argument about anti-realism just reinforces my view that effective altruism needs to break apart into sub movements that clearly state their goals/ontologies. (I’m pro ea) but it increasingly doesn’t make sense to me to call this “effective altruism” and then be vaguely morally agnostic while mostly just being an applied utilitarian group. Even among the utilitarians there is tons of minutiae that actually significantly alters the value estimates of different things.
I really do think we could solve most of this stuff by just making EA an umbrella org for ea minded orgs that have specific goals and ontologies (democratic negative utilitarians, dictatorial anti realist dog lovers).
TBF I don’t think it matters that much for above if you are/aren’t anti realist rather it just reminds me that even here I have large worldview differences to a lot of people (which is totally fine) but I think it would be more clear to everyone if there were more de jure divisions.
yep I agree, it’s not that I actually want to split by antirealists vs not, rather the disagreement in that debate reminded me once again the plurality of different fundamental opinions on the forum. It’s the first order moral views that I think are natural delineators because I think there is a lot of arguing past each other on the forum when the real cruxes are far downstream (what is your utility function, moral weights of different species, etc)
I don’t want to limit my interactions to people who agree with me on certain details because I might be wrong about those details and if I’m wrong then I want to be convinced.
I still want to interact with them—I don’t want the crux of our arguements to be ethics/metaethics, I want it to be object level real world quantities for the most part.
argument about anti-realism just reinforces my view that effective altruism needs to break apart into sub movements that clearly state their goals/ontologies. (I’m pro ea) but it increasingly doesn’t make sense to me to call this “effective altruism” and then be vaguely morally agnostic while mostly just being an applied utilitarian group. Even among the utilitarians there is tons of minutiae that actually significantly alters the value estimates of different things.
I really do think we could solve most of this stuff by just making EA an umbrella org for ea minded orgs that have specific goals and ontologies (democratic negative utilitarians, dictatorial anti realist dog lovers).
TBF I don’t think it matters that much for above if you are/aren’t anti realist rather it just reminds me that even here I have large worldview differences to a lot of people (which is totally fine) but I think it would be more clear to everyone if there were more de jure divisions.
Meta-ethical views aren’t a great way to define practical communities because they needn’t affect your first-order moral views.
Ditto ontology most of the time.
yep I agree, it’s not that I actually want to split by antirealists vs not, rather the disagreement in that debate reminded me once again the plurality of different fundamental opinions on the forum. It’s the first order moral views that I think are natural delineators because I think there is a lot of arguing past each other on the forum when the real cruxes are far downstream (what is your utility function, moral weights of different species, etc)
I don’t want to limit my interactions to people who agree with me on certain details because I might be wrong about those details and if I’m wrong then I want to be convinced.
I still want to interact with them—I don’t want the crux of our arguements to be ethics/metaethics, I want it to be object level real world quantities for the most part.