Again, Iām aware that concrete, impactful projects and people still exist within EA. But in the public sphere accessible to me, their influence and visibility are increasingly diminishing, while indirect high-impact approaches via highly speculative expected value calculations become more prominent and dominant.
This has probably been what many people experienced over the last few years, especially as the rest of the world also started getting into AI.
But I think itās possible to counteract by curating oneās own āpublic sphereā instead.
For example, you could follow all of your favorite charities and altruistic projects on Twitter. This might be a good starting point. For inspiration, you could also check the follow lists of places like Open Phil (my employer; we follow a ton of our grantees) or CEAās āofficial EAā account. Throw in Dylan Matthews and Kelsey Piper while youāre at it; Future Perfect publishes content across many cause areas. And finally, at the risk of sounding biased, Iāll note that Alexander Berger has one of the best EA-flavored research feeds I know of.
If you mostly follow concrete, visibly impactful projects, Twitter will start throwing more of those your way. I assume youāll start seeing development economists and YIMBYs working on local policy ā at least, thatās what happened to me. And maybe some of those people have blogs you want to follow, or respond when you comment on their stuff, and suddenly you find yourself floating peacefully among a bunch of adjacent-to-EA communities focused on things that excite you.
The Forum also lets you filter by topic pretty aggressively, hiding or highlighting whatever tags you want. You just have to click āCustomize feedā at the top of the homepage...
...and follow these instructions. (You might be familiar with this, but many Forum users arenāt, so I figured Iād mention it.)
Of course, itās not essential for anyone to follow a bunch of āEA contentā ā your plan of donating to and supporting projects you like is a good one. But if you previously enjoyed reading the Forum, and find it annoying as of late, it may be possible to restore (or improve upon!) your earlier experience and end up with a lot of stuff to read.
I think this is a really important point. My āpublic sphereā of EA has very little longtermism just because of who I happen to follow /ā what I happen to read.
This has probably been what many people experienced over the last few years, especially as the rest of the world also started getting into AI.
But I think itās possible to counteract by curating oneās own āpublic sphereā instead.
For example, you could follow all of your favorite charities and altruistic projects on Twitter. This might be a good starting point. For inspiration, you could also check the follow lists of places like Open Phil (my employer; we follow a ton of our grantees) or CEAās āofficial EAā account. Throw in Dylan Matthews and Kelsey Piper while youāre at it; Future Perfect publishes content across many cause areas. And finally, at the risk of sounding biased, Iāll note that Alexander Berger has one of the best EA-flavored research feeds I know of.
If you mostly follow concrete, visibly impactful projects, Twitter will start throwing more of those your way. I assume youāll start seeing development economists and YIMBYs working on local policy ā at least, thatās what happened to me. And maybe some of those people have blogs you want to follow, or respond when you comment on their stuff, and suddenly you find yourself floating peacefully among a bunch of adjacent-to-EA communities focused on things that excite you.
The Forum also lets you filter by topic pretty aggressively, hiding or highlighting whatever tags you want. You just have to click āCustomize feedā at the top of the homepage...
...and follow these instructions. (You might be familiar with this, but many Forum users arenāt, so I figured Iād mention it.)
Of course, itās not essential for anyone to follow a bunch of āEA contentā ā your plan of donating to and supporting projects you like is a good one. But if you previously enjoyed reading the Forum, and find it annoying as of late, it may be possible to restore (or improve upon!) your earlier experience and end up with a lot of stuff to read.
I think this is a really important point. My āpublic sphereā of EA has very little longtermism just because of who I happen to follow /ā what I happen to read.