People have been reacting to my last post with #notallEAs, which, totally, but… have you considered that if you have to distinguish yourself from other EAs then maybe the label doesn’t describe you well?
I fought for EA to mean something simpler— just someone who 1. Figured out the best way to improve the world and 2. Does it— but I lost. EA became focused on careers and technical AI Safety. Part of that was it kind of stopped being a thing everyone can participate in in their own way. I’m beyond thrilled that Giving What We Can has gotten more confident in itself again, but for a while there even giving money was being treated as deprecated in the core community. If you’re not going to have an EA career, you can no longer be a real insider.
Again, this is not how I wanted it. Don’t be mad at me for just describing what happened. I wanted EA to nurture fractional participation at every level through teachings and community support, more focused on the middle of the funnel. It started much more that way. But tastes changed and circa 2017 CEA officially changed its recruitment model to be about focusing on making “core EAs”, and EA messaging started being more about recruiting people into a handful of careers. It’s in the second edition of the EA handbook. It was openly discussed, roughly coincident with the switch to longtermism.
Whether everyone reading knows it or not, there is a core community that calls the shots about EA. Even if you run your own group outside of an EA hub, these people tell you what’s effective and worth doing by providing the materials, controlling the money, and setting the trends. In early EA, lots of people did their own research and compared notes. Now that’s less common and there are think tanks (like Rethink Priorities, where I used to work) where Open Phil dictates what research to do and whether it can be shared. (Trying to please OP was a huge concern at RP, and it exerted a huge psychic influence even on me that affected how clearly I could think for myself.)
So what I’m saying is, if you’re not at the top calling the shots, maybe you just shouldn’t cast your lot with them. Because they are the ones controlling what “EA” means, perks and liabilities. If you’re all one people when it comes time to get benefits, how can everyone be distinct when it comes time to share responsibility for EA problems? Every time I engage on this I come upon a bailey of smiling people loving to identify as the same thing, only to have them crawl up into the motte of “not ALL” by the time they’ve finished my post. If you don’t accept the critique and claim you don’t recognize it, maybe you also don’t really need or accept the label.
You value the friends? You can just be friends. If that doesn’t work without adopting the label, they aren’t good friends.
You like the online conversation? You can just talk.
You want an intellectual community? You don’t have to be in communion with them.
You want funding? This one’s tough but you can’t let it dictate your identity to you. Accepting money creates a bond, which you need to accept responsibility for. If you can’t, maybe it’s not worth getting EA money.
You want the EA community to be what you wish it was? Yeah, I did too. But you have to take a clear-eyed look at what it is. And if you take part in it and bear the name, you have to accept the good and the bad of how it actually is.
The last thing I wanted to do was leave EA. I wanted it to be the community it was at the beginning, and I had a lot of influence, but I couldn’t dictate what EA “really” meant in the face of the actual people and choices making up the community. I stuck around for a long time arguing that my version of EA was how it should be, and insisting that that’s how it was for me even if others were doing it differently. When I was forced to leave EA to pursue PauseAI, I could admit to myself that I was co-signing the bad stuff by being there and lending my name and work, and it was shitty of me to think I could shirk responsibility just because I wanted EA to be something else.
So, idk, if you think I’m wrong because you’re an EA and I’m not describing you— in what sense are you an EA? You can always leave.
You can just leave EA
People have been reacting to my last post with #notallEAs, which, totally, but… have you considered that if you have to distinguish yourself from other EAs then maybe the label doesn’t describe you well?
I fought for EA to mean something simpler— just someone who 1. Figured out the best way to improve the world and 2. Does it— but I lost. EA became focused on careers and technical AI Safety. Part of that was it kind of stopped being a thing everyone can participate in in their own way. I’m beyond thrilled that Giving What We Can has gotten more confident in itself again, but for a while there even giving money was being treated as deprecated in the core community. If you’re not going to have an EA career, you can no longer be a real insider.
Again, this is not how I wanted it. Don’t be mad at me for just describing what happened. I wanted EA to nurture fractional participation at every level through teachings and community support, more focused on the middle of the funnel. It started much more that way. But tastes changed and circa 2017 CEA officially changed its recruitment model to be about focusing on making “core EAs”, and EA messaging started being more about recruiting people into a handful of careers. It’s in the second edition of the EA handbook. It was openly discussed, roughly coincident with the switch to longtermism.
Whether everyone reading knows it or not, there is a core community that calls the shots about EA. Even if you run your own group outside of an EA hub, these people tell you what’s effective and worth doing by providing the materials, controlling the money, and setting the trends. In early EA, lots of people did their own research and compared notes. Now that’s less common and there are think tanks (like Rethink Priorities, where I used to work) where Open Phil dictates what research to do and whether it can be shared. (Trying to please OP was a huge concern at RP, and it exerted a huge psychic influence even on me that affected how clearly I could think for myself.)
So what I’m saying is, if you’re not at the top calling the shots, maybe you just shouldn’t cast your lot with them. Because they are the ones controlling what “EA” means, perks and liabilities. If you’re all one people when it comes time to get benefits, how can everyone be distinct when it comes time to share responsibility for EA problems? Every time I engage on this I come upon a bailey of smiling people loving to identify as the same thing, only to have them crawl up into the motte of “not ALL” by the time they’ve finished my post. If you don’t accept the critique and claim you don’t recognize it, maybe you also don’t really need or accept the label.
You value the friends? You can just be friends. If that doesn’t work without adopting the label, they aren’t good friends.
You like the online conversation? You can just talk.
You want an intellectual community? You don’t have to be in communion with them.
You want funding? This one’s tough but you can’t let it dictate your identity to you. Accepting money creates a bond, which you need to accept responsibility for. If you can’t, maybe it’s not worth getting EA money.
You want the EA community to be what you wish it was? Yeah, I did too. But you have to take a clear-eyed look at what it is. And if you take part in it and bear the name, you have to accept the good and the bad of how it actually is.
The last thing I wanted to do was leave EA. I wanted it to be the community it was at the beginning, and I had a lot of influence, but I couldn’t dictate what EA “really” meant in the face of the actual people and choices making up the community. I stuck around for a long time arguing that my version of EA was how it should be, and insisting that that’s how it was for me even if others were doing it differently. When I was forced to leave EA to pursue PauseAI, I could admit to myself that I was co-signing the bad stuff by being there and lending my name and work, and it was shitty of me to think I could shirk responsibility just because I wanted EA to be something else.
So, idk, if you think I’m wrong because you’re an EA and I’m not describing you— in what sense are you an EA? You can always leave.