These might be kinda similar to things that others have already said, but:
My personal journey was encountering extinction risks first, worrying about those, and then over time thinking in more detail about threat models and consequently broadening the list of things I worried about. I've been assuming that community discourse evolved in the same way: initially based on relatively simple ideas (e.g. omnipotent superintelligence, everyone dies) and then adding more detail and precision and subtlety as people developed those more, which naturally increases the number of possible pathways and scenarios. But it's possible that all the new pathways I discovered were only new to me, and therefore my path doesn't track the community path. I don't know.
On the object level, I don't super buy the "extinction is positive lock-in but not much else is". Similar to what Vasco said, you only believe that extinction has a massive impact on the long-term future if you believe that extinction risk is high now but will drop to being permanently extremely low later on. Otherwise you're just delaying extinction rather than preventing it. This isn't an obvious belief! Most who believe it appeal to something like space colonisation, where we spread in such a way that it's no longer easy for effects of any kind to spread across all sentient life rapidly. But if space colonisation works to prevent extinction (which itself is not obvious!) then maybe it also locks in other things in the same way. You can think of not only the human race as having their survival at stake here, but also our ideas, social structures, etc. -- arguably, space colonisation gives these things the same shot at immortality it does us.
Having written this out, I think it's fair enough if you still think that "locking in non-extinction" is likely to happen, but locking in anything else isn't. It's reasonable to believe that extinction is special. But I hope that gives some intuition for why someone might think that extinction and lock-in are comparable risks.
"shockingly terrible", no, that's still not a comparison.
"far worse than anything I've ever seen at any organisation I've ever been in" -- this one is a comparison! (In my defence I hadn't seen titotal's comment when I made mine.)
But here it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to respond to that comparison with "where's your evidence?" or "what about Durham?". It's clear where the comparison is coming from, and it's clear that it's not about base rates, it's about one specific org and a specific thing they did, and it's specific about what standard they're held to. Are you saying that it's the wrong standard?
I think you're reading some of them right, and many of them wrong, because you seem to continue to be equating "EA's performance on this issue makes me sad" and "EA's performance on this issue is worse than peers". Some people believe both for sure! But you keep including people saying the first thing as if they're saying the second. "Currently about half of the comments disagreeing here seem to espouse the view that the community is bad." -- again not distinguishing between "bad" and "worse".
Honestly my guess would be that most people don't have a clear considered belief on the comparison. They see bad behaviour and they object. It's not obvious to me why they would feel the need for a belief on the comparison. Whatever it is, the bad behaviour is still objectionable.
I hear you as pushing in a direction of "maybe we can't do anything about it, because no-one around us has succeeded in doing better". And, well, maybe! But I think this is a weak heuristic as compared with thinking directly about whether we should have stronger codes of conduct at EA conferences, or whether we need to develop more training resources or other support for orgs that are too small to have a proper HR function, or what stopped CEA from acting on what seems like clear evidence of inappropriate behaviour.
I think of this situation as analogous to waking up in the cabin of a truck that's careening down a major road. Of course you're going to grab the wheel, just because no-one else has done so yet.
I'm not really convinced by your evidence that there's a widespread belief that EA is worse than other communities. Your first quote clearly says this, I grant. The other quotes seem to me to all be saying something more like "this community has this problem", and "I wish this community was better / had hoped that it would be better", without saying "we are worse than relevant comparisons", much less "we are worse than relevant comparisons because of intrinsic aspects of our culture".
FWIW, my belief, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, is more like: EA handles this badly, but also handling this badly is widespread. I don't think I've ever been in a community that I was confident had a good answer for this. EA should address this within its own community, because that's where we understand what's happening best and have the best tools for addressing it. This is true regardless of whether EA is worse, the same, or better than its peers: it's true for as long as it seems feasible to do better than we're doing.
In the end, interventions should be decided on their merits, and I think we should tip the balance away from the abstract and towards the concrete questions of what specific things we should or shouldn't do.
An incredibly mainstream view is to care about everyone alive today and everyone who will be born in the next 100 years. I have to imagine over 90% of people in the world would agree to that view or a view very close to that if you asked them.
I think we have an empirical disagreement here. If I felt strongly motivated to try to persuade you about this, I would go try to find studies about it; I suspect we may not even have 90% agreement on "everyone alive today is worthy of moral concern", and I would strongly guess we don't have that level of agreement on caring about people who will be born 50 years from now. (Although I would also guess that many people just don't think about this kind of question very much and aren't guaranteed to have very clear or consistent answers.)
Even if people agreed with the premises, we could try to justify longtermism as arguing that the consequences of this belief are underexplored, though I hear you that you don't see a lot of neglected consequences.
At this point, though, I'm not actually that invested in trying to champion longtermism specifically, so I'm not the right person to defend it to you here. Let's fix x-risk and check in about it after that :)
forgive the self-promotion but here's a related Facebook post I made:
The law of conservation of expected evidence, E(E(X|Y)) = E(X), essentially states that you can't "expect to change your mind", in the sense that, if you already thought that your estimate of (say) some intervention's cost-effectiveness would go up by an average of Z after reading this study, then your EV should already have been Z higher before you read it. You should be balanced (in EV terms) between the possible outcomes that would be positive surprises and negative surprises, otherwise you're just not calculating your EVs correctly.
