It was great seeing you at RatFest! I enjoyed your blog and I understand your concern about community building. Still, I disagree with you on some key points, as I explain below.
Firstly, I think you’re being too lenient towards the EA crowd. For a movement about charitable giving, it has developed a remarkably self-referential culture. Polyamory is unusually common among EA-ers, which should raise eyebrows. How does a philosophy about effective altruism consistently attract, or perhaps create, people with the same unconventional relationship style? I’ve also met EA-ers with plainly irrational views, such as the belief that even mentioning Roko’s Basilisk to someone is not just wrong but reprehensible. At one EA conference I attended a couple of years ago, people presented a graph comparing the suffering of cows and crickets, complete with a y-axis labelled “amount of suffering” but no units. It’s the kind of mistake you learn to avoid in first-year science courses. Of course there couldn’t be any units, but then why have the graph at all? Nobody objected, and when I tried to raise the point, I was passed over. It was a simulacrum of science.
Any group of people who attend a conference will, naturally, share certain views and background assumptions. Physicists at a physics conference, or programmers at a tech conference, will agree on a great deal. That kind of cohesion isn’t a sign of irrationality. What matters is the community’s attitude toward disagreement, whether dissent is engaged with or quietly suppressed. In that respect, much of EA has drifted away from the scientific seriousness it claims to embody. It gestures towards rigour but rarely makes real contact with it.
RatFest, by contrast, didn’t feel like that at all. Genuine research scientists were in attendance, discussions were grounded, and obvious errors didn’t pass unchallenged. While many attendees shared similar views on certain topics, I didn’t sense hostility towards dissent or any in-group taboos. So if EA is the standard, RatFest far surpasses it!
Hi Ben,
It was great seeing you at RatFest! I enjoyed your blog and I understand your concern about community building. Still, I disagree with you on some key points, as I explain below.
Firstly, I think you’re being too lenient towards the EA crowd. For a movement about charitable giving, it has developed a remarkably self-referential culture. Polyamory is unusually common among EA-ers, which should raise eyebrows. How does a philosophy about effective altruism consistently attract, or perhaps create, people with the same unconventional relationship style? I’ve also met EA-ers with plainly irrational views, such as the belief that even mentioning Roko’s Basilisk to someone is not just wrong but reprehensible. At one EA conference I attended a couple of years ago, people presented a graph comparing the suffering of cows and crickets, complete with a y-axis labelled “amount of suffering” but no units. It’s the kind of mistake you learn to avoid in first-year science courses. Of course there couldn’t be any units, but then why have the graph at all? Nobody objected, and when I tried to raise the point, I was passed over. It was a simulacrum of science.
Any group of people who attend a conference will, naturally, share certain views and background assumptions. Physicists at a physics conference, or programmers at a tech conference, will agree on a great deal. That kind of cohesion isn’t a sign of irrationality. What matters is the community’s attitude toward disagreement, whether dissent is engaged with or quietly suppressed. In that respect, much of EA has drifted away from the scientific seriousness it claims to embody. It gestures towards rigour but rarely makes real contact with it.
RatFest, by contrast, didn’t feel like that at all. Genuine research scientists were in attendance, discussions were grounded, and obvious errors didn’t pass unchallenged. While many attendees shared similar views on certain topics, I didn’t sense hostility towards dissent or any in-group taboos. So if EA is the standard, RatFest far surpasses it!