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But almost all of the impactful positions in the world are at organisations which don’t identify as EA. So it’s important for us to find ways to make sure that wherever they work, people can still have a sense of being often around people with similar values and who help them figure out their path.

I share the view that this seems potentially really valuable. Anecdotally, I know an EA who seems like they could do well in roles at EA orgs, or could potentially rise to fairly high positions in government roles in a country that’s not a major EA hub. There are of course many consideration influencing their thinking about which path to pursue, but one notable one is that the latter just understandably sounds less fun, less satisfying over the long term, and more prone to value drift.

I think efforts to address this issue might ideally also try to address the issue that status, validation, etc. within the EA movement are easier to access by working at EA orgs than at other orgs, and probably especially hard to access by working at orgs outside the major EA hubs (e.g., a key department of a government agency in an Asia country rather than in the UK or US).

We tried to brainstorm some ideas for how EA in general could support people like this EA I know to happily pursue roles that where (by default) there’d be no EAs in their orgs and maybe only a few in their city/​country as well. Some (not necessarily good) ideas, from memory:

• Have more EA conferences in these not-currently-EA-hubs, so that the people living there can sometimes get “booster shots” of EA interactions

• Provide funding for these people to occasionally travel to EA conferences /​ EA hubs

• Make the EA movement more geographically distributed, e.g. by some EA orgs moving to places that aren’t currently hubs

Some (also not necessarily good) ideas that come to mind now:

• Support more EA community building in these areas

• Support the creation of organisations like HIPE in these areas

  • This could be seen as supporting community building that’s more targeted in terms of sector/​career, yet not necessarily explicitly EA-branded. It could build a network of people with similar values and a desire to help each other, even if few/​none explicitly identify as part of the EA movement.

  • (I don’t actually know much about HIPE)

• Some sort of virtual community building stuff?

  • Things like the EA Anywhere group?

  • Things like online coworking spaces?

  • (There’s obviously a lot that could be done in this broad bucket)

• Efforts to just make EAs less concerned about status, validation, etc. within the EA movement (or more concerned about those things from outside the EA movement)

  • (No big ideas for this immediately come to my mind)

• Efforts to just make status, validation, etc. make those things easier to access for people who work at non-EA orgs and outside of EA hubs

  • This could include EAs sharing info about a broader range of organisations, geographical areas, career paths, etc., so that more EAs can easily see why a wider range of things are impactful

An impression after skimming this post (not well thought through; do point out what I missed):
Some of the tentative project ideas listed are oriented around extending EA’s reach via new like-minded groups who will share our values and strategies.

Sentences that seemed to be supporting this line of thinking:

… making it the case that all major decision makers (politicians, business leaders etc) use ‘will this most improve wellbeing over the long run?’ as their main decision criterion.

...So it’s important for us to find ways to make sure that wherever they work, people can still have a sense of being often around people with similar values and who help them figure out their path.

...One problem with area specific community building is that in order to be taken seriously and know enough to be helpful to people, you might yourself need to be doing object level work in the area.

I’m unsure how much I misinterpreted specific project ideas listed in this post.

Leaving that aside, I generally worry about encouraging further outreach focused on creating like-minded groups of influential professionals (and even more about encouraging initiators to focus their efforts on making such groups look ‘prestigious’). I expect that will discourage efforts in outreach to integrate importantly diverse backgrounds, approaches, and views. I would expect EA field builders to involve fewer of the specialists who developed their expertise inside a dissimilar context, take alternative approaches to understanding and navigating their field, or have insightful but different views that complement views held in EA.

A field builder who simply aims to increase EA’s influence over decisions made by professionals will tend to select for and socially reward members that line up with their values/​cause prio/​strategy as a default tactic, I think. Inversely, taking the tactic of connecting EAs who like to talk with other EAs who are climbing similar career ladders leads to those gathered themselves agreeing to and approving each other more for exerting influence in stereotypically EA ways. Such group dynamics can lead to a kind of impoverished homogenisation of common knowledge and values.

I imagine a corporate, academic, or bureaucratic decision maker getting involved in an EA-aligned group and consulting their collaborators on how to make an impact. Given that they’re surrounded by like-minded EAs, they may not become aware of shared blindspots in EA. Conversely, they’d less often reach out and listen attentively to outside stakeholders who can illuminate them on those blindspots.

Decision makers who lose touch with other important perspectives will no longer spot certain mistakes they might make, and may therefore become (even more) overconfident about certain ways of making impact on the world. This could lead to more ‘superficially EA-good’ large-scale decisions that actually negatively impact persons far removed from us.


In my opinion, it would be awesome if

1. along with existing field-building initiatives focused on expanding the influence of EA thought,

2. we encourage corresponding efforts to really get in touch and build shared understandings with specialised stakeholders (particularly, those with skin in the game) who have taken up complementary approaches and views to doing good in their field.

Some reasons:

• Dedicated EA field builders seem to naturally incline towards type 1 efforts. Therefore, it’s extra important for strategic thinkers and leaders in the EA community to be deliberate and clear about encouraging type 2 efforts in the projects they advise.

• 1 is challenging to implement but EA field builders have been making steady progress in scaling up initiatives there (e.g. staff at Founder’s Pledge, Global Priorities Institute, Center for Human-Compatible AI).

• 2 seems much more challenging intellectually. They require us to build bridges that allow EA and non-EA-identifying organisations to complement each other: complex, nuanced perspectives that allow us to traverse between general EA principles and arguments, and the contextual awareness and domain-specific know-how (amongst others) of experienced specialists. I have difficulty recalling EA initiatives that were explicitly intended for coordinating type 2 efforts.

At this stage, I would honestly prefer if field builders start paying much deeper attention to 2. before they go out changing other people’s minds and the world. I’m not sure how much credence to put in this being a better course of action though. I have little experience reaching out to influential professionals myself. It also feels I’m speculating here on big implications in a way that seems unnecessary or exaggerated. I’d be curious to hear more nuanced arguments from an experienced field-builder.

Yeah, I agree that there would be significant benefits to trying to set up another academic research institute at a university more focused on economics.

What I’d have liked was:

• A succinct summary of what seemed good and bad about the change to give me an idea of whether I agreed with it.

• A really clear action plan if I wanted to help in some way. That might include, for example: sample letters to send to your MP, some considerations on what makes letters to your MP more/​less likely to succeed (are emails better than physical letters, or vice versa?), a link to where you can find out who your local MP is and what the best way to contact them is.

This seems like a good idea to me. And the second idea seems to me like a potential Task Y, meaning something which has some or all of the properties:

• “Task Y is something that can be performed usefully by people who are not currently able to choose their career path entirely based on EA concerns*.

• Task Y is clearly effective, and doesn’t become much less effective the more people who are doing it.

• The positive effects of Task Y are obvious to the person doing the task.”

Relatedly, that second idea also seems like something anyone could just start and provide value in right away—no need for permission, special resources, or unusual skills. (My local EA group actually discussed similar things previously in the context of climate change, and took some minor actions in this direction.)

I’ve just made a shortform post on Some ideas for projects to improve the long-term future. I brainstormed the ideas before seeing this post, but this post is part of what prompted me to share the ideas publicly. And the shortform is only moderately rather than massively long, so I’ll copy the whole thing below rather than just linking to it. (Maybe that’s a bit weird? If so, sorry!)

---

In January, I spent ~1 hour trying to brainstorm relatively concrete ideas for projects that might help improve the long-term future. I later spent another ~1 hour editing what I came up with for this shortform. This shortform includes basically everything I came up with, not just a top selection, so not all of these ideas will be great. I’m also sure that my commentary misses some important points. But I thought it was worth sharing this list anyway.

The ideas vary in the extent to which the bottleneck(s) to executing them are the right person/​people, buy-in from the right existing organisation, or funding.

I’m not expecting to execute these ideas in the near-term future myself, so if you think one of these ideas sounds promising and relevant to your skills, interests, etc., please feel very free to explore the idea further, to comment here, and/​or to reach out to me to discuss it! [If commenting, please comment on the shortform version of this, so centralise discussion there.]

• Something along the lines of compiling a large set of potentially promising cause areas and interventions; doing rough Fermi estimates, cost-effectiveness analyses, and/​or forecasts; thereby narrowing the list down; and then maybe gradually doing more extensive Fermi estimates, cost-effectiveness analyses, and/​or forecasts

  • This is somewhat similar to things that Ozzie Gooen, Nuño Sempere, and Charity Entrepreneurship have done or are doing

    • Ozzie also discusses some similar ideas here

  • So it’d probably be worth talking to them about this

• Something like a team of part-time paid forecasters, both to forecast on various important questions and to be “on-call” when it looks like a catastrophe or window of opportunity might be looming

  • I think I got this idea from Linch Zhang, and it might be worth talking to him about it

• 80,000 Hours-style career reviews on things like diplomacy, arms control, international organisations, becoming a Russia/​India/​etc specialist

  • Some discussion here

  • Could see if 80k would be happy to supervise someone else to do this

  • Could seek out EAs or EA-aligned people who are working full-time in related areas

    • Organisations like HIPE, CSET, and EA Russia might have useful connections

  • I might be open to collaborating with someone on this

• Research or writing assistance for researchers (especially senior ones) at orgs like FHI, Forethought, MIRI, CHAI

  • This might allow them to complete additional valuable projects

  • This also might help the research or writing assistants build career capital and test fit for valuable roles

  • Maybe BERI can already provide this?

  • It’s possible it’s not worth being proactive about this, and instead waiting for people to decide they want an assistant and create a job ad for one. But I’d guess that some proactiveness would be useful (i.e., that there are cases where someone would benefit from such an assistant but hasn’t thought of it, or doesn’t think the overhead of a long search for one is worthwhile)

  • See also this comment from someone who did this sort of role for Toby Ord

• Research or writing assistance for certain independent researchers?

• Ops assistance for orgs like FHI?

  • But I think orgs like BERI and the Future of Humanity Foundation are already in this space

• Additional “Research Training Programs” like summer research fellowships, “Early Career Conference Programmes”, internships, or similar

  • Probably best if this is at existing orgs

  • Could perhaps find an org that isn’t doing this yet but has researchers who would be capable of providing valuable mentorship, suggest the idea to them, and be or find someone who can handle the organisational aspects

• Something like the Open Phil AI fellowship, but for another topic

  • In particular, something that captures the good effects a “fellowship” can have, beyond the provision of funding (since there are already some sources of funding alone, such as the Long-Term Future Fund)

• A hub for longtermism-relevant research (or a narrower area, e.g. AI) outside of US and UK

  • Perhaps ideally a non-Anglophone country? Perhaps ideally in Asia?

  • Could be a new organisation or a branch/​affiliate of an existing one

  • There’s some relevant discussion here, here, here, and I think here (though I haven’t properly read that post)

• Found an organization/​community similar to HIPE and/​or APPGFG, but in countries other than the UK

  • I’d guess it’d probably be easiest in countries where there is a substantial EA presence, and perhaps easier in smaller countries like Switzerland rather than in the US

  • Why this might/​might not be good:

    • I don’t know a huge amount about HIPE or APPGFG, but from my limited info on those orgs they seem valuable

    • I’d guess that there’s no major reason something similar to HIPE couldn’t be successfully replicated in other countries, if we could find the right person/​people

    • In contrast, I’d guess that there might be more barriers to successfully replicating something like APPGFG

      • E.g., most countries probably don’t have an institution very similar to APPGs

      • But I imagine something broadly similar could be replicated elsewhere

  • Potential next steps:

    • Talk to people involved in HIPE and APPGFG about whether they think these things could be replicated, how valuable they think that’d be, how they’d suggest it be done, what countries they’d suggest, and who they’d suggest talking to

    • Talk to other EAs, especially outside of the UK, who are involved in politics, policy, and improving institutional decision-making

      • Ask them for their thoughts, who they’d suggest reaching out to, and (in some cases) whether they might be interested in collaborating on this

• I also had some ideas for specific research or writing projects, but I’m not including them in this list

  • That’s partly because I might publish something more polished on that later

  • It’s mostly because people can check out A central directory for open research questions for a broader set of research project ideas

  • See also Why you (yes, you) should post on the EA Forum

See also:

• Possible gaps in the EA community—EA Forum

• Get Involved—EA Forum

The views I expressed here are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employers.

