LW is a rape cult
If you wouldn’t bail out a bank then would you bail out EA?
Fluttershy
Karma: 182
As a guy who used to be female (I was AMAB), Kelly’s post rings true to me. Fully endorsed. It would be particularly interesting to hear about AFAB transmen’s experiences with respect to this.
The change in how you’re treated is much more noticeable when making progress in the direction of becoming more guyish; not sure if this is because this change tends to happen quickly (testosterone is powerful + quick) or because of the offsetting stigma re: people making transition progress towards being female. I could also see this stigma making up some of the positive effect that AMAB people feel on detransitioning, though it’s mostly possible to disentangle the effect of the misogyny from that of the transmisogyny if you have good social sense.
In anticipation of being harassed (based on past experience with this community), I’ll leave it at that. I’m not going to respond to any BS or bother with politics.
I like the article. The first table makes it viscerally available that the VOI for better estimating eta (or for finding a better model for utility as a function of consumption on the margins) could be high, if you’re relatively more interested in global poverty-focused EA than in other causes within EA.
I’m not aware of any better figures you could have used for GWWC/TLYCS/REG’s leverage, and I’m not sure if many of us take estimates of leverage for meta-organizations literally, even relative to how literally we take normal EA cost-effectiveness estimates. I agree that combining the leverage estimates with the consumption multipliers in order to estimate impact would be the correct thing to do if you managed to get accurate estimates of both that weren’t dependent or interdependent on each other, though!
To the extent that GWWC/TLYCS/REG count donations that they have received themselves as having a certain leverage because of the donations “caused”/influenced by GWWC/TLYCS/REG, everyone who has had their donations “caused”/influenced by GWWC/TLYCS/REG (at least according to GWWC/TLYCS/REG) should count their donations as having proportionally less than 1.0x leverage. (Alternatively, GWWC/TLYCS/REG could claim to have less leverage, and thereby allow those who they claim to have influenced to claim that they’ve caused a greater fraction of the impact that their own donations have caused). This prevents double-counting of impact, and gives us a more accurate estimate of how much good donations to various organizations cause, which in turn lets us figure out how we can do the most good.
I strongly agree with both of the comments you’ve written in this thread so far, but the last paragraph here seems especially important. Regarding this bit, though:
I might be a bit of an outlier
This factor may push in the opposite way than you’d think, given the context. Specifically, if people who might have gotten into EA in the past ended up avoiding it because they were exposed to this example, then you’d expect the example to be more popular than it would be if everyone who once stood a reasonable chance of becoming an EA (or even a hardcore EA) had stuck around to give you their opinion on whether you should use that example. So, keep doing what you’re doing! I like your approach.
The objection about it being ableist to promote funding for trachoma surgeries rather than guide dogs doesn’t have to do with how many QALYs we’d save from providing someone with a guide dog or a trachoma surgery. Roughly, this objection is about how much respect we’re showing to disabled people. I’m not sure how many of the people who have said that this example is ableist are utilitarians, but we can actually make a good case that using the example causes negative consequences for the reason that it’s ableist. (It’s also possible that using the example as it’s typically used causes negative consequences by affecting how intellectually rigorous EA is, but that’s another topic). A few different points that might be used to support this argument would be:
On average, people get a lot of value out of having self-esteem; often, having more self-esteem on the margins enables them to do value-producing things they wouldn’t have done otherwise (flow-through effects!). Sometimes, it just makes them a bit happier (probably a much smaller effect in utilitarian terms).
Roughly, raising or lowering the group-wise esteem of a group has an effect on the self-esteem of some of the group’s members.
Keeping from lowering a group’s esteem isn’t very costly, if doing so involves nothing more than using a different tone. (There are of course situations where making a certain claim will raise or lower a group’s esteem a large amount if a certain tone is used, and a lesser amount if a different tone is used, even though the group’s esteem is nevertheless changed in the same direction in either case).
