Kinda pro-pluralist, kinda anti-Bay EA.
I have come here to extend the principle of charity to bad criticisms of EA and kick ass. And I’m all out of charity.
(my opinions are fully my own, and do not represent the views of any close associates or the company I work for)
Thanks for responding David, and again I think that the survey work you’ve done is great :) We have many points of agreement:
Agreed that you basically note my points in the previous works (both in footnotes and in the main text)
Agreed that it’s always a hard tradeoff when compressing detailed research findings into digestible summaries of research—I know from professional experience how hard that is!
Agreed that there is some structure which your previous factor analysis and general community discussions picked up on, which is worth highlighting and examining
I still think that the terminology is somewhat misguided. Perhaps the key part I disagree is that “Referring to these clusters of causes and ideas in terms of “longtermism” and “neartermism” is established terminology”—even if it has been established I want to push back and un-establish because I think it’s more unhelpful and even harmful for community discussion and progress. I’m not sure what terms are better, though some alternatives I’ve seen have been:[1]
Richard Chappell’s “Pure suffering reduction vs Reliable global capacity growth vs High-impact long-shots”
Laura Duffy’s “Empirical EA vs Reason-driven EA”
Ryan Briggs’s “Bed-nets vs Light-cone”
I guess, to state my point as clearly as possible, I don’t think the current cluster names “carve nature at its joints”, and that the potential confusion/ambiguity in use could lead to negative perceptions that aren’t accurate became entrenched
Though I don’t think any of them are perfect distillations