(I’ll leave for another comment/post the question of what went wrong in my generation. The “types of arguments” I objected to above all seem quite EA-flavored, and so one salient possibility is just that the increasing prominence of EA steered my generation away from the type of mentality in which it’s even possible to aim towards scientific breakthroughs. But even if that’s one part of the story, I expect it’s more complicated than that.)
I’m reminded of Patrick Collison’s (I now think, quite wise) comment on EA:
Now if the question is, should everyone be an EA or even, I guess in the individual sense, am I or do I think I should be an EA? I think – and obviously there’s kind of heterogeneity within the field – but my general sense is that the EA movement is always very focused on kind of rigid, not rigid, that’s that’s unfair perhaps, but on sort of, estimation, analytical, quantification, and sort of utilitarian calculation, and I think that that as a practical matter that means that you end up too focused on that which you can measure, which again means – or as a practical matter means – you’re too focus on things that are sort of short-term like bed nets or deworming or whatever being obvious examples. And are those good causes? I would say almost definitely yes, obviously. Now we’ve seen some new data over the last couple of years that maybe they’re not as good as they initially seemed but they’re very likely to be really good things to do.
But it’s hard for me to see how, you know, writing a treatise of human nature would score really highly in an EA oriented framework. As assessed ex-post that looked like a really valuable thing for Hume to do. And similarly, as we have a look at the things that in hindsight seem like very good things to have happen in the world, it’s often unclear to me how an EA oriented intuition might have caused somebody to do so. And so I guess I think of EA as sort of like a metal detector, and they’ve invented a new kind of metal detector that’s really good at detecting some metals that other detectors are not very good at detecting. But I actually think we need some diversity in the different metallic substances which our detectors are attuned to, and for me EA would not be the only one.
I’m reminded of Patrick Collison’s (I now think, quite wise) comment on EA: