Strong upvote. I remember when someone I knew was being dragged on the internet, and I found some of the things they’d said really upsetting to me and my moral sensibilities, and I found it really helpful (without it necessarily changing my mind on how bad those things were!) for a friend to help me reflect on how much I had or hadn’t yet priced in the selection filter of “find the worst things anyone has ever written or that they’ve ever done”. (Sometimes it’s right to judge people on the worst thing they’ve ever done, but I suspect not often).
Similarly, in the last 8 months of working at an EA org / in the EA community, it’s been really helpful to be able to understand what’s unusual about the orgs and community, and what’s incredibly standard boilerplate (which might be good or bad—lots of normal ways of doing things are stupid) - talking to people from journalism, politics, etc has been great for contextualization.
For some reason, this post about criticisms of the Gates foundation has been really sticking with me.
Strong upvote. I remember when someone I knew was being dragged on the internet, and I found some of the things they’d said really upsetting to me and my moral sensibilities, and I found it really helpful (without it necessarily changing my mind on how bad those things were!) for a friend to help me reflect on how much I had or hadn’t yet priced in the selection filter of “find the worst things anyone has ever written or that they’ve ever done”. (Sometimes it’s right to judge people on the worst thing they’ve ever done, but I suspect not often).
Similarly, in the last 8 months of working at an EA org / in the EA community, it’s been really helpful to be able to understand what’s unusual about the orgs and community, and what’s incredibly standard boilerplate (which might be good or bad—lots of normal ways of doing things are stupid) - talking to people from journalism, politics, etc has been great for contextualization.
For some reason, this post about criticisms of the Gates foundation has been really sticking with me.
Tiny note—I think that link redirects from youtube to here: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/not-many-speak-their-mind-to-gates-foundation/. I suggest just replacing it.
Oops, thanks!