it reflects a sentiment that effective altruism is not about one thing, about having the right politics, about saying the right things, about adopting groupthink, or any of the many other things we associate with ideology.
Can you expand a bit on this statement? I don’t see how you can say only other ideologies of being full of groupthink and having the right politics, even though most posts on the EA forum that don’t agree with the ideological tennets listed in the OP tends to get heavily downvoted. When I personally try to advocate against the idea that AI Safety is an effective cause, I experience quite some social disapproval for that within EA.
I think the points you’re complaining about affect EA just as much as any other ideology, but that they are hard to see when you are in the midst of it. Your own politics and groupthink don’t feel like politics and groupthink, they feel like that is the way the world is.
Let me try to illustrate this using an example. Plenty of people accuse any piece of popular media with a poc/female/lgbt protagonist as being overly political, seemingly thinking that white cishet male protagonists are the unique non-political choice. Whether you like this new trend or not, it is absurd to think that one position here is political and the other isn’t. But your own view always looks apolitical from the inside. For EA this phenomenon might be compounded by the fact that there is no singular opposing ideology.
I don’t see how you can say only other ideologies of being full of groupthink and having the right politics, even though most posts on the EA forum that don’t agree with the ideological tennets listed in the OP tends to get heavily downvoted.
This post of yours is at +28. The most upvoted comment is a request to see more stuff from you. If EA was an ideology, I would expect to see your post at a 0 or negative score.
There’s no shortage of subreddits where stuff that goes against community beliefs rarely scores above 0. I would guess most subreddits devoted to feminism & libertarianism have this property, for instance.
Sure, this is the ideology part that springs up and people end up engaging with. Thinking of EA as a question can help us hew to a less political, less assumption-laden approach, but this can’t stop people entirely from forming an ideology anyway and hewing to that instead, producing the types of behaviors you see (and that I’m similarly concerned about, as I’ve noticed and complained about similar voting patterns as well).
The point of my comment was mostly to save the aspiration and motivation for thinking of EA as a question rather than ideology, as I think if we stop thinking of it as a question it will become nothing more than an ideology and much of what I love about EA today would then be lost.
Can you expand a bit on this statement? I don’t see how you can say only other ideologies of being full of groupthink and having the right politics, even though most posts on the EA forum that don’t agree with the ideological tennets listed in the OP tends to get heavily downvoted. When I personally try to advocate against the idea that AI Safety is an effective cause, I experience quite some social disapproval for that within EA.
I think the points you’re complaining about affect EA just as much as any other ideology, but that they are hard to see when you are in the midst of it. Your own politics and groupthink don’t feel like politics and groupthink, they feel like that is the way the world is.
Let me try to illustrate this using an example. Plenty of people accuse any piece of popular media with a poc/female/lgbt protagonist as being overly political, seemingly thinking that white cishet male protagonists are the unique non-political choice. Whether you like this new trend or not, it is absurd to think that one position here is political and the other isn’t. But your own view always looks apolitical from the inside. For EA this phenomenon might be compounded by the fact that there is no singular opposing ideology.
This post of yours is at +28. The most upvoted comment is a request to see more stuff from you. If EA was an ideology, I would expect to see your post at a 0 or negative score.
There’s no shortage of subreddits where stuff that goes against community beliefs rarely scores above 0. I would guess most subreddits devoted to feminism & libertarianism have this property, for instance.
Sure, this is the ideology part that springs up and people end up engaging with. Thinking of EA as a question can help us hew to a less political, less assumption-laden approach, but this can’t stop people entirely from forming an ideology anyway and hewing to that instead, producing the types of behaviors you see (and that I’m similarly concerned about, as I’ve noticed and complained about similar voting patterns as well).
The point of my comment was mostly to save the aspiration and motivation for thinking of EA as a question rather than ideology, as I think if we stop thinking of it as a question it will become nothing more than an ideology and much of what I love about EA today would then be lost.