Comment on Holly Elmore's "I want an ethnography of EA"

Abstract

Commissioning an ethnography or routine anthropological observation of EA communities could be good for our epistemic hygiene. A lot of the big differences of opinion in EA today don’t come down to empirical matters, but priors and values. It’s difficult to get anywhere using logic and debate when the real difference between sides is, say, how realistic a catastrophe feels or whether you lean negative utilitarian. One productive way I see to move forward is identifying the existence of strong motives or forces that lead us to hold certain beliefs besides their truth value.