Thanks for this post! I think I basically share the view that all of those prompts are useful and all of those “gaps” are worth seriously considering. I’ll share some thoughts in separate comments.

(FWIW, I think maybe the idea I feel least confident is worth having an additional person focus ~full-time on—considering what other activities are already being done—is creating “some easy way for someone who’s about to make their yearly donation to chat to another person about it.”)

Regarding influencing future decision-makers

Something which would make that most likely to happen is having EA ideas discussed in courses in all top universities. That led me to wonder whether we’re currently neglecting supporting and encouraging lecturers to do that.

Both of those claims match my independent impression.

On the first claim: This post using neoliberalism as a case study seems relevant (I highlight that mainly for readers, not as new evidence, as I imagine that article probably already influenced your thinking here).

On the second claim: When I was a high school teacher and first learned of EA, two of the main next career steps I initially considered were:

• Try to write a sort of EA textbook

• Try to become a university lecturer who doesn’t do much research, and basically just takes on lots of teaching duties

  • My thinking was that:

    • I’d seen various people argue that it’s a shame that so many world-class researchers have to spend much of their time teaching when that wasn’t their comparative advantage (and in some cases they were outright bad at it)

    • And I’d also heard various people argue that a major point of leverage over future leaders may be influencing what ideas students at top unis are exposed to

    • So it seemed like it might be worth considering trying to find a way to specialise in taking teaching load off top researchers’ plates while also influencing future generations of leaders

  • I didn’t actually look into whether jobs along those lines exist. I considered that maybe, even if they don’t exist, one could be entrepreneurial and convince a uni to create one, or adapt another role into that.

    • Though an obstacle would probably be the rigidity of many universities.

I ultimately decided on other paths, partly due to reading more of 80k’s articles. And I do think the decisions I made make more sense for me. But reading this post has reminded me of those ideas and updated me towards thinking it could be worth some people considering the second one in particular.

Supporting teaching of effective altruism at universities

I feel quite good about the ideas in this section—I’d definitely be excited for one or more things along those lines to be done one or more people who are good fits for that.

Some of those activities sound like they might be sort-of similar to some of the roles people involved in other EA education efforts (e.g., Students for High-Impact Charity, SPARC) and Effective Thesis have played. So maybe it’d be valuable to talk to such people, learn about their experiences and their perspectives on these ideas, etc.

Misc small comments

For example, when you inherit money might be a good time to make a significant donation: if the money isn’t part of your usual revenue stream, you might not need all of it.

This does seems like a good idea to me, but I think Generation Pledge might already be doing something like that? (That said, I don’t know much about them, and I don’t necessarily think that one org doing ~X means no other org should do ~X.)

Also, for people thinking about this broader idea of potentially setting up pledges (or whatever) that cover things GWWC isn’t designed for, it may be useful to check out A List of EA Donation Pledges (GWWC, etc).

It could be cool to have a point person for an area who does things like: chats to people considering moving into that area (to help them decide), regularly checks in with people working in the area (to support them in their journey), and connects people who could productively collaborate.

I know very little about Animal Advocacy Careers, but this sounds like the sort of thing they might do? And if they don’t do it, then maybe they could start doing so for the animal space (which could be useful directly and also could provide a model others could learn from)? And if they raise strong specific reasons to be inclined against doing that (rather than just reasons why it’s not currently their top priority), that could be useful to learn from as well.

But I think that pressure is ultimately counterproductive, because I think we’ll only be able to do the best we can if we consider a broad array of options and think about them carefully.

