If you believe that existential risk is the highest priority cause area by a significant margin—a belief that is only increasing in prominence—then the last thing you’d want to do is interfere with the EA → existential risk pipeline.
That said, I’m hugely in favour of cause-specific movement building—it solves a lot of problems, such as picking up different people from the EA framing and makes it easier to spend more money running programs, just as you’ve said.
I don’t believe the EA → existential risk pipeline is the best pipeline to bring in people to work on existential risks. I actually think it’s a very suboptimal one and that absent how EA history played out, no one would ever have had answered the question of “What’s the best way to get people to work on existential risks?” with anything resembling “Let’s start them with the ideas of Peter Singer and then convince them that they should include future people in their circle of concern and do the math.” Obviously this argument has worked well for longtermist EAs, but it’s hard for me to believe that’s a more effective approach than appealing to people’s basic intuitions about why the world ending would be bad.
That said, I also do think closing this pipeline entirely would be quite bad. Sam Bankman-Fried, after all, seems to have come through that pipeline. But I think the EA <-> rationality pipeline is quite strong despite the two being different movements, and that the same would be true here for a separate existential risk prevention movement as well.
I don’t know if it’s the best pipeline, but a lot of people have come through this pipeline who were initially skeptical of existential risks. So empirically, it seems to be a more effective pipeline than people might think. I guess one of the advantages is that people only need to resonate with one of the main cause areas to initially get involved and they can shift cause areas over time and I think it’s really important to have a pipeline like this.
Yes. I liked the OP, but think it might be better titled/framed as “X-risk should have it’s own distinct movement (separate from EA)”, or “X-risk without EA/Longtermism”. There are definitely still hugely active parts of the EA movement that aren’t focused on Longtermism or X-risk (Global Poverty and Animal Welfare donations and orgs are still increasing/expanding, despite losing relative “market share”).
If you believe that existential risk is the highest priority cause area by a significant margin—a belief that is only increasing in prominence—then the last thing you’d want to do is interfere with the EA → existential risk pipeline.
That said, I’m hugely in favour of cause-specific movement building—it solves a lot of problems, such as picking up different people from the EA framing and makes it easier to spend more money running programs, just as you’ve said.
I don’t believe the EA → existential risk pipeline is the best pipeline to bring in people to work on existential risks. I actually think it’s a very suboptimal one and that absent how EA history played out, no one would ever have had answered the question of “What’s the best way to get people to work on existential risks?” with anything resembling “Let’s start them with the ideas of Peter Singer and then convince them that they should include future people in their circle of concern and do the math.” Obviously this argument has worked well for longtermist EAs, but it’s hard for me to believe that’s a more effective approach than appealing to people’s basic intuitions about why the world ending would be bad.
That said, I also do think closing this pipeline entirely would be quite bad. Sam Bankman-Fried, after all, seems to have come through that pipeline. But I think the EA <-> rationality pipeline is quite strong despite the two being different movements, and that the same would be true here for a separate existential risk prevention movement as well.
I don’t know if it’s the best pipeline, but a lot of people have come through this pipeline who were initially skeptical of existential risks. So empirically, it seems to be a more effective pipeline than people might think. I guess one of the advantages is that people only need to resonate with one of the main cause areas to initially get involved and they can shift cause areas over time and I think it’s really important to have a pipeline like this.
Yes. I liked the OP, but think it might be better titled/framed as “X-risk should have it’s own distinct movement (separate from EA)”, or “X-risk without EA/Longtermism”. There are definitely still hugely active parts of the EA movement that aren’t focused on Longtermism or X-risk (Global Poverty and Animal Welfare donations and orgs are still increasing/expanding, despite losing relative “market share”).