You highlight a couple of downsides. Far from all of the downsides of course, but none of the advantages either.
I feel a bit sad to read this since I’ve worked on something related[1] to what you post about for years myself. And a bit confused why you posted this; do you think that you think EAs are underrating these two downsides? (If not, it just feels a bit unnecessarily disparaging to people trying their best to do good in the world.)
Appreciate you highlighting your personal experience though; that’s a useful anecdote.
“Targeting of really young people” is certainly not the framing I would use; there’s genuine demand for the services that we offer, as demonstrated by the tens of thousands of applications received across Leaf, Non-Trivial, Atlas, Pivotal, and SPARC/ESPR. But it’s of course accurate in the sense that our target audience consists of (subsets of) young people.
Hey Jamie, sorry my post made you feel bad. Indeed there are more nuances and it would be interesting to compile a more advanced pros and cons list on the topic of targeting younger folks. When AIM/me have thought about the pros and cons in deeper depth we tend to come out negative on it—specifically I do indeed think both value drift and flow through ecosystem effects to other parts of the movement are on average under-valubed by EAs. I wanted to call some attention to these two cons.
You highlight a couple of downsides. Far from all of the downsides of course, but none of the advantages either.
I feel a bit sad to read this since I’ve worked on something related[1] to what you post about for years myself. And a bit confused why you posted this; do you think that you think EAs are underrating these two downsides? (If not, it just feels a bit unnecessarily disparaging to people trying their best to do good in the world.)
Appreciate you highlighting your personal experience though; that’s a useful anecdote.
“Targeting of really young people” is certainly not the framing I would use; there’s genuine demand for the services that we offer, as demonstrated by the tens of thousands of applications received across Leaf, Non-Trivial, Atlas, Pivotal, and SPARC/ESPR. But it’s of course accurate in the sense that our target audience consists of (subsets of) young people.
Hey Jamie, sorry my post made you feel bad. Indeed there are more nuances and it would be interesting to compile a more advanced pros and cons list on the topic of targeting younger folks. When AIM/me have thought about the pros and cons in deeper depth we tend to come out negative on it—specifically I do indeed think both value drift and flow through ecosystem effects to other parts of the movement are on average under-valubed by EAs. I wanted to call some attention to these two cons.