It’s important to listen to people outside the community in case people are self-selecting in or out based on incidental factors.
Yet anything which is framed as an attack or critique on EA is itself something that causes people to self-select in or out of the community. If someone says “EAs have statistics ideology” then people who don’t like statistics won’t join. It becomes an entrenched problem from founder effects. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What is helpful is to showcase people who actual work on things like ethnography. That’s something that makes EA more methodologically diverse.
But stuff like this is just as apt to make anyone who isn’t cool with utilitarianism / statistics / etc say they want to go elsewhere.
People who aren’t “cool with utilitarianism / statistics / etc” already largely self-select out of EA. I think my post articulates some of the reasons why this is the case.
I’ve met a great number of people in EA who disagree with utilitarianism and many people who aren’t particularly statistically minded. Of course it is not equal to the base rates of the population, but I don’t really see philosophically dissecting moderate differences as productive for the goal of increasing movement growth.
If you’re interested in ethnologies, sociology, case studies, etc—then consider how other movements have effectively overcome similar issues. For instance, the contemporary American progressive political movement is heavily driven by middle and upper class whites, and faces dissent from substantial portions of the racial minority and female identities. Yet it has been very effective in seizing institutions and public discourse surrounding race and gender issues. Have they accomplished this by critically interrogating themselves about their social appeal? No, they hid such doubts as they focused on hammering home their core message as strongly as possible.
If we want to assist movement growth, we need to take off our philosopher hats, and put on our marketer and politician hats. But you didn’t write this essay with the framing of “how to increase the uptake of EA among non-mathematical (etc) people” (which would have been very helpful); eschewing that in favor of normative philosophy was your implicit, subjective judgment of which questions are most worth asking and answering.
Yet anything which is framed as an attack or critique on EA is itself something that causes people to self-select in or out of the community. If someone says “EAs have statistics ideology” then people who don’t like statistics won’t join. It becomes an entrenched problem from founder effects. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What is helpful is to showcase people who actual work on things like ethnography. That’s something that makes EA more methodologically diverse.
But stuff like this is just as apt to make anyone who isn’t cool with utilitarianism / statistics / etc say they want to go elsewhere.
People who aren’t “cool with utilitarianism / statistics / etc” already largely self-select out of EA. I think my post articulates some of the reasons why this is the case.
I’ve met a great number of people in EA who disagree with utilitarianism and many people who aren’t particularly statistically minded. Of course it is not equal to the base rates of the population, but I don’t really see philosophically dissecting moderate differences as productive for the goal of increasing movement growth.
If you’re interested in ethnologies, sociology, case studies, etc—then consider how other movements have effectively overcome similar issues. For instance, the contemporary American progressive political movement is heavily driven by middle and upper class whites, and faces dissent from substantial portions of the racial minority and female identities. Yet it has been very effective in seizing institutions and public discourse surrounding race and gender issues. Have they accomplished this by critically interrogating themselves about their social appeal? No, they hid such doubts as they focused on hammering home their core message as strongly as possible.
If we want to assist movement growth, we need to take off our philosopher hats, and put on our marketer and politician hats. But you didn’t write this essay with the framing of “how to increase the uptake of EA among non-mathematical (etc) people” (which would have been very helpful); eschewing that in favor of normative philosophy was your implicit, subjective judgment of which questions are most worth asking and answering.