This post was, in the end, largely a failed experiment. It did win a lesser prize, and in a sense that proved its point, and I had fun doing it, but I do not think it successfully changed minds, and I don’t think it has lasting value, although someone gave it a +9 so it presumably worked for them. The core idea—that EA in particular wants ‘criticism’ but it wants it in narrow friendly ways and it discourages actual substantive challenges to its core stuff—does seem important. But also this is LW, not EA Forum. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t bother writing this.
I am surprised to hear this, especially “I don’t think it has lasting value”. In my opinion, this post has aged incredibly well. Reading it now, knowing that the EA criticism contest utterly failed to do one iota of good with regards to stopping the giant catastrophe on the horizon (FTX), and seeing that the top prizes were all given to long, well-formatted essays providing incremental suggestions on heavily trodden topics while the one guy vaguely gesturing at the actual problem (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/T85NxgeZTTZZpqBq2/the-effective-altruism-movement-is-not-above-conflicts-of) gets ignored, cements this as one of your more prophetic works.
This post was, in the end, largely a failed experiment. It did win a lesser prize, and in a sense that proved its point, and I had fun doing it, but I do not think it successfully changed minds, and I don’t think it has lasting value, although someone gave it a +9 so it presumably worked for them. The core idea—that EA in particular wants ‘criticism’ but it wants it in narrow friendly ways and it discourages actual substantive challenges to its core stuff—does seem important. But also this is LW, not EA Forum. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t bother writing this.
I am surprised to hear this, especially “I don’t think it has lasting value”. In my opinion, this post has aged incredibly well. Reading it now, knowing that the EA criticism contest utterly failed to do one iota of good with regards to stopping the giant catastrophe on the horizon (FTX), and seeing that the top prizes were all given to long, well-formatted essays providing incremental suggestions on heavily trodden topics while the one guy vaguely gesturing at the actual problem (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/T85NxgeZTTZZpqBq2/the-effective-altruism-movement-is-not-above-conflicts-of) gets ignored, cements this as one of your more prophetic works.