I think one of the reasons I loved this post is that my experience of reading it echoed in an odd way my own personal journey within EA. I remember thinking even at the start of EA there was a lack of diversity and a struggle at accept “deep critiques”. Mostly this did not affect me – until I moved into an EA longtermist role a few years ago. Finding existing longtermist research to be lacking for the kind of work I was doing I turned to the existent disciplines on risk (risk management, deep uncertainty, futures tool, etc). Next thing I know a disproportionately large amount of my time seemed to be being sunk into trying and failing to get EA thinkers and funders take seriously governance issues and those aforementioned risk disciplines. Ultimately I gave up and ended up partly switching away from that kind of work. Yet despite all this I still find the EA community to be the best place for helping me mend the world.
I loved your post but I want to push back on one thing – these problems are not only in the longermist side of EA. Yes neartermist EA is epistemically healthier (or at minimum currently having less scandals), but that there are still problems and we should still be self reflective and looking to learn from posts like this and to consider if there are issues around: diversity of views, limited funding to high impact areas due to over centralisation, rejection of deep critiques, bad actors, and so on. As one example consider the (extremely laudable) criticism contents from GiveWell which was focused heavily on looking at how their quantitative analyses are 10% inaccurate, but not finding ways to highlight where their approach might be fundamentally failing to make good decisions. [section edited]
PS. One extra idea for the idea list: run CEA (or other EA orgs) on a cooperative model where every donor/member gets a vote on key issues or leadership decisions.
I think one of the reasons I loved this post is that my experience of reading it echoed in an odd way my own personal journey within EA. I remember thinking even at the start of EA there was a lack of diversity and a struggle at accept “deep critiques”. Mostly this did not affect me – until I moved into an EA longtermist role a few years ago. Finding existing longtermist research to be lacking for the kind of work I was doing I turned to the existent disciplines on risk (risk management, deep uncertainty, futures tool, etc). Next thing I know a disproportionately large amount of my time seemed to be being sunk into trying and failing to get EA thinkers and funders take seriously governance issues and those aforementioned risk disciplines. Ultimately I gave up and ended up partly switching away from that kind of work. Yet despite all this I still find the EA community to be the best place for helping me mend the world.
I loved your post but I want to push back on one thing – these problems are not only in the longermist side of EA. Yes neartermist EA is epistemically healthier (or at minimum currently having less scandals), but that there are still problems and we should still be self reflective and looking to learn from posts like this and to consider if there are issues around: diversity of views, limited funding to high impact areas due to over centralisation, rejection of deep critiques, bad actors, and so on. As one example consider the (extremely laudable) criticism contents from GiveWell which was focused heavily on looking at how their quantitative analyses are 10% inaccurate, but not finding ways to highlight where their approach might be fundamentally failing to make good decisions. [section edited]
PS. One extra idea for the idea list: run CEA (or other EA orgs) on a cooperative model where every donor/member gets a vote on key issues or leadership decisions.