Trying to write a response quickly before work starts at the end of long week (working on dem races, being EA-ish), so open to being too hasty or needing to flesh out these ideas. Two immediate reactions:
I am concerned about the tone and timing, and so optics of this post. We’re in a moment where SBF seems to quite plausibly have fraudulently financially ruined people to fund EA ventures, including political ones- not certain of course, but that is a current (potentially most reasonable!) narrative. We’re also worried about a potential backlash, where EAs are perceived as much too willing to believe that “ends justify the means” and we will have more critical eyes on the community. Given this, I think your tone should much more clearly reflect the somberness here, clearly reject what SBF may have done unethically, and be doing more to do everything it can to anticipate how this could be taken (potentially extremely!) the wrong way. To be clear, not making any claims about what your underlying stance is here and I’m guessing you’re just trying to be action oriented in a tough moment , just thinking an edit to clarify that might be prudent.
More broadly, I think any “politics coming out of EA” group you start needs to pretty seriously consider how you will manage such genuine issues and optics to be at all effective. Happy to talk more about this, but the “let’s all coordinate in private about our longterm political plans where our special interest money has declined” tone here feels incredibly concerning to intuitions as a dem political organizer.
A last quick clarifying thought- my claim isn’t just “external people looking might be concerned”, it’s “this is not the tone we should bring to doing politics as a community”.
This comment feels important, like something I’ve been considering trying to spin into a full post. Finding a frame has been hard, because it feels like I’m trying to translate what’s (unfortunately) a distinctively non-EA culture norm into reasoning that EAs will take more seriously.
One thought that I do want to share though is that I don’t think seeing this as something that needs to be weighed against good epistemics feels quite right. I think our prizing good epistemics should mean being able to reason clearly and adjust our reactions to tone/emotional tenor from people who (very understandably!) are speaking from a place of trauma and deep hurt.
The best frame I have so far for a post is reminding people about Julia Galef’s straw-Vulcan argument and arguing what it implies for conversations on (understandably) incredibly emotionally heavy topics, and in tough times more generally. Roughly rehashing the argument because I can’t find a good link on it: Spock frequently makes assumptions that humans will be perfectly rational creatures under all circumstances, and when this leads him astray essentially shrugs and responds “it’s not my fault that I did not predict their actions correctly, they were being irrational!”. Galef’s point of course, is that this is horrible rationality: the failure to reason about how emotions might effect people and adjust accordingly means your epistemics are severely impoverished.
Setting aside the Klingon style rationality argument, there also feels like there should be a argument along the lines of how (to me, incredibly!) obvious it should be that tone like this demands sympathy and willingness to take on the burden of being accommodating from people serious about thinking of themselves as invested in altruism as a value. I’m still figuring out how to express this crisply (and to be clear, without bitterness) so that it will resonate.
If you have thoughts on what the best frame would be here, would love to hear any thoughts you have or discuss more.
Edited to take out something unkind. Trying to practice what I preach here.