Decreases in a group’s ability to do value-producing things or be happy because their esteem has been lowered by someone acting in an ablelist manner, do not cause others to experience a similarly sized boost to their ability to be happy or do value-producing things. (I.e. the truth value of claims that “status games are zero sum” has little effect on the extent to which it’s true that decreasing a group’s esteem by e.g. ableist remarks has negative utilitarian consequences).
I’ve generally found it hard to make this sort of observation publicly in EA-inhabited spaces, since I typically get interpreted as primarily trying to say something political, rather than primarily trying to point out that certain actions have certain consequences. It’s legitimately hard to figure out what the ideal utilitarian combination of tone and example would be for this case, but it’s possible to iterate towards better combinations of the two as you have time to try different things according to your own best judgement, or just ask a critic what the most hurtful parts of an example are.
It just seems like the simplest explanation of your observed data is ‘the community at large likes the funds, and my personal geographical locus of friends is weird’.
And without meaning to pick on you in particular (because I think this mistake is super-common), in general I want to push strongly towards people recognising that EA consists of a large number of almost-disjoint filter bubbles that often barely talk to each other and in some extreme cases have next-to-nothing in common. Unless you’re very different to me, we are both selecting the people we speak to in person such that they will tend to think much like us, and like each other; we live inside one of the many bubbles. So the fact that everyone I’ve spoken to in person about the EA funds thinks they’re a good idea is particularly weak evidence that the community thinks they are good, and so is your opposing observation.
I’d say this is correct. The EA Forum itself has such a selection effect, though it’s weaker than the ones either of our friend groups have. One idea would be to do a survey, as Peter suggests, though this makes me feel slightly uneasy given that a survey may weight the opinions of people who have considered the problem less or feel less strongly about it equally with the opinions of others. A relevant factor here is that it sometimes takes people a fair bit of reading or reflection to develop a sense for why integrity is particularly valuable from a consequentialist’s perspective, and then link this up to why EA Funds continuing has the consequence of showing people that projects others use relatively lower-integrity methods to report on and market can succeed despite (or even because?) of this.
I’d also agree that, at the time of Will’s post, it would have been incorrect to say:
The community is probably net-neutral to net-negative on the EA funds, but Will’s post introducing them is the 4th most upvoted post of all time
But what we likely care about is whether or not the community is positive on EA Funds at the moment, which may or may not be different from whether it was positive on EA Funds in the past.
My view is further that the community’s response to this sort of thing is partly a function of how debates on honesty and integrity have been resolved in the past; if lack of integrity in EA has been an issue in the past, the sort of people who care about integrity are less likely to stick around in EA, such that the remaining population of EAs will have fewer people who care about integrity, which itself affects how the average EA feels about future incidents relating to integrity (such as this one), and so on. So, on some level I’m positing that the public response to EA Funds would be more negative if we hadn’t filtered certain people out of EA by having an integrity problem in the first place.
A more detailed discussion of the considerations for and against concluding that EA Funds had been well received would have been helpful if the added detail was spent examining people’s concerns re: conflicts of interest, and centralization of power, i.e. concerns which were commonly expressed but not resolved.
I’m concerned with the framing that you updated towards it being correct for EA Funds to persist past the three month trial period. If there was support to start out with and you mostly didn’t gather more support later on relative to what one would expect, then your prior on whether EA Funds is well received should be stronger but you shouldn’t update in favor of it being well received based on more recent data. This may sound like a nitpick, but it is actually a crucially important consideration if you’ve framed things as if you’ll continue on with the project only if you update in the direction of having more public support than before.
I also dislike that you emphasize that some people “expressed confusion at your endorsement of EA Funds”. Some people may have felt that way, but your choice of wording both downplays the seriousness of some people’s disagreements with EA Funds, while also implying that critics are in need of figuring something out that others have already settled (which itself socially implies they’re less competent than others who aren’t confused). This is a part of what some of us mean when we talk about a tax on criticism in EA.
