Community > Epistemics Community is more important to EA than epistemics. What drives EA’s greater impact isn’t just reasoning, but collaboration. Twenty “90% smart” people are much more likely identify more impactful interventions than two “100% smart” people.
I may be biased by how I found EA—working alone on “finding most impactful work” before stumbling into the EA community—but this is the point: EA isn’t unique for asking, “How can I use reason to find the most impactful interventions?” Others ask that too. EA is unique because it gathers those people, and facilitates funding and coordination, enabling far more careful and comprehensive work.
I’m not so sure, there are quite a lot of groups that gather together, but not as many that trade off the community side in favour of epistemics (I imagine EA could be much bigger if it focused more on climate or other less neglected areas).
I also wouldn’t use the example of 20 vs 2, but with 10,000 people with average epistemics vs 1,000 with better epistemics I’d predict the better reasoning group would have more impact.
EA, unlike other large humanitarian organizations such as Oxfam (for example), has the valuable originality of focusing its activity not so much on the humanitarian tasks to be carried out, but rather on the altruistic disposition of donors and collaborators (who thus form a community). It therefore has its own ideological character, which is rationalist and apolitical, and which can be further developed in this sense.
Community > Epistemics
Community is more important to EA than epistemics. What drives EA’s greater impact isn’t just reasoning, but collaboration. Twenty “90% smart” people are much more likely identify more impactful interventions than two “100% smart” people.
I may be biased by how I found EA—working alone on “finding most impactful work” before stumbling into the EA community—but this is the point: EA isn’t unique for asking, “How can I use reason to find the most impactful interventions?” Others ask that too. EA is unique because it gathers those people, and facilitates funding and coordination, enabling far more careful and comprehensive work.
I’m not so sure, there are quite a lot of groups that gather together, but not as many that trade off the community side in favour of epistemics (I imagine EA could be much bigger if it focused more on climate or other less neglected areas).
I also wouldn’t use the example of 20 vs 2, but with 10,000 people with average epistemics vs 1,000 with better epistemics I’d predict the better reasoning group would have more impact.
EA, unlike other large humanitarian organizations such as Oxfam (for example), has the valuable originality of focusing its activity not so much on the humanitarian tasks to be carried out, but rather on the altruistic disposition of donors and collaborators (who thus form a community). It therefore has its own ideological character, which is rationalist and apolitical, and which can be further developed in this sense.