EA - Diversity takes by quinn

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Diversity takes, published by quinn on February 14, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Richard Ren gets points for the part of diversity's value prop that has to do with frame disruption, I also realized a previously neglected by me merit of standpoint epistemology while I was ranting about something to him.Written quickly over not at all, based on my assessment of the importance of not letting the chase after that next karma hit prevent me from doing actual work, but also wanting to permanently communicate something that I've ranted about on discord and meatspace numerous times.Ozy really crushed it recently, and in this post I'm kind of expanding on their takedown of Doing EA Better's homogeneity takes.A premise of this post is that diversity is separable into demographic and intellectual parts. Demographic diversity is when you enumerate all the sources of variance in things like race, gender, faith, birthplace, et. al. and intellectual diversity is where you talk about sources of variance in ideas, philosophy, ideology, priors, et. al.. In this post, I'm going to celebrate intellectual exclusion, then explore an objection to see how much it weakens my argument. I'm going to be mostly boring and agreeable about EA's room for improvement on demographic diversity, but I'm going to distinguish between demographic diversity's true value prop and its false value prop. The false value prop will lead me to highlighting standpoint epistemology, talk about why I think rejection of it in general is deeply EA but also defend keeping it in the overton window, and outline what I think are the right and wrong ways to use it.I will distinguish solidarity from altruism as the two basic strategies for improving the world, and claim that EA oughtn't try too hard to cultivate solidarity.Definition 1: standpoint epistemologyTwice, philosophers have informed me that standpoint epistemology isn't a real tradition. That it has signaling functions on a kind of ideology level in and between philosophy departments, ready be used as a cudgel or flag, but there's no granular characterization of what it is and how it works that epistemologists agree on. This is probably cultural: critical theorists and analytical philosophers have different standards of what it means to "characterize" an "epistemology", but I don't in fact care about philosophy department politics, I care about a coherent phenomenon that I've observed in the things people say. So, without any appeal to the flowery language of the credentialed, and assuming the anticipation-constraint definition of "belief" as a premise, I will define standpoint epistemology as expecting people with skin in a game to know more about that game than someone who's not directly exposed.Take 1: poor people are cool and smart...I'm singling out poor people instead of some other niche group because I spent several years under $10k/year. (I was a leftist who cared a lot about art, which means I was what leftists and artists affectionately call "downwardly mobile", not like earning similarly to my parents or anything close to that). I think those years directly cultivated a model of how the world works, and separately gave me a permanent ability to see between the staples of society all the resilience, bravery, and pain that exists out there.Here's a factoid that some of you might not know, in spite of eating in restaurants a lot: back-of-house is actually operationally marvelous. Kitchens are like orchestras. I sometimes tell people that they should pick up some back of house shifts just so they can be a part of it.There's kind of a scope sensitivity thing going on where you can abstractly communicate about single mothers relying on the bus to get to minimum wage jobs, but it really hits different when you've worked with them. Here's anot...