Given recent events, are you concerned about progress studies being too closely associated with the Bay Area-centric Rationalist and Effective Altruism communities (even down to using the LessWrong software for this forum)?
2jasoncrawford1yI think the progress community has its own identity that is distinct from (if
partially overlapping with) adjacent communities such as rationalism. For
instance, I got interested in progress [https://rootsofprogress.org/motivation]
when I knew very little about rationalism and nothing about EA. The article that
coined the term “progress studies”
[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/]
was published in The Atlantic, not on LessWrong.
Along the way, the communities discovered each other and found we had a lot of
interesting things to talk about. But there is a set of motivations
[https://rootsofprogress.org/smart-rich-and-free] animating the progress effort
that is original and not derivative of any contemporaneous movement.
I think the most important thing for us to do here is to focus first and
foremost on the facts of reality that we think are most interesting, the goals
and values that we think are most important, and the premises or principles that
we think are most deeply true, and follow all that where it leads—with our
relationship to any other intellectual communities or movements being a distant
second.
Given recent events, are you concerned about progress studies being too closely associated with the Bay Area-centric Rationalist and Effective Altruism communities (even down to using the LessWrong software for this forum)?