Hmm, I think I could be persuaded into putting it on the EA Forum, but I’m mildly against it:
It is literally about rationality, in the sense that it’s about the cognitive biases and false justifications and motivated reasoning that cause people to conclude that they don’t want to be any more ethical than they currently are; you can apply the point to other ethical systems if you want, like, Bob could just as easily be a religious person justifying why he can’t be bothered to do any pilgrimages this year while Alice is a hotshot missionary or something. I would hope that lots of people on LW want to work harder on saving the world, even if they don’t agree with the Drowning Child thing; there are many reasons to work harder on x-risk reduction.
It’s the sort of spicy that makes me worried that EAs will consider it bad PR, whereas rationalists are fine with spicy takes because we already have those in spades. I think people can effectively link to it no matter where it is, so posting it in more places isn’t necessarily beneficial?
I don’t agree with everything Alice says but I do think it’s very plausible that EA should be a big tent that welcomes everyone—including people who just want to give 10% and not do anything else—whereas my personal view is that the rationality community should probably be more elitist; we’re supposed to be a self-improve-so-hard-that-you-end-up-saving-the-world group, damnit, not a book club for insight porn.
Also it’s going to be part of a sequence (conditional on me successfully finishing the other posts), and I feel like the sequence overall belongs more on LW.
I genuinely don’t really know how the response to the Drowning Child differs between LW and EA! I guess I would probably say more people on the EA Forum probably donate money to charity for Drowning-Child-related reasons, but more people on LW are probably interested in philosophy qua philosophy and probably more people on LW switched careers to directly work on things like AI safety. I don’t suppose there’s survey/census data that we could look up?
Hmm, I think I could be persuaded into putting it on the EA Forum, but I’m mildly against it:
It is literally about rationality, in the sense that it’s about the cognitive biases and false justifications and motivated reasoning that cause people to conclude that they don’t want to be any more ethical than they currently are; you can apply the point to other ethical systems if you want, like, Bob could just as easily be a religious person justifying why he can’t be bothered to do any pilgrimages this year while Alice is a hotshot missionary or something. I would hope that lots of people on LW want to work harder on saving the world, even if they don’t agree with the Drowning Child thing; there are many reasons to work harder on x-risk reduction.
It’s the sort of spicy that makes me worried that EAs will consider it bad PR, whereas rationalists are fine with spicy takes because we already have those in spades. I think people can effectively link to it no matter where it is, so posting it in more places isn’t necessarily beneficial?
I don’t agree with everything Alice says but I do think it’s very plausible that EA should be a big tent that welcomes everyone—including people who just want to give 10% and not do anything else—whereas my personal view is that the rationality community should probably be more elitist; we’re supposed to be a self-improve-so-hard-that-you-end-up-saving-the-world group, damnit, not a book club for insight porn.
Also it’s going to be part of a sequence (conditional on me successfully finishing the other posts), and I feel like the sequence overall belongs more on LW.
I genuinely don’t really know how the response to the Drowning Child differs between LW and EA! I guess I would probably say more people on the EA Forum probably donate money to charity for Drowning-Child-related reasons, but more people on LW are probably interested in philosophy qua philosophy and probably more people on LW switched careers to directly work on things like AI safety. I don’t suppose there’s survey/census data that we could look up?
This does seem more like EA than LW.