Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I am making the claim that most EAs think EA is primarily about redistribution — broadly defined as moving resources non-transactionally — and explicitly not primarily about growth.

TBC I was replying to this tweet of yours, which I thought was about something else (inconsistent messaging from EA):https://twitter.com/webdevMason/status/1052956898318643200 …

As I've said, I agree EA isn't primarily about growth, but disagree EA is primarily about redistribution (except for some very broad & nonstandard definition of redistribution that includes things like getting factory farms to go cage-free & making sure the world doesn't blow up)

I don’t think I know what a standard definition of redistribution is, or a better term for “moving resources non-transactionally.” Insofar as EA is primarily about “doing good stuff better,” fair, I guess, although utterly lacking in content

I think you're strawmanning. "Using reason and evidence to figure out how to do the most good" (what I said) != "doing good stuff better" (what you said). And yes, a single phrase cannot contain all the content around what we consider "good", but you can read the websites, (cont)

... and if you do you'll see it's not empty. Basically all EA cashes out "good" in terms of the welfare of sentient beings, in a consequentialist, scope-sensitive way, w/out unfairly prioritizing a single time period, locality, or species. This is very unusual.

It feels like between you and Rob, I can't nail down a goalpost. If I zoom in, I'm ignoring x, y, & z; if I zoom out, I'm strawmanning. I agree that I'm having trouble finding the right level of resolution to carry a convo forward, but it doesn't feel like I'm getting much help.

Well, usually when it feels like a disagreement keeps slipping away, and goalposts keep shifting, a good thing to do is to pin down an empirically testable prediction we disagree on. Which I'm totally happy to do; also happy to drop this if you feel like it's not your circus.