Notice what arguments aren't made (but don't necessarily go and make them)

Playing devil's advocate for a moment, it feels like in the limit this sort of none dare urge restraint dynamic may lead to EA getting watered down to the point where it's not as substantially different from mainstream altruism. I'd expect that mainstream altruism is already pretty well optimized to make its practitioners look like good people to the mainstream. If there's an incentive structure within EA to make EAs look like good people to the mainstream (by cutting out weird causes, suppressing critical discussion, etc.), and there aren't countervailing incentives, where exactly do we think this trend is going to stop?

The post arguing that EA should be "elitist" got lots of upvotes, even though it presumably belongs in the latter category.

I may be influenced by the Less Wrong side of things, but in my experience “They make the reader feel awful cognitive dissonance and make them question their views” is a factor that leads to a lot of upvotes. But maybe there are different types of updating, one that make the person feel virtuous about updating and one that make them feel bad about having been wrong. If there is, then I haven’t found any pattern behind them.

Btw., jerk opinions 1–3 seem defensible to me, 4 with more modest phrasing, but I’d be really curious about any arguments someone could come up with in defense of 5 and 6. But: Rob and other people who, I suspect, know a bunch of things I don’t seem to be interestingly careful about what gets published in this forum, so this is probably something we should rather chitchat about at our local meetup. I just read about how newspaper reports on suicides seem to actually cause suicides, so this virtue of silence thing is not to be taken lightly.

This is, I take it, an ad hominem-argument:

Two reasons these articles get written and become popular are:

They make the author look virtuous (e.g. modest, kind, reliable).
The arguments flatter a large share of readers.

It says that there are non-rational reasons why these articles gets written, and implies that is a reason to adjust the probability that the content of those articles are true downwards.

Now ad hominem-arguments do have a place in debating, although they should be used cautiously. I want to emphasize, though, that similar ad hominem-arguments can also be made against those that write the latter sort of posts. E.g., one might argue that they want to be contrarian, or that they want to be part of an exclusive club, that they want to feel better than everyone else, etc.

Now given the demographic set-up of the EA movement, it isn't obvious to me that the latter kind of ad hominem-argument is less plausible than the former. The situation seems to me to be quite symmetric.

But I also want to caution against over-use of ad hominem-arguments, and not only in public, but also when you're thinking about this yourself. It is very easy to invent a straw man caricature of your opponent - "they only have that view because (insert self-interested motivation)". This is a good example of that, from the "elitist" post:

This all said, the accusation of elitism, even if it's accurate, can feel hurtful. Nevertheless there is an important thought experiment to run: In the hypothetical world where elitism is in fact the best strategy for saving and improving the most lives (even after accounting for reputational risk), how many happy lives am I willing to sacrifice in order to not be accused of elitism?

This implies that those who oppose elitism do so because of their self-interest in not being hurt by accusations of elitism. I defintely don't believe that is universally true. Neither do I believe that all of those who advocate that EA should try to focus on recruiting elite members do so because they want to feel like they're part of an elite group. Instead, I believe that both groups have good reasons for their views, and that we should try to engage with them. (This is not to say that we don't fall prey to biases; we all do.) This debate needs more steel-manning.