Yeah, I think it’d be pretty terrible if people took EA’s focus on prioritisation, critical thinking, etc. as a reason to not raise ideas that might turn out to be uninteresting, low-quality, low-priority, or whatever. It seems best to have a relatively low bar for raising an idea (along with appropriate caveats, expressions of uncertainty, etc.), even if we want to keep the bar for things we spend lots of resources on quite high. We’ll find better priorities if we start with a broad pool of options.

(See also babble and prune [full disclosure: I don’t know if I’ve actually read any of those posts].)

(Obviously some screening is needed before even raising an idea—we won’t literally say any random sequence of syllables, and we should probably not bother writing about every idea that seemed potentially promising for a moment but not after a minute of thought. But it basically seems)

A long quibbly tangent

I think one way we could make the world far better in decades’ time is by making it the case that all major decision makers (politicians, business leaders etc) use ‘will this most improve wellbeing over the long run?’ as their main decision criterion.

I’d say there’s a >50% chance that this would indeed be good, and that it’s plausible it’d be very good. But it also seems to me plausible that this would be bad or very bad. This is for a few reasons:

1. You didn’t say what you meant by wellbeing. A decision maker might say “wellbeing” and mean only the wellbeing of humans, or of people in countries like theirs (e.g., predominantly English-speaking liberal democracies), or of people in their country, or of an in-group of theirs within their country (e.g., people with the same political leaning or race as them).

   • This could be because they explicitly believe that only those people are moral patients, or just because that’s who they implicitly focus on.

   • If the decision makers do have a narrow subset of all moral patients in mind when they they think about increasing wellbeing, would probably at least reduce the benefits of decision makers having that as their main criterion. It might also lead to that criterion being net harmful, if it means people are consequentialist altruists for one group only, having stripped away the norms and deontological constraints that often help prevent certain bad behaviours.

   • Maybe this is just a nitpick, as you could just edit your statement to incorporate some sort of impartiality. But then you’d have to grapple with exactly how to do that—do we want the criteria decision makers use to come pre-loaded with our current best guesses about moral patienthood and weights? Or with some particular of handling moral uncertainty? Or with some general principles for thinking about how to handle moral uncertainty?

2. I have an intuition that just making people more consequentialist and more altruistic-in-some-sense, without also making them more rational, reflective, cautious, etc., has a decent chance of being harmful. I think the (overlapping) drivers of this intuition are:

   • The fact doing that would move a seemingly important variable into somewhat uncharted territory, so we should start out pretty uncertain about what outcomes it would have, and thus predict a nontrivial chance of fairly bad outcomes

   • The various potential ways people have suggested naive consequentialism could cause harms (even from a consequentialist perspective)

   • There seeming to have been some historical cases where people have been mobilised to do bad things by consequentialist and altruistic-in-some-sense arguments (“for the greater good”)

   • A sort of Chesterton’s fence /​ Secrets of Our Success-style argument for thinking very carefully before substantially changing anything that currently seems like a major part of how the world runs (even if it seems at first glance like the consequences of the change would be good)

[The above statements of mine are pretty vague, and I can try to elaborate if that’d be useful.]

So I’d favour thinking more about precisely what sort of changes we want to make to future decision-makers’ values, reasoning, and criteria for decision-making, and doing so before we make any major pushes on those fronts.

And that generic “more research needed” statement, I’d favour trying to package increases in consequentialism and generic altruism with more reflection on moral circles, more reflectiveness in general, various rationality skills and ideas, and probably some other things like that.

The following posts and their comment sections contain some relevant prior discussion:

• Everyday Longtermism

  • Especially the section Safeguarding against naive utilitarianism, which presents a model/​graph that I think is very interesting and helpful

• Improving the future by influencing actors’ benevolence, intelligence, and power

...but, I think all of this might be pretty much just a tangent. That’s because I think we could just change the sentence of yours that I quoted at the start of this comment to make it reflect a broader package of attributes we want to change in future leaders, and your other points would still stand. E.g., teaching at universities could try to inculcate not just consequentialism and generic altruism but also more reflection on moral circles, more reflectiveness in general, various rationality skills and ideas, etc.