Gil
Posts 8
Comments103
IMO it's pretty outrageous to make a piece entitled "The EA case for [X]" when you yourself do not call yourself identify as an effective altruist and the [X] in question is extremely toxic to most everyone on the outside. It's like if I made a piece "the feminist case for Benito Mussolini" where I made clear that I am not a feminist but feminists should be supporting Mussolini.
I do want to make the point that how tied to EA you are isn’t really your choice. The reason it’s really easy for media outlets to tie EA to scientific racism is that there’s a lot of interaction with scientific racists and nobody from the outside really cares if events like this explicitly market themselves as EA events or not. Strong free speech norms enabling scientific racism have always been a source of tension for this community, and you can’t just get around that by not calling yourselves EA.
Re: extremely toxic, most people who would see this post are left-wing, that is obvious.
I don't think that a word-for-word identical where the author self-identified as an EA would be good. I think it would be less bad, and I might not clamor for the title to be changed.
The problem is that this post blew up on Twitter and a lot of people's image of EA was downgraded because of it. To me, that's very unfair; this post is wrong on the substance, this is an extremely unpopular opinion within EA, and the author doesn't even identify as an EA so the post does not provide any evidence that people who identify as EA think this way. Changing the title would alleviate most of the reputational damage to EA (or well it would have if it was done earlier) and does not seem too big an ask.