Eugine_Nier comments on 2014 Survey of Effective Altruists - Less Wrong

27 Post author: tog 05 May 2014 02:32AM

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Comment author: Viliam_Bur 06 May 2014 11:04:31AM *  5 points [-]

Uhm, upvoted the comment, but don't completely agree with the linked article.

It suggests that when fans of something are worried when it becomes too popular, they object against losing their positional good. That's just one possible explanation. Sometimes the fact that X becomes widely popular changes X, and there are people who genuinely preferred the original version. -- As a simple example, imagine that tomorrow million new readers will come to LW; would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Depends on what happens to LW. If the quality of debate remains the same, that it's obviously a huge win, and anyone who resents that is guilty of caring about their positional good too much. On the other hand, the new people could easily shift LW towards the popular (in sense: frequent in population) stuff, so we would get a lot of nonsense sprinkled by LW buzzwords.

I can imagine leftist groups believing they are working "more meta than thou"; solving a problem which taken in isolation doesn't seem so important (compared with the causes effective altruists care about), but would start a huge cascade of improvement afterwards (their model of the world says so, your model doesn't). Making mosquito nets instead is not an improvement according to their model.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2014 09:05:21PM 1 point [-]

It suggests that when fans of something are worried when it becomes too popular, they object against losing their positional good. That's just one possible explanation. Sometimes the fact that X becomes widely popular changes X, and there are people who genuinely preferred the original version.

That doesn't explain why the new X looks much more like an extreme version of the popular version of X rather than the original X.