Focusing solely in EAs has a bunch of weird effects though.
E.g. I’ve been thinking about some ‘safeguarding democracy’ type interventions for longtermist reasons. If I looked at EA funding I’d presumably conclude that the area was massively underfunded—almost no one working on this. Whereas looking in a global sense the initial impression is that it’s a very large, well-funded area. (Maybe it’s still a useful heuristic though because explicitly longtermist funding and effort might focus on quite different subcomponents of the broad topic?)
And another one is just that how liberal you are in your definitions of what’s EA or not can make quite a big difference. E.g. plausibly by a factor of 2 in the case of animal advocacy.
Yeah it might be more tractable.
Focusing solely in EAs has a bunch of weird effects though.
E.g. I’ve been thinking about some ‘safeguarding democracy’ type interventions for longtermist reasons. If I looked at EA funding I’d presumably conclude that the area was massively underfunded—almost no one working on this. Whereas looking in a global sense the initial impression is that it’s a very large, well-funded area. (Maybe it’s still a useful heuristic though because explicitly longtermist funding and effort might focus on quite different subcomponents of the broad topic?)
And another one is just that how liberal you are in your definitions of what’s EA or not can make quite a big difference. E.g. plausibly by a factor of 2 in the case of animal advocacy.
(No need to reply, I’m just musing.)
Thanks!