I want people who have influence over the EA community (and humanity in general) to be making decisions from an abundance mindset rather than a scarcity mindset
In case you read the comments here: do you have a short form / a blog post on this (even from someone else) that you’d like to link to?
Richard’s ‘Coercion is an adaptation to scarcity’ post and follow-up comment talk about this (though ofc maybe there’s more to Richard’s view than what’s discussed there). Select quotes:
What if you think, like I do, that we live at the hinge of history, and our actions could have major effects on the far future—and in particular that there’s a significant possibility of existential risk from AGI? I agree that this puts us in more of a position of scarcity and danger than we otherwise would be (although I disagree with those who have very high credence in catastrophe). But the more complex the problems we face, the more counterproductive scarcity mindset is. In particular, AGI safety requires creative paradigm-shifting research, and large-scale coordination; those are both hard to achieve from a scarcity mindset. In other words, coercion at a psychological or community level has strongly diminishing marginal returns when dealing with scarcity at a civilizational level.
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AI is a danger on a civilizational level; but the best way to deal with danger on a civilizational level is via cultivating abundance at the level of your own community, since that’s the only way it’ll be able to make a difference at that higher level.
“I don’t want to encourage people to donate (even to the same places as I did) unless you already have a few million dollars in assets”
I do see advantages of the abundance mindset, but your threshold is extremely high-it excludes nearly everyone in developed countries, let alone the world. Plenty of people without millions of dollars of assets have an abundance mindset (including myself).
In case you read the comments here: do you have a short form / a blog post on this (even from someone else) that you’d like to link to?
Richard’s ‘Coercion is an adaptation to scarcity’ post and follow-up comment talk about this (though ofc maybe there’s more to Richard’s view than what’s discussed there). Select quotes:
“I don’t want to encourage people to donate (even to the same places as I did) unless you already have a few million dollars in assets”
I do see advantages of the abundance mindset, but your threshold is extremely high-it excludes nearly everyone in developed countries, let alone the world. Plenty of people without millions of dollars of assets have an abundance mindset (including myself).