I’m much less involved now than I was 12 months ago.
There are a few reasons for this. The largest factor is that my engagement has steadily decreased since I stopped working an EA job where engagement with EA was a job requirement and took a non-EA job instead. My intellectual interests have also shifted to history of science which is mostly outside the EA purview.
More generally, from the outside, EA feels stagnant both intellectually and socially. The intellectual advances that I’m aware of seem to be concentrated in working out the details of longtermism using the tools of philosophy and economics—important work to be sure, but not work that is likely to substantially influence my worldview or plans.
Socially, many of the close friends I met in EA are drifting away from EA involvement. The newer people I’ve met also tend to have a notably different vibe from EAs in the past. Newer EAs seem to be looking to the older EA intellectuals to tell them the answer to what they should do with their lives and how they should think about the world. Something I liked about the vibe of the EA community in the past was the sense of possibility; the sense that there were many unanswered questions and that everyone had to work together to figure things out.
As the EA community has matured, it seems to have narrowed its focus and reigned in its level of ambition. That’s probably for the best, but I suspect it means that the intellectual explorers of the future are probably going to be located elsewhere.
I’m much less involved now than I was 12 months ago.
There are a few reasons for this. The largest factor is that my engagement has steadily decreased since I stopped working an EA job where engagement with EA was a job requirement and took a non-EA job instead. My intellectual interests have also shifted to history of science which is mostly outside the EA purview.
More generally, from the outside, EA feels stagnant both intellectually and socially. The intellectual advances that I’m aware of seem to be concentrated in working out the details of longtermism using the tools of philosophy and economics—important work to be sure, but not work that is likely to substantially influence my worldview or plans.
Socially, many of the close friends I met in EA are drifting away from EA involvement. The newer people I’ve met also tend to have a notably different vibe from EAs in the past. Newer EAs seem to be looking to the older EA intellectuals to tell them the answer to what they should do with their lives and how they should think about the world. Something I liked about the vibe of the EA community in the past was the sense of possibility; the sense that there were many unanswered questions and that everyone had to work together to figure things out.
As the EA community has matured, it seems to have narrowed its focus and reigned in its level of ambition. That’s probably for the best, but I suspect it means that the intellectual explorers of the future are probably going to be located elsewhere.
Question for my understanding: what is your current job?
I work at Leverage Research as the Program Manager for our Early Stage Science research.