Today I’m going to try something similar for effective altruism (EA). I’m going to declare some arguments “retired”, in a hope people won’t use them anymore. I don’t see them used as much as I used to, but I want to explain why in the context of EA they don’t change anyone’s perceptions, and why using them is a waste of time.

1. “It’s too sci-fi”

This is usually applied to the AI safety by all manner of journalists, critics, and well, everyone. It’s sometimes generally lobbed at other causes pushed by rationalists and transhumanists like anti-ageing or other emerging technologies too. You’d think the last few years would’ve vindicated AI safety some, and it has, but at this point I don’t expect techno-skeptics to ever go away completely. However, I think this type of argument still applied by effective altruists generically quite skeptical of what they see as blue-sky futurist projects.

2. “It’s just a blog”

Obviously, the public value of blogs follows a power law. 20% of the blogs probably produce 80% of the value for the EA movement, and so forth. I think we need to retire the argument “it’s only a blog”, and evaluate what’s easy to dismiss as mere online content for the projects that they are. If you don’t like the impact someone’s or some organization’s blog is having the EA community, you need to engage the content the blog or its posts itself, and explain what you with think they get wrong. Effective altruism is an internet movement. Credentials aren’t what matter most to effective altruists. Argument screens off authority. When this movement was created because of blogs, and the second biggest driver of its growth around the world after university student groups is probably blogs, you won’t convince anyone an idea magically doesn’t matter because it was introduced to the world through a blog post.

Read the source article at Evan Gains Power