While I agree with the substance of this comment to a great extent, I want to note that EA also has a problem of being much more willing to tolerate abstract criticism than concrete criticism.
If I singled out a specific person in EA and accused them of significant conflicts of interest or of being too unqualified and inexperienced to work on whatever they are currently working on, the reaction in the forum would be much more negative than it was to this comment.
If you really believe the issues raised in the comment are important, take it seriously when people raise these concerns in concrete cases.
This comment exactly proves the point I’m talking about: it gets upvoted because it’s an abstract comment that doesn’t blame anyone in particular of anything. My comments that are critical of or adversarial towards specific people perform significantly worse, and plenty of my comments have fluctuated between having −10 karma to +10 or +20 karma.
I’m reasonably confident this is happening because people in EA hate conflict in general. I’m sorry to say that genuine criticism has to involve conflict of some kind. I understand people in EA are not used to this and prefer to shut their ears while accusing their counterparty of being “insufficienty truth-seeking” or “acting in bad faith” whenever they make use of adversarial discourse, and indeed this is exactly what happened to Guzey’s post from 2018.
I wish EA could move past these dysfunctional social norms, but I’m not getting my hopes up.
Go to any psychiatrist at the conference and criticize psychiatry in these terms—“Don’t you think our field is systemically racist and sexist and fails to understand that the true problem is Capitalism?” and they will enthusiastically agree and maybe even tell you stories about how their own experience proves that’s true and how they need to try to do better.
Is there any criticism that can touch these people at all?
Here’s my proposal: ask why they prescribe s-ketamine instead of racemic ketamine for treatment-resistant depression.
If you say this, psychiatrists will push back. If you say it in a confrontational way—maybe you hint that they’ve outsourced their thought processes to a handful of regulators and pharmaceutical companies even when this severely disadvantages patients, because thinking for themselves is hard and scary—they’ll get offended. The world is full of psychiatrists who will confess to systemic racism with a smile on their face, then get all huffy when you ask them about esketamine.
While I agree with the substance of this comment to a great extent, I want to note that EA also has a problem of being much more willing to tolerate abstract criticism than concrete criticism.
If I singled out a specific person in EA and accused them of significant conflicts of interest or of being too unqualified and inexperienced to work on whatever they are currently working on, the reaction in the forum would be much more negative than it was to this comment.
If you really believe the issues raised in the comment are important, take it seriously when people raise these concerns in concrete cases.
This comment exactly proves the point I’m talking about: it gets upvoted because it’s an abstract comment that doesn’t blame anyone in particular of anything. My comments that are critical of or adversarial towards specific people perform significantly worse, and plenty of my comments have fluctuated between having −10 karma to +10 or +20 karma.
I’m reasonably confident this is happening because people in EA hate conflict in general. I’m sorry to say that genuine criticism has to involve conflict of some kind. I understand people in EA are not used to this and prefer to shut their ears while accusing their counterparty of being “insufficienty truth-seeking” or “acting in bad faith” whenever they make use of adversarial discourse, and indeed this is exactly what happened to Guzey’s post from 2018.
I wish EA could move past these dysfunctional social norms, but I’m not getting my hopes up.
Relevant: