Thanks for the useful exchange.

It may be useful to consider whether you think your comment would pass a reversal test: if the roles were reversed and it was an EA criticizing another movement, but the criticism was otherwise comparable (e.g. in tone and content), would you also have expressed a broadly positive opinion about it? If yes, that would suggest we are disagreeing about the merits of the letter. If no, it seems it’s primarily a disagreement about the standards we should adopt when evaluating external criticism.

(Note that minutes after posting my comment, I replaced “quality” with “merit”, because it better expresses what I was trying to communicate. However, I don’t think this makes a substantial difference to the point you are raising.)

I think that you managed to articulate clearly what I think is the strongest reason for a certain attitude I see among some EAs, which involves applying different standards to external criticism than to stuff written by members of our community.

Empirically, however, what you say doesn’t ring true to me. My impression is that EA has made progress over time primarily by a process of collective discussion with other EAs, as well as “EA-adjacent” folk like rationalists and forecasters, rather than external critics in the reference class Wenar instantiates. In my opinion, the net effect of such external criticism has, in fact, probably been negative: it has often created polarization and tribalism within the EA community, of the sort that makes it more difficult for us to make intellectual progress, and has misallocated precious community attention, which has in turn slowed down that progress.

So, I’d summarize my position as follows: “Yes, it may be reasonable on priors to expect there to exist critics who can see important problems with EA but who may not be able to articulate that criticism in a way that resonates with us. But our posterior, when we also factor in the evidence supplied by the social and intellectual history of EA, is that there is not much to be gained from engaging with that criticism (criticism that doesn’t seem valuable on its merits), and there is in fact a risk of harm in the form of wasting time and energy on unproductive and acrimonious discussion.”

[I accidentally pressed ‘Comment’ before a previous version of this comment was finished; I have deleted that comment.]

Please remember that the downvote button is not a disagreevote button. Under the circumstances here, it is mainly a reduce visibility / push off the homepage button

I would encourage voters to vote based on your views about the merits of the letter, rather than the effects on its visibility. In general, I think voting based on effects is a kind of "naive consequentialism", which has worse consequences than voting based on merit when the effects of voting are properly accounted for.

What you call performative open-mindedness (I have been internally referring to it as epistemic virtue signaling) is a very real and important phenomenon, and one I wish people wrote about more and were more aware of.

Do you truly not care that people are accidentally spreading misinformation here?

Why do you attribute to me a view I never stated and do not hold? If I say that one cost is greater than another, it doesn’t mean that I do not care about the lesser cost.

In your original shortform, you listed three separate criticisms, but your reply now focuses on just one of those criticisms, in a way that makes it look that my concerns would be invalidated if one granted the validity of that specific criticism. This is the sort of subtle goalpost moving that makes it difficult to have a productive discussion.

Why are you not more concerned about flawed calculations being spread than about me pointing out that flawed calculations are being spread?

Because there is an asymmetry in the costs of waiting. Waiting a week or so to better understand the alleged problems of a tool that will likely be used for years is a very minor cost, compared to the expected improvement in that understanding that will occur over that period.

(ETA: I didn’t downvote any of your comments, in accordance with my policy of never downvoting comments I reply to, even if I believe I would normally have downvoted them. I mention this only because your most recent comment was downvoted just as I posted this one.)

I think comments like these are valuable when they are made after the relevant parties have all had enough time to respond, the discussion is largely settled, and readers are in a position to make up their minds about the nature, magnitude and importance of the problems reported, by having access to all the information that is likely to emerge from the exchange in question. Instead, your comment cautions people to be careful in using a tool based on some issues you found and reported less than two days ago, when the discussion appears to be ongoing and some of the people involved have not even expressed an opinion, perhaps because they haven’t yet seen the thread or had enough time to digest your criticisms. Maybe these criticisms are correct and we should indeed exercise the degree of caution you advise when using the tool, but it seems not unlikely that we’ll be in a better epistemic position to know this, say, a week or so from now, so why not just wait for all the potential evidence to become available?

Very nice post.

Do you think that size and intensity are reducible to a common factor? Somewhat metaphorically, one could say that, ultimately, there are only atoms of pleasantness and unpleasantness, which may be more or less concentrated in phenomenal space. When the atoms are concentrated, we call it ‘intensity’; when they are dispersed, we call it ‘size’. But when all is said and done, the value of a state of affairs is entirely determined by its net hedonic “quantity” (i.e., the number of pleasantness atoms minus the number of unpleasantness atoms).