In one view, the concept post had 43 upvotes, the launch post had 28, and this post currently has 14. I don’t think this is problematic in itself, since this could just be an indication of hype dying down over time, rather than of support being retracted.
Part of what I’m tracking when I say that the EA community isn’t supportive of EA Funds is that I’ve spoken to several people in person who have said as much—I think I covered all of the reasons they brought up in my post, but one recurring theme throughout those conversations was that writing up criticism of EA was tiring and unrewarding, and that they often didn’t have the energy to do so (though one offered to proofread anything I wrote in that vein). So, a large part of my reason for feeling that there isn’t a great deal of community support for EA funds has to do with the ways in which I’d expect the data on how much support there actually is to be filtered. For example:
the method in which Kerry presented his survey data made it look like there was more support than there was
the fact that Kerry presented the data in this way suggests it’s relatively more likely that Kerry will do so again in the future if given the chance
social desirability bias should also make it look like there’s more support than there is
the fact that it’s socially encouraged to praise projects on the EA Forum and that criticism is judged more harshly than praise should make it look like there’s more support than there is. Contrast this norm with the one at LW, and notice how it affected how long it took us to get rid of Gleb.
we have a social norm of wording criticism in a very mild manner, which might make it seem like critics are less serious than they are.
It also doesn’t help that most of the core objections people have brought up have been acknowledged but not addressed. But really, given all of those filters on data relating to how well-supported the EA Funds are, and the fact that the survey data doesn’t show anything useful either way, I’m not comfortable with accepting the claim that EA Funds has been particularly well-received.
I appreciate that the post has been improved a couple times since the criticisms below were written.
A few of you were diligent enough to beat me to saying much of this, but:
Where we’ve received criticism it has mostly been around how we can improve the website and our communication about EA Funds as opposed to criticism about the core concept.
This seems false, based on these replies. The author of this post replied to the majority of those comments, which means he’s aware that many people have in fact raised concerns about things other than communication and EA Funds’ website. To his credit, someone added a paragraph acknowledging that these concerns had been raised elsewhere, in the pages for the EA community fund and the animal welfare fund. Unfortunately, though, these concerns were never mentioned in this post. There are a number of people who would like to hear about any progress that’s been made since the discussion which happened on this thread regarding the problems of 1) how to address conflicts of interest given how many of the fund managers are tied into e.g. OPP, and 2) how centralizing funding allocation (rather than making people who aren’t OPP staff into Fund Managers) narrows the amount of new information about what effective opportunities exist that the EA Funds’ Fund Managers encounter.
I’ve spoken with a couple EAs in person who have mentioned that making the claim that “EA Funds are likely to be at least as good as OPP’s last dollar” is harmful. In this post, it’s certainly worded in a way that implies very strong belief, which, given how popular consequentialism is around here, would be likely to make certain sorts of people feel bad for not donating to EA Funds instead of whatever else they might donate to counterfactually. This is the same sort of effect people get from looking at this sort of advertising, but more subtle, since it’s less obvious on a gut level that this slogan half-implies that the reader is morally bad for not donating. Using this slogan could be net negative even without considering that it might make EAs feel bad about themselves, if, say, individual EAs had information about giving opportunities that were more effective than EA Funds, but donated to EA Funds anyways out of a sense of pressure caused by the “at least as good as OPP” slogan.
More immediately, I have negative feelings about how this post used the Net Promoter Score to evaluate the reception of EA Funds. First, it mentions that EA Funds “received an NPS of +56 (which is generally considered excellent according to the NPS Wikipedia page).” But the first sentence of the Wikipedia page for NPS, which I’m sure the author read at least the first line of given that he linked to it, states that NPS is “a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships” (emphasis mine). However, EA Funds isn’t a firm. My view is that implicitly assuming that, as a nonprofit (or something socially equivalent), your score on a metric intended to judge how satisfied a for-profit company’s customers are can be compared side by side with the scores received by for-profit firms (and then neglecting to mention that you’ve made this assumption) belies a lack of intent to honestly inform EAs.
