Hey, I am the author of the ‘some blindspots in EA’ post.
Just started reading Scott’s post, after a friend shared the link with me. She, like me, thinks there is a self-criticism fetish in this community – which can get quite unproductive *in terms of* how people seek out and address criticism. The intro of the ‘criticism of criticism of criticism…’ post resonated. I agree also that criticism tends to be quite broad and abstract, and this is a fair portrayal of the list of specific distinctions in my post.
In terms of Scott’s responses to parts of the ‘some blindspots in EA’ post, I appreciate Scott being transparent and humble about what he focussed on and selected out for his writing, and what he cannot or is not making claims about. It’s always hard to portray others’ work you are criticising in a fair or at least open-minded way, and I appreciate the care Scott put into doing this.
The main clarification I need to make is that the brightspot-blindspot distinctions I wrote about are not about prescribing ’EAs’ to be eg. less individualistic (although there is an implicit preference, with non-elaborated-on reasoning, which Scott also seems to have but in the other direction).
The distinctions are attempts at categorising where (covering aspects of the environment) people involved in our broader community incline to focus on more (‘brightspots’) relative to other communities and what corresponding representational assumptions we are making in our mental models, descriptions, and explanations.
These distinctions do form a basis for prescribing the community to not just make hand-wavy gestures of ‘we should be open to criticism’ but to actually zone in on different aspects other communities notice and could complement our sensemaking in, if we manage to build epistemic bridges to their perspectives. Ie. listen in a way where we do not keep misinterpreting what they are saying within our default frames of thinking (criticism is not useful if we keep talking past each other). I highlighted where we are falling short and other communities could contribute value.
~ ~ ~
I’m coming at this subject from a very different angle than Scott, which is going to take too much time to clarify. I do not want to waste my and everyone else’s time by reading and writing long comment exchanges. If you are interested though to hear my thoughts on a specific comment I may have missed, ping me at remmelt[at}effectiefaltruisme.nl with a link to the comment.
Hey, I am the author of the ‘some blindspots in EA’ post.
Just started reading Scott’s post, after a friend shared the link with me. She, like me, thinks there is a self-criticism fetish in this community – which can get quite unproductive *in terms of* how people seek out and address criticism. The intro of the ‘criticism of criticism of criticism…’ post resonated. I agree also that criticism tends to be quite broad and abstract, and this is a fair portrayal of the list of specific distinctions in my post.
In terms of Scott’s responses to parts of the ‘some blindspots in EA’ post, I appreciate Scott being transparent and humble about what he focussed on and selected out for his writing, and what he cannot or is not making claims about. It’s always hard to portray others’ work you are criticising in a fair or at least open-minded way, and I appreciate the care Scott put into doing this.
The main clarification I need to make is that the brightspot-blindspot distinctions I wrote about are not about prescribing ’EAs’ to be eg. less individualistic (although there is an implicit preference, with non-elaborated-on reasoning, which Scott also seems to have but in the other direction).
The distinctions are attempts at categorising where (covering aspects of the environment) people involved in our broader community incline to focus on more (‘brightspots’) relative to other communities and what corresponding representational assumptions we are making in our mental models, descriptions, and explanations.
These distinctions do form a basis for prescribing the community to not just make hand-wavy gestures of ‘we should be open to criticism’ but to actually zone in on different aspects other communities notice and could complement our sensemaking in, if we manage to build epistemic bridges to their perspectives. Ie. listen in a way where we do not keep misinterpreting what they are saying within our default frames of thinking (criticism is not useful if we keep talking past each other). I highlighted where we are falling short and other communities could contribute value.
~ ~ ~
I’m coming at this subject from a very different angle than Scott, which is going to take too much time to clarify. I do not want to waste my and everyone else’s time by reading and writing long comment exchanges. If you are interested though to hear my thoughts on a specific comment I may have missed, ping me at remmelt[at}effectiefaltruisme.nl with a link to the comment.