Sorry, I don’t think I get the meaning here. Could you rephrase?
I think EA is a mixture of ‘giving people new options’ (we found a cool new intervention!) and ‘removing previously held options’; it involves cutting to the heart of things, and also cutting things out of your life. The core beliefs do not involve much in the way of softness or malleability to individual autonomy. (I think people have since developed a bunch of padding so that they can live with it more easily.)
Like, EA is about deprioritizing ‘ineffective’ approaches in favor of ‘effective’ approaches. This is both rough (for the ineffective approaches and people excited about them) and also the mechanism of action by which EA does any good (in the same way that capitalism does well in part by having companies go out of business when they’re less good at deploying capital than others).
Hmm, I see. Well, I agree with your first paragraph but not with your second. That is, I do not think that selection of approaches is the core, to say nothing of the entirety, of what EA is. This is a major part of my problem with EA as a movement an ideology.
However, that is perhaps a digression we can avoid. More relevant is that none of this seems to me to require, or even to motivate, “being this sort of rude”. It’s all very well to “remove previously held options” and otherwise be “rough” to the beliefs and values of people who come to EA looking for guidance and answers, but to impose these things on people who manifestly aren’t interested is… not justifiable behavior, it seems to me.
(And, again, this is quite distinct from the question of accepting or rejecting someone from some group or what have you, or letting their false claims to have some praiseworthy quality stand unchallenged, etc.)
I think EA is a mixture of ‘giving people new options’ (we found a cool new intervention!) and ‘removing previously held options’; it involves cutting to the heart of things, and also cutting things out of your life. The core beliefs do not involve much in the way of softness or malleability to individual autonomy. (I think people have since developed a bunch of padding so that they can live with it more easily.)
Like, EA is about deprioritizing ‘ineffective’ approaches in favor of ‘effective’ approaches. This is both rough (for the ineffective approaches and people excited about them) and also the mechanism of action by which EA does any good (in the same way that capitalism does well in part by having companies go out of business when they’re less good at deploying capital than others).
Hmm, I see. Well, I agree with your first paragraph but not with your second. That is, I do not think that selection of approaches is the core, to say nothing of the entirety, of what EA is. This is a major part of my problem with EA as a movement an ideology.
However, that is perhaps a digression we can avoid. More relevant is that none of this seems to me to require, or even to motivate, “being this sort of rude”. It’s all very well to “remove previously held options” and otherwise be “rough” to the beliefs and values of people who come to EA looking for guidance and answers, but to impose these things on people who manifestly aren’t interested is… not justifiable behavior, it seems to me.
(And, again, this is quite distinct from the question of accepting or rejecting someone from some group or what have you, or letting their false claims to have some praiseworthy quality stand unchallenged, etc.)
Just noting here that I broadly agree with Said’s position throughout this comment thread.