This post has other problems, too; it uses the NPS scoring system to analyze donors and other’s responses to the question:
How likely is it that your donation to EA Funds will do more good in expectation than where you would have donated otherwise?
The NPS scoring system was never intended to be used to evaluate responses to this question, so perhaps that makes it insignificant that an NPS score of 0 for this question just misses the mark of being “felt to be good” in industry. Worse, the post mentions that this result
could merely represent healthy skepticism of a new project or it could indicate that donors are enthusiastic about features other than the impact of donations to EA Funds.
It seems to me that including only positive (or strongly positive-sounding) interpretations of this result is incorrect and misleadingly optimistic. I’d agree that it’s a good idea to not “take NPS too seriously”, though in this case, I wouldn’t say that the benefit that came from using NPS in the first place outweighed the cost that was incurred by the resultant incorrect suggestion that we should feel there was a respectable amount of quantitative support for the conclusions drawn in this post.
I’m disappointed that I was able to point out so many things I wish the author had done better in this document. If there had only been a couple errors, it would have been plausibly deniable that anything fishy was going on here. But with as many errors as I’ve pointed out, which all point in the direction of making EA Funds look better than it is, things don’t look good. Things don’t look good regarding how well this project has been received, but that’s not the larger problem here. The larger problem is that things don’t look good because this post decreases how much I am willing to trust communications made on the behalf of EA funds in particular, and communications made by CEA staff more generally.
Writing this made me cry, a little. It’s late, and I should have gone to bed hours ago, but instead, here I am being filled with sad determination and horror that it feels like I can’t trust anyone I haven’t personally vetted to communicate honestly with me. In Effective Altruism, honesty used to mean something, consequentialism used to come with integrity, and we used to be able to work together to do the most good we could.
Some days, I like to quietly smile to myself and wonder if we might be able to take that back.
This is a problem, both for the reasons you give:
Why do I think intuition jousting is bad? Because it doesn’t achieve anything, it erodes community relations and it makes people much less inclined to share their views, which in turn reduces the quality of future discussions and the collective pursuit of knowledge. And frankly, it’s rude to do and unpleasant to receive.
and through this mechanism, which you correctly point out:
The implication is nearly always that the target of the joust has the ‘wrong’ intuitions.
The above two considerations combine extremely poorly with the following:
I’ve noticed IJing happens much more among effective altruists than academic philosophers.
Another consequence of this tendency, when it emerges, is that communicating a felt sense of something is much harder to do, and less rewarding to do, when there’s some level of social expectation that arguments from intuition will be attacked. Note that the felt senses of experts often do contain information that’s not otherwise available when said experts work in fields with short feedback loops. (This is more broadly true: norms of rudeness, verbal domination, using microaggressions, and nitpicking impede communication more generally, and your more specific concept of IJ does occur disproportionately often in EA).
Note also that development of a social expectation whereby people believe on a gut level that they’ll receive about as much criticism, verbal aggression, and so on regardless of how correct or useful their statements are may be especially harmful (See especially the second paragraph of p.2).
I’d like to respond to your description of what some people’s worries about your previous proposal were, and highlight how some of those worries could be addressed, hopefully without reducing how helpfully ambitious your initial proposal was. Here goes:
the risk of losing flexibility by enforcing what is an “EA view” or not
It seems to me like the primary goal of the panel in the original proposal was to address instances of people lowering the standard of trustworthiness within EA and imposing unreasonable costs (including unreasonable time costs) on individual EAs. I suspect that enumerating what sorts of things “count” as EA endeavors isn’t a strictly necessary prerequisite for forming such a panel.
