Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow

Thank you for this insightful post. While I resonate with the emphasis on the necessity of truthseeking, it's important to also highlight the positive aspects that often get overshadowed. Truthseeking is not only about exposing flaws and maintaining a critical perspective; it's also about fostering open-mindedness, generating new ideas, and empirically testing disagreements. These elements require significantly more effort and resources compared to criticism, which often leads to an oversupply of the latter and can stifle innovation if not balanced with constructive efforts.

Generating new ideas and empirically testing them involves substantial effort and investment, including developing hypotheses, designing experiments, and analyzing results. Despite these challenges, this expansive aspect of truthseeking is crucial for progress and understanding. Encouraging open-mindedness and fostering a culture of curiosity and innovation are essential. This aligns with your point about the importance of embracing unconventional, “weird” ideas, which often lie outside the consensus and require a willingness to explore and challenge the status quo.

Your post reflects a general EA attitude that emphasizes the negative aspects of epistemic virtue while often ignoring the positive. A holistic approach that includes both the critical and constructive dimensions of truthseeking can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of reality and drive meaningful progress. Balancing criticism with creativity and empirical testing, especially for unconventional ideas, can create a more dynamic and effective truthseeking community.

I generally really resonate with this piece. At the same time, when reading this, I keep wondering if this is advice perhaps more appropriate in LW/rationalist circles than in EA? In general, in EA, I do not clearly see why truth-seeking outside cause areas is super helpful? I actually see downsides with this as we can quickly descend into less action-relevant discussion e.g. around religion, gender/sexuality or even more hot-button topics (of course gender/sexuality is crucial in GH interventions centred on this topic!). I kind of feel truth seeking in such domains is perhaps net negative in EA, especially as we need to work across a range of cultures and with people from all walks of life. I think this is a difficult topic but wanted to mention it here as I could  imagine some readers taking especially the heading on hurting other people's feelings as an encouragement in EA to say things that are mostly action irrelevant but gets them lots of attention. My current stance is to refrain from such truth-seeking in public until I have a very strong conviction it could actually change priorities and also have broad support in making public such potentially controversial takes.

I agree mostly with the article, but I think truth-seeking should take into account the large fallibility of the movement. For example:

On the negative side: I can make an argument for any given inclusion or exclusion on the 80,000 hours job board, but I’m certain the overall gestalt is too normal. When I look at the list, almost every entry is the kind of things that any liberal cultivator parent would be happy to be asked about at a dinner party. Almost all of the remaining (and most of the liberal-cultivator-approved) jobs are very core EA. I don’t know what jobs in particular are missing but I do not believe high impact jobs have this much overlap with liberal cultivator parent values. 

I don't see the problem with this. Ideas like "we should stop poor people dying of preventable illnesses" are robust ideas that have stood the test of time and scrutiny, and the reason most people are on board with them is because they are correct and have significant evidence backing them up.

Conversely, "weirder" ideas have significantly less evidence backing them up, and are often based on shaky assumptions or controversial moral opinions.  The most likely explanation for a weird new idea not being popular is that it's wrong. 

If you score "truth-seeking" by being correct on average about the most things, then a strategy of "agree with the majority of subject level scientific experts in every single field" is extremely hard to beat.  I guess the hope is by encouraging contrarianism, you can find a hidden gem that pays off for everything else, but there is a cost to that. 

I'm curating this post. The facets listed are values that I believe in, but that are easy to forget due to short term concerns about optics and so on. I think it's good to be reminded of the importance of these things sometimes. I particularly liked the examples in the section on Open sharing of information, as these are things that other people can try and emulate.

Executive summary: Truthseeking and maintaining contact with reality is the most important meta-principle for achieving consequentialist goals, and there are many facets and techniques for pursuing it that are underutilized in the Effective Altruism community.

Key points:

1. Avoid deferring to "epistemic daddies" and instead delegate opinions while maintaining ultimate responsibility for decisions.
2. Stick to projects small enough to comprehend to maintain the ability to update beliefs.
3. Actively seek out and create new information, with short feedback loops.
4. Protect the epistemic commons by pushing back against anti-truthseeking behavior and supporting others' truthseeking.
5. Cultivate an emotional appreciation for contact with reality, even when it involves losing bets or receiving criticism.
6. Share information openly, including negative information about yourself and others, despite the personal costs, as it benefits the community.

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