Comments
It seems like EAs care a lot about defining EA, but it's not clear to me what the purpose of defining EA is. A lot of social movements are ill-defined, either because the people inside the movement disagree (i.e. socialism), or because the people outside the movement disagree (i.e. zionism, or feminism).Â
If the definition is meant for PR reasons, then it strikes me as weird why most definitions are either long or not immediately understandable. PR seems to heavily favor processing fluency (how easy it is to understand something; happy to cite my sources if needed), and most definitions of EA seem like they're more catered towards philosophical ponderings than spreadable messages that someone can understand in <10 seconds.
If the definition is meant for marketing reasons (marketing is attracting people into EA, PR is managing what people say about EA on the outside), then the current array of definitions seems to further encourage only philosophically-inclined people to get into the movement (which isn't a problem, tbh, if you don't weigh ideological diversity highly).
If the definition is meant for gaining clarity as a community on what the community is about, then it seems strange that people are presumably unsatisfied enough with previous definitions that new posts trying to define EA and its direction keeps on popping up. Some of it is justified by evolutions in the movement, for sure, but I think part of it is also just that people keep trying to explain EA to their non-EA friends, and most of the current defintions don't land very well (anecdotally, n > 30).
I think so much of the PR problem EA has just comes down to people hating EA for the same reason people hate philosophers:
I think the solution here is to just keep hammering in what EA has done, rather than engaging on what EA thinks. Most people's only knowledge of what EA has done is SBF, because that's all that gets talked about. Anecdotally, my friends' impressions of EA were most improved by learning that:
I think #1 is not right (ETA: I explain in my below comment). I think there's a somewhat related problem where people are refusing to decouple. Taking philosophy seriously can lead you to beliefs that, on first sight, appear incredibly strange (eg: strong longtermism).Â
#2 and #3 seem quite likely to me.Â
But these critiques presumably can't be exclusively because of philosophers, since unfortunately academic philosophers seem to dislike EA (on aggregate)[1]
I think a lot of these critiques from philosophers seem to rely on weak arguments, but nonetheless they exist
I'm not really sure why you think the refusal to decouple can't co-exist with people wanting clarity?
And I'm also not sure why you think philosophers hating EA means people don't hate EA the same way they hate philosophers? I think a lot of philosophers hate each other as well, and those same people get hated on by outsiders for philosophy-vibes reasons. Unfortunately hatred is not a zero-sum game.
My comment was not clear and I wrote it poorly, sorry! I will edit parts of it.
My objection to "EA posing more questions than answers" is that a lot of what people are objecting to are the answers that many people take in the movement (eg: future people matter a ton, AI x-risk is a serious issue, etc.). People also seem to be upset about its overconfidence rather than its underconfidence.Â
The thing I was trying to gesture at with "decoupling" was that people find many thought experiments very weird and counterintuitive (eg: torture vs dust specks, strong longtermist thought experiments). Then, people often not separating them out from questions like "is AI a potential existential threat" or "is factory farming bad" which aren't too different. I'm now unsure if this is related to your initial point.
This explanation is interesting, but imo its more of a minor factor than a major factor. It seems to me that the dislike for EA doesn't seem like a respectful disagreement but much more of a strong dislike. However, I'm not super confident about this since I'm not super familiar with how academic philosophers relate to one another.