I would really like to have a community of people who take truth-seeking seriously. While I can do some research, the world is too big for me to research most things. Furthermore, the value of the research that I do could be much bigger if others could benefit from it, but this would require a community that upholds proper epistemic standards towards me and communicates value of information well. I assume other people face the same problems, of not having the resources to research everything, and finding that it is inefficient for them to research the things they do research.
I think this can be fixed by getting a couple of honest people representing different interests together for each topic, and having them perform research that answers the most commonly relevant question on the topic and writing up the answers in a convenient format.
(At least up to a point? People are, probably rightfully, skeptical that this approach can be used to research who is an abuser or not. But for “scientific” questions like veganism, which concern subjects that are present in many places across the world like human nutritional needs or means of food production, and therefore feasible to collect direct information on without too much interference, it seems like it should be feasible.)
The rationalist community seems too loosely organized to handle this automatically. The EA community seems too biased and maybe also too loose to handle it. So I would like to create a community within rationalism to address it. For now, here is a Discord link for it: https://discord.gg/sTqMq8ey
Note that I don’t mean this to bash vegans. While the vegan community is often dishonest, I have the impression that the carnist community is also often dishonest. I think that people on all sides are too focused on creating counternarratives to places where they are being attacked, instead of creating actionable answers to important questions, and I would like a community that just focuses on 1) figuring out what questions people have, and 2) answering them as accurately as possible, in easy-to-understand formats, and communicating the ranges of uncertainty and the raw evidence used to answer them.
I would really like to have a community of people who take truth-seeking seriously. While I can do some research, the world is too big for me to research most things. Furthermore, the value of the research that I do could be much bigger if others could benefit from it, but this would require a community that upholds proper epistemic standards towards me and communicates value of information well. I assume other people face the same problems, of not having the resources to research everything, and finding that it is inefficient for them to research the things they do research.
I think this can be fixed by getting a couple of honest people representing different interests together for each topic, and having them perform research that answers the most commonly relevant question on the topic and writing up the answers in a convenient format.
(At least up to a point? People are, probably rightfully, skeptical that this approach can be used to research who is an abuser or not. But for “scientific” questions like veganism, which concern subjects that are present in many places across the world like human nutritional needs or means of food production, and therefore feasible to collect direct information on without too much interference, it seems like it should be feasible.)
The rationalist community seems too loosely organized to handle this automatically. The EA community seems too biased and maybe also too loose to handle it. So I would like to create a community within rationalism to address it. For now, here is a Discord link for it: https://discord.gg/sTqMq8ey
Note that I don’t mean this to bash vegans. While the vegan community is often dishonest, I have the impression that the carnist community is also often dishonest. I think that people on all sides are too focused on creating counternarratives to places where they are being attacked, instead of creating actionable answers to important questions, and I would like a community that just focuses on 1) figuring out what questions people have, and 2) answering them as accurately as possible, in easy-to-understand formats, and communicating the ranges of uncertainty and the raw evidence used to answer them.
The reminds me of Slate Star Codex’s Adversarial Collaboration competition.
That’s actually what got me to stop eating (or at least buying) meat
Yes, I tried participating in this twice and am probably somewhat inspired by it.