as a community should just also realize that a critical post having 400+ upvotes doesn’t necessarily reflect agreement or quality. (I’m also a fan of the idea to introduce agreement votes for posts themselves.)