I can see why some people held this concern, partly because “defining what does and doesn’t count as an EA endeavor” clusters in thing-space with “keeping an eye out for people acting in untrustworthy and non-cooperative ways towards EAs”, but these two things don’t have to go hand in hand.
the risk of consolidating too much influence over EA in any one organisation or panel
Fair enough. As with the last point, the panel would likely consolidate less unwanted influence over EA if it focused solely on calling out sufficiently dishonestly harmful behavior by anyone who self-identified as an EA, and made no claims as to whether any individuals or organizations “counted” as EAs.
the risk of it being impossible to get agreement, leading to an increase in politicisation and squabbling
This seems like a concern that’s good, in that a bit harder for me to address satisfactorily. Hopefully, though, there would some clear-cut cases the panel could choose to consider, too; the case of Intentional Insights’ poor behavior was eventually quite clear, for one. I would guess that the less clear cases would tend to be the ones where a clear resolution would be less impactful.
In response, we toned back the ambitions of the proposed ideas.
I’d have likely done the same. But that’s the wrong thing to do.
In this case, the counterfactual to having some sort of panel to call out behavior which causes unreasonable amounts of harm to EAs is relying on the initiative of individuals to call out such behavior. This is not a sustainable solution. Your summary of your previous post puts it well:
There’s very little to deal with people representing EA in ways that seem to be harmful; this means that the only response is community action, which is slow, unpleasant for all involved, and risks unfairness through lack of good process.
Community action is all that we had before the Intentional Insights fiasco, and community action is all that we’re back to having now.
I didn’t get to watch the formation of the panel you discuss, but it seems like a nontrivial amount of momentum, which was riled up by the harm Intentional Insights caused EA, went into its creation. To the extent that that momentum is no longer available because some of it was channeled into the creation of this panel, we’ve lost a chance at building a tool to protect ourselves against agents and organizations who would impose costs on, and harm EAs and EA overall. Pending further developments, I have lowered my opinion of everyone directly involved accordingly.
Noted! I can understand that it’s easy to feel like you’re overstepping your bounds when trying to speak for others. Personally, I’d have been happy for you all to take a more central leadership role, and would have wanted you all to feel comfortable if you had decided to do so.
My view is that we still don’t have reliable mechanisms to deal with the sorts of problems mentioned (i.e. the Intentional Insights fiasco), so it’s valuable when people call out problems as they have the ability to. It would be better if the EA community had ways of calling out such problems by means other than requiring individuals to take on heroic responsibility, though!
This having been said, I think it’s worth explicitly thanking the people who helped expose Intentional Insight’s deceitful practices—Jeff Kaufman, for his original post on the topic, and Jeff Kaufman, Gregory Lewis, Oliver Habryka, Carl Shulman, Claire Zabel, and others who have not been mentioned or who contributed anonymously, for writing this detailed document.
I believe you when you say that you don’t benefit much from feedback from people not already deeply engaged with your work.
There’s something really noticeable to me about the manner in which you’ve publicly engaged with the EA community through writing for the past while. You mention that you put lots of care into your writing, and what’s most noticeable about this for me is that I can’t find anything that you’ve written here that anyone interested in engaging with you might feel threatened or put down by. This might sound like faint praise, but it really isn’t meant to be; I find that writing in such a way is actually somewhat resource intensive in terms of both time, and something roughly like mental energy.
(I find it’s generally easier to develop a felt sense for when someone else is paying sufficient attention to conversational nuances regarding civility than it is to point out specific examples, but your discussion of how you feel about receiving criticism is a good example of this sort of civility).
As you and James mention, public writeups can be valuable to readers, and I think this is true to a strong extent.
I’d also say that, just as importantly, writing this kind of well thought out post which uses healthy and civil conversational norms creates value from a leadership/coordination point of view. Leadership in terms of teaching skills and knowledge is important too, but I guess I’m used to thinking of those as separate from leadership in terms of exemplifying civility and openness to sharing information. If it were more common for people and foundations to write frequently and openly, and communicate with empathy towards their audiences when they did, I think the world would be the better for it. You and other senior Open Phil and GiveWell staff are very much respected in our community, and I think it’s wonderful when people are happy to set a positive example for others.
(Apologies if I’ve conflated civility with openness to sharing information; these behaviors feel quite similar to me on a gut level—possibly because they both take some effort to do, but also nudge social norms in the right direction while helping the audience.).