Anyway, let's take X to be global future welfare, and Y to be the consequences of some action you take. E(E(X|Y)) = E(X) means that the average global well-being given the outcome of your action is exactly the same as the average global well-being without the outcome of your action. So why did you bother doing it?
I trust that you'll enforce this trademark against anyone who takes any actions with an unduly large impact on the world, requiring them to first apply for a license to do so.
These might be kinda similar to things that others have already said, but:
My personal journey was encountering extinction risks first, worrying about those, and then over time thinking in more detail about threat models and consequently broadening the list of things I worried about. I've been assuming that community discourse evolved in the same way: initially based on relatively simple ideas (e.g. omnipotent superintelligence, everyone dies) and then adding more detail and precision and subtlety as people developed those more, which naturally increases the number of possible pathways and scenarios. But it's possible that all the new pathways I discovered were only new to me, and therefore my path doesn't track the community path. I don't know.
On the object level, I don't super buy the "extinction is positive lock-in but not much else is". Similar to what Vasco said, you only believe that extinction has a massive impact on the long-term future if you believe that extinction risk is high now but will drop to being permanently extremely low later on. Otherwise you're just delaying extinction rather than preventing it. This isn't an obvious belief! Most who believe it appeal to something like space colonisation, where we spread in such a way that it's no longer easy for effects of any kind to spread across all sentient life rapidly. But if space colonisation works to prevent extinction (which itself is not obvious!) then maybe it also locks in other things in the same way. You can think of not only the human race as having their survival at stake here, but also our ideas, social structures, etc. -- arguably, space colonisation gives these things the same shot at immortality it does us.
Having written this out, I think it's fair enough if you still think that "locking in non-extinction" is likely to happen, but locking in anything else isn't. It's reasonable to believe that extinction is special. But I hope that gives some intuition for why someone might think that extinction and lock-in are comparable risks.
"shockingly terrible", no, that's still not a comparison.
"far worse than anything I've ever seen at any organisation I've ever been in" -- this one is a comparison! (In my defence I hadn't seen titotal's comment when I made mine.)
But here it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to respond to that comparison with "where's your evidence?" or "what about Durham?". It's clear where the comparison is coming from, and it's clear that it's not about base rates, it's about one specific org and a specific thing they did, and it's specific about what standard they're held to. Are you saying that it's the wrong standard?
I think the third one most clearly. Doesn't suggest that other communities successfully take sexual harassment seriously, to my eyes.
I think you're reading some of them right, and many of them wrong, because you seem to continue to be equating "EA's performance on this issue makes me sad" and "EA's performance on this issue is worse than peers". Some people believe both for sure! But you keep including people saying the first thing as if they're saying the second. "Currently about half of the comments disagreeing here seem to espouse the view that the community is bad." -- again not distinguishing between "bad" and "worse".
Honestly my guess would be that most people don't have a clear considered belief on the comparison. They see bad behaviour and they object. It's not obvious to me why they would feel the need for a belief on the comparison. Whatever it is, the bad behaviour is still objectionable.
I hear you as pushing in a direction of "maybe we can't do anything about it, because no-one around us has succeeded in doing better". And, well, maybe! But I think this is a weak heuristic as compared with thinking directly about whether we should have stronger codes of conduct at EA conferences, or whether we need to develop more training resources or other support for orgs that are too small to have a proper HR function, or what stopped CEA from acting on what seems like clear evidence of inappropriate behaviour.
I think of this situation as analogous to waking up in the cabin of a truck that's careening down a major road. Of course you're going to grab the wheel, just because no-one else has done so yet.
I'm not really convinced by your evidence that there's a widespread belief that EA is worse than other communities. Your first quote clearly says this, I grant. The other quotes seem to me to all be saying something more like "this community has this problem", and "I wish this community was better / had hoped that it would be better", without saying "we are worse than relevant comparisons", much less "we are worse than relevant comparisons because of intrinsic aspects of our culture".
FWIW, my belief, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, is more like: EA handles this badly, but also handling this badly is widespread. I don't think I've ever been in a community that I was confident had a good answer for this. EA should address this within its own community, because that's where we understand what's happening best and have the best tools for addressing it. This is true regardless of whether EA is worse, the same, or better than its peers: it's true for as long as it seems feasible to do better than we're doing.
In the end, interventions should be decided on their merits, and I think we should tip the balance away from the abstract and towards the concrete questions of what specific things we should or shouldn't do.
I think we have an empirical disagreement here. If I felt strongly motivated to try to persuade you about this, I would go try to find studies about it; I suspect we may not even have 90% agreement on "everyone alive today is worthy of moral concern", and I would strongly guess we don't have that level of agreement on caring about people who will be born 50 years from now. (Although I would also guess that many people just don't think about this kind of question very much and aren't guaranteed to have very clear or consistent answers.)
Even if people agreed with the premises, we could try to justify longtermism as arguing that the consequences of this belief are underexplored, though I hear you that you don't see a lot of neglected consequences.
At this point, though, I'm not actually that invested in trying to champion longtermism specifically, so I'm not the right person to defend it to you here. Let's fix x-risk and check in about it after that :)
forgive the self-promotion but here's a related Facebook post I made:
I trust that you'll enforce this trademark against anyone who takes any actions with an unduly large impact on the world, requiring them to first apply for a license to do so.
This got me thinking:
Have you considered making a form where people can submit their names and nothing else?