I miss discussions about “how we can make EA mainstream” or “bring EA to academia”.
While I find the EA community to be a great source of personal and social value, we still face the challenge of significantly scaling everything we do. Taking informed steps to doing good better shouldn’t be a side consideration for governments, NGOs or people, it should be the default. Working to systematically address existential risk shouldn’t be the work of a few nonprofits, it should be the work of national and international institutions.
If we over-emphasize community building while at the same time de-prioritizing engaging with the outside world, we risk that vision. There are significant advantages to working inside a community (and we should leverage those!), but to be truly successful, we first have to learn how to communicate with the outside world.
For group organizers, one step we could take is prioritize working with existing institutions and experts in different fields. Instead of only inviting EAs to events, we could invite more experts working in related areas. Instead of only networking with EA institutions, we could work more closely with traditional institutions from different fields. [1]
This probably means navigating difficult tradeoffs, in handling outreach and press, in compromising ideas and in producing less “highly-engaged EAs”, but I think this is a discussion worth having.
This is already happening in the policy space (out of necessity). There’s also plenty of precedent from other EA groups (especially if they’re specialized), but I don’t think it’s nowhere there yet.
I strongly agree.
I miss discussions about “how we can make EA mainstream” or “bring EA to academia”.
While I find the EA community to be a great source of personal and social value, we still face the challenge of significantly scaling everything we do. Taking informed steps to doing good better shouldn’t be a side consideration for governments, NGOs or people, it should be the default. Working to systematically address existential risk shouldn’t be the work of a few nonprofits, it should be the work of national and international institutions.
If we over-emphasize community building while at the same time de-prioritizing engaging with the outside world, we risk that vision. There are significant advantages to working inside a community (and we should leverage those!), but to be truly successful, we first have to learn how to communicate with the outside world.
For group organizers, one step we could take is prioritize working with existing institutions and experts in different fields. Instead of only inviting EAs to events, we could invite more experts working in related areas. Instead of only networking with EA institutions, we could work more closely with traditional institutions from different fields. [1]
This probably means navigating difficult tradeoffs, in handling outreach and press, in compromising ideas and in producing less “highly-engaged EAs”, but I think this is a discussion worth having.
This is already happening in the policy space (out of necessity). There’s also plenty of precedent from other EA groups (especially if they’re specialized), but I don’t think it’s nowhere there yet.