Thought-provoking! I think one organization that illustrates the split you’re talking about well is the Centre for Long Term Resilience. This is an EA-aligned advocacy group focused on increasing awareness of and capacity to respond to extreme risks in the UK government. What’s interesting with regard to your post is that they’ve divided their work into three divisions. The first two, AI and biosecurity, are issue-specific. But the third division focuses on generalized “risk management,” or as they put it, “the process of both transforming risk governance, and of identifying, assessing and mitigating all extreme risks.”
I think I agree with you that the community could benefit from more investment in cross-issue and exploratory work of this type. The rest of the world is already too siloed and EA set itself apart in the first place with its commitment to cause neutrality. It’s important to retain that openness and integrative approach even as we get deeper into implementation work on high-impact causes.
Thanks for your comment! Fascinating, haven’t heard of them thus far, I will look into their work! Yes, I agree. I believe that past successes with cause prioritization and forecasting could lead to some overconfidence in regard to competence at discovering unknown cause areas: It will be important to keep up the cause-neutrality, especially in regards to the unknown!
Thought-provoking! I think one organization that illustrates the split you’re talking about well is the Centre for Long Term Resilience. This is an EA-aligned advocacy group focused on increasing awareness of and capacity to respond to extreme risks in the UK government. What’s interesting with regard to your post is that they’ve divided their work into three divisions. The first two, AI and biosecurity, are issue-specific. But the third division focuses on generalized “risk management,” or as they put it, “the process of both transforming risk governance, and of identifying, assessing and mitigating all extreme risks.”
I think I agree with you that the community could benefit from more investment in cross-issue and exploratory work of this type. The rest of the world is already too siloed and EA set itself apart in the first place with its commitment to cause neutrality. It’s important to retain that openness and integrative approach even as we get deeper into implementation work on high-impact causes.
Thanks for your comment!
Fascinating, haven’t heard of them thus far, I will look into their work!
Yes, I agree. I believe that past successes with cause prioritization and forecasting could lead to some overconfidence in regard to competence at discovering unknown cause areas: It will be important to keep up the cause-neutrality, especially in regards to the unknown!