When you speculate too much on complicated movement dynamics, it’s easy to overlook things like this via motivated reasoning.
Thanks for affirming the first point. But lurkers on a forum thread don’t feel respected or disrespected. They just observe and judge. And you want them to respect us, first and foremost.
I appreciate that you thanked Telofy; that was respectful of you. I’ve said a lot about how using kind communication norms is both agreeable and useful in general, but the same principles apply to our conversation.
I notice that, in the first passage I’ve quoted, it’s socially (but not logically) implied that Telofy has “speculated”, “overlooked things”, and used “motivated reasoning”. The second passage I’ve quoted states that certain people who “don’t feel respected or disrespected” should “respect us, first and foremost”, which socially (but not logically) implies that they are both less capable of having feelings in reaction to being (dis)respected, and less deserving of respect, than we are.
These examples are part of a trend in your writing.
Cut it out.
I agree with your last paragraph, as written. But this conversation is about kindness, and trusting people to be competent altruists, and epistemic humility. That’s because acting indifferent to whether or not people who care about similar things as we do waste time figuring things out is cold in a way that disproportionately drives away certain types of skilled people who’d otherwise feel welcome in EA.
But this is about optimal marketing and movement growth, a very empirical question. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with personal experiences
I’m happy to discuss optimal marketing and movement growth strategies, but I don’t think the question of how to optimally grow EA is best answered as an empirical question at all. I’m generally highly supportive of trying to quantify and optimize things, but in this case, treating movement growth as something suited to empirical analysis may be harmful on net, because the underlying factors actually responsible for the way & extent to which movement growth maps to eventual impact are impossible to meaningfully track. Intersectionality comes into the picture when, due to their experiences, people from certain backgrounds are much, much likelier to be able to easily grasp how these underlying factors impact the way in which not all movement growth is equal.
The obvious-to-me way in which this could be true is if traditionally privileged people (especially first-worlders with testosterone-dominated bodies) either don’t understand or don’t appreciate that unhealthy conversation norms subtly but surely drive away valuable people. I’d expect the effect of unhealthy conversation norms to be mostly unnoticeable; for one, AB-testing EA’s overall conversation norms isn’t possible. If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t use particularly friendly conversation norms in the first place, you’re likely to underestimate how important friendly conversation norms are to the well-being of others, and overestimate the willingness of others to consider themselves a part of a movement with poor conversation norms.
“Conversation norms” might seem like a dangerously broad term, but I think it’s pointing at exactly the right thing. When people speak as if dishonesty is permissible, as if kindness is optional, or as if dominating others is ok, this makes EA’s conversation norms worse. There’s no reason to think that a decrease in quality of EA’s conversation norms would show up in quantitative metrics like number of new pledges per month. But when EA’s conversation norms become less healthy, key people are pushed away, or don’t engage with us in the first place, and this destroys utility we’d have otherwise produced.
It may be worse than this, even: if counterfactual EAs who care a lot about having healthy conversational norms are a somewhat homogeneous group of people with skill sets that are distinct from our own, this could cause us to disproportionately lack certain classes of talented people in EA.
There’s nothing necessarily intersectional/background-based about that
People have different experiences, which can inform their ability to accurately predict how effective various interventions are. Some people have better information on some domains than others.
One utilitarian steelman of this position that’s pertinent to the question of the value of kindness and respect of other’s time would be that:
respecting people’s intellectual autonomy and being generally kind tends to bring more skilled people to EA
attracting more skilled EAs is worth it in utilitarian terms
there are only some people who have had experiences that would point them to this correct conclusion
Sure, they’re valid perspectives. They’re also untenable, and we don’t agree with them
The kind of ‘kindness’ being discussed here [is]… another utilitarian-ish approach, equally impersonal as donating to charity, just much less effective.
I feel that both of these statements are untrue of myself, and I have some sort of dispreference for speech about how “we” in EA believe one thing or another.
