Great post! In addition to biases that increase antagonism, there are also biases that reduce antagonism. For example, the fact that most EAs see each other as friends can blind us to the fact that we may in fact be quite opposed on some important questions. Plausibly this is a good thing, because friendship is a form of cooperation that tends to work in the real world. But I think friendship does make us less likely to notice or worry about large value differences.
As an example, it’s plausible to me that the EA movement overall somewhat increases expected suffering in the far future, though there’s huge uncertainty about that. Because EAs tend to be friends with one another and admire each other’s intellectual contributions, most negative-utilitarian EAs don’t worry much about this fact and don’t seem to, e.g., try to avoid promoting EA to new people out of concern doing so may be net bad. It’s much easier to just get along with your friends and not rock the boat, especially when people with values opposed to yours are the “cool kids” in EA. Overall, I think this friendliness is good, and it would be worse if EAs with different values spent more time trying to fight each other. I myself don’t worry much about helping the EA movement, in part because it seems more cooperative to not worry about it too much. But I think it’s sensible to at least check every once in a while that you’re not massively harming your own values or being taken advantage of.
I think a lot of this comes down to one’s personality. If you’re extremely agreeable and conflict-averse, you probably shouldn’t update even more in that direction from Magnus’s article. Meanwhile, if you tend to get into fights a lot, you probably should lower your temperature, as Magnus suggests.
Great post! In addition to biases that increase antagonism, there are also biases that reduce antagonism. For example, the fact that most EAs see each other as friends can blind us to the fact that we may in fact be quite opposed on some important questions. Plausibly this is a good thing, because friendship is a form of cooperation that tends to work in the real world. But I think friendship does make us less likely to notice or worry about large value differences.
As an example, it’s plausible to me that the EA movement overall somewhat increases expected suffering in the far future, though there’s huge uncertainty about that. Because EAs tend to be friends with one another and admire each other’s intellectual contributions, most negative-utilitarian EAs don’t worry much about this fact and don’t seem to, e.g., try to avoid promoting EA to new people out of concern doing so may be net bad. It’s much easier to just get along with your friends and not rock the boat, especially when people with values opposed to yours are the “cool kids” in EA. Overall, I think this friendliness is good, and it would be worse if EAs with different values spent more time trying to fight each other. I myself don’t worry much about helping the EA movement, in part because it seems more cooperative to not worry about it too much. But I think it’s sensible to at least check every once in a while that you’re not massively harming your own values or being taken advantage of.
I think a lot of this comes down to one’s personality. If you’re extremely agreeable and conflict-averse, you probably shouldn’t update even more in that direction from Magnus’s article. Meanwhile, if you tend to get into fights a lot, you probably should lower your temperature, as Magnus suggests.