The Phil Torres essay in Aeon attacking Longtermism might be good

I think you're underestimating the impact bad faith criticism can have. Lots of people just copy their takes from someone else.

One substantive point that I do think is worth making is that Torres isn't coming from the perspective of common-sense morality Vs longtermism, but rather a different, opposing, non-mainstream morality that (like longtermism) is much more common among elites and academics.

Yet this Baconian, capitalist view is one of the most fundamental root causes of the unprecedented environmental crisis that now threatens to destroy large regions of the biosphere, Indigenous communities around the world, and perhaps even Western technological civilisation itself.

When he says that this Baconian idea is going to damage civilisation, presumably he thinks that we should do something about this, so he's implicitly arguing for very radical things that most people today, especially in the Global South, wouldn't endorse at all. If we take this claim at face value, it would probably involve degrowth and therefore massive economic and political change.

I'm not saying that longtermism is in agreement with the moral priorities of most people or that Torres's (progressive? degrowth?) worldview is overall similarly counterintuitive to longtermism. His perspective is more counterintuitive to me, but on the other hand a lot more people share his worldview, and it's currently much more influential in politics.

But I think it's still important to point out that Torres's world-view goes against common-sense morality as well, and that like longtermists he thinks it's okay to second guess the deeply held moral views of most people under the right circumstances.

Practically what that means is that, for the reasons you've given, many of the criticisms that don't rely on CSM, but rather on his morality, won't land with everyone reading the article. So I agree that this probably doesn't make longtermism look as bad as he thinks.

FWIW, my guess is that if you asked a man in the street whether weak longtermist policies or degrowth environmentalist policies were crazier, he'd probably choose the latter.

EA is still in a context where recruiting new people who are interested in the ideas is vastly more important to the cause than ensuring everyone thinks positively of it. 

This is not consistent with my conversations with longtermists and my impressions speaking to funder(s) in longtermism.

From this, it seems that being seen as weird or negative would actively undermine foundational projects in longtermism today.

Sometimes I think people have a model of movement building that involves mass action, publicity and generally "punching out" (e.g. PETA, people physically fighting in the same two blocks in Portland for months). 

I would want someone to have a way better model involving gears level work. I think this talent and insight is probably available today and someone write about it explicitly.

For years, LessWrong and the broader rationalist community has faced similar criticism:

• Look at these nerds trying to tally up biases in a naïve way that will only lead them further astray from properly understanding themselves and the world.

• What does "rational" even mean, how can we define it? How arrogant to name the whole movement "rationalism".

• This weird stuff about quantum mechanics sounds crazy, like the kind of thing cults believe.

• (Misconceptions about "rationality" meaning being cold/emotionless like Spock from Star Trek)

As with this article, some of the criticism was true (tallying up official psychological biases turns out to be not very useful, and the community has moved away from that over time), but it's mixed in with a lot of nonsense and bad-faith or ill-informed attacks. Nevertheless, lots of people (such as myself, long ago) initially heard of LessWrong via criticism of it, and over time our curiosity kept us coming back to learn more until we were eventually won over. But surely it also turned off many others, or prevented rationalism from becoming as prestigious / authoritative / mainstream as it possibly could have otherwise.

Overall, in retrospect, do you think this kind of criticism helped or hurt the rationalist movement?

Having missed the responses to some of Torres' earlier articles, I found myself interested to read a response to some of his points. If anyone else is in the same boat, this post  from 8 months back covers most of them. 

Great, thanks for writing this.  I wished you had included a concise and short summary of the article in your post rather than your evaluation. This would have provided more information to people who don't read the article. I read parts of the original article.

Re. "Few of us would unhesitatingly accept the repugnant conclusion":  I unhesitatingly accept the repugnant conclusion.  We all do, except for people who say that it's repugnant to place the welfare of a human above that of a thousand bacteria.  (I think Jainists say something like that.)

Arriving at the repugnant conclusion presumes you have an objective way of comparing the utility of two beings.  I can't just say "My utility function equals your utility function times two".  You have to have some operationalized, common definition of utility, in which values presumably cache out in organismal conscious phenomenal experience, that allows you to compare utilities across beings.

It's easy to believe that such an objective measure would calculate the utility of pleasure to a human as being more than a thousand times as great as the utility of whatever is pleasurable to a bacterium (probably something like a positive glucose gradient).  Every time we try to kill the bacteria in our refrigerator, we're endorsing the repugnant conclusion.