We’re trying to make the world a better place as effectively as possible. I don’t think that ensuring convenience for privileged Western people who are wandering through social movements is important.
I’m certainly a privileged Western person, and I’m aware that that affords me many comforts and advantages that others don’t have! I also think that many people from intersectional perspectives within the scope of “privileged Western person” other than your own may place more or less value on respecting people’s efforts, time, and autonomy than you do, and that their perspectives are valid too.
(As a more general note, and not something I want to address to kbog in particular, I’ve noticed that I do sometimes System-1-feel like I have to justify arguments for being considerate in terms of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism does justify kindness, but feeling emotionally compelled to argue for kindness on grounds of utilitarianism rather than on grounds of decency feels like overkill, and makes it feel like something is off—even if it is just my emotional calibration that’s off.)
For me, most of the value I get out of commenting in EA-adjacent spaces comes through tasting the ways in which I gently care about our causes and community. (Hopefully it is tacit that one of the many warm flavors of that value for me is in the outcomes our conversations contribute to.)
But I suspect that many of you are like me in this way, and also that, in many broad senses, former EAs have different information than the rest of us. Perhaps the feedback we hear when anyone shares some of what they’ve learned before they go will tend to be less rewarding for them to share, and more informative to us to receive, than most other feedback. In that spirit, I’d like to affirm that it’s valuable to have people in similar positions to Lila’s share. Thanks to Lila for doing so.
Personally, I’ve noticed that being casually aware of smaller projects that seem cash-strapped has given me the intuition that it would be better for Good Ventures to fund more of the things it thinks should be funded, since that might give some talented EAs more autonomy. On the other hand, I suspect that people who prefer the “opposite” strategy, of being more positive on the pledge and feeling quite comfortable with Givewell’s approach to splitting, are seeing a very different social landscape than I am. Maybe they’re aware of people who wouldn’t have engaged with EA in any way other than by taking the pledge, or they’ve spent relatively more time engaging with Givewell-style core EA material than I have?
Between the fact that filter bubbles exist, and the fact that I don’t get out much (see the last three characters of my username), I think I’d be likely to not notice if lots of the disagreement on this whole cluster of related topics (honesty/pledging/partial funding/etc.) was due to people having had differing social experiences with other EAs.
So, perhaps this is a nudge towards reconciliation on both the pledge and on Good Ventures’ take on partial funding. If people’s social circles tend to be homogeneous-ish, some people will know of lots of underfunded promising EAs and projects (which indirectly compete with GV and GiveWell top charities for resources), and others will know of few such EAs/projects. If this is case, we should expect most people’s intuitions on how many funding opportunities for small projects (which only small donors can identify effectively) there are, to be systematically off in one way or another. Perhaps a reasonable thing to do here would be to discuss ways to estimate how many underfunded small projects, which EAs would be eager to fund if only they knew about them, there are.
You’re clearly pointing at a real problem, and the only case in which I can read this as melodramatic is the case in which the problem is already very serious. So, thank you for writing.
When the word “care” is used carelessly, or, more generally, when the emotional content of messages is not carefully tended to, this nudges EA towards being the sort of place where e.g. the word “care” is used carelessly. This has all sorts of hard to track negative effects; the sort of people who are irked by things like misuse of the word “care” are disproportionately likely to be the sort of people who are careful about this sort of thing themselves. It’s easy to see how a harmful “positive” feedback loop might be created in such a scenario if not paying attention to the connotations of words can drive our friends away.
Yeah, this sort of thing is basically always in danger of becoming politics all the way down. One good heuristic is to keep the goals you hope to satisfy by engaging in mind—if you want to figure out whether to accept an article’s central claim, is the answer to your question decisive with respect to your decision? If you’re trying to sway people, are you being careful to make sure it’s plausibly deniable that you’re doing anything other than truthseeking? If you’re engaging because you think it’s impactful to do so, are you treating your engagement as a tool rather than an end?