I don’t know about Yair’s example, but it’s possible they just miss the rebuttal. They’d see the criticism, not happen to log onto EA forum on the days when Givewell’s response is on the top of the forum, and update only on the criticism because by a week or two later, many people probably just have a couple main points and a background negative feeling left in their brains.
It’s concerning if, as seems to be the case, people are making important decisions based on “a couple main points and a background negative feeling left in their brains”.
But people do make decisions like this, which is a well known psychological result. We’ve got to live with it, and it’s not givewells fault that people are like this.
I expect people to shrug and say “yeah, but look, that’s just how the world works, people get ingrained opinions, we have to work around that”. My response is: why on earth are you forfeiting victory without thoroughly discussing the problem?
I don’t know about Yair’s example, but it’s possible they just miss the rebuttal. They’d see the criticism, not happen to log onto EA forum on the days when Givewell’s response is on the top of the forum, and update only on the criticism because by a week or two later, many people probably just have a couple main points and a background negative feeling left in their brains.
It’s concerning if, as seems to be the case, people are making important decisions based on “a couple main points and a background negative feeling left in their brains”.
But people do make decisions like this, which is a well known psychological result. We’ve got to live with it, and it’s not givewells fault that people are like this.
As I said in my (unedited) toplevel comment:
The latter point does not seem to follow the prior.
I do not know of any achievable plan to make a majority of the world’s habitants rational.
“We’ve got to” implies there’s only one possibility.
We can also just ignore the bad decision makers?
We can go extinct?
We can have a world autocrat in the future?
We can… do a lot of things other than just live with it?