I think while there may be no competing movements that have the community aspect of EA, there are lots of individuals (and orgs) out there who do charitable giving in an impact-driven/rational way, or take well paid positions with the view of using the income for good without branding it earning-to-give. Some might do this quietly. Some of these individuals might well agree with core EA ideas, and may have learnt from books like doing good better. You can do all of these without being a movement. If a critic thinks EA is a cult, why would they respond by forming a competing cult?
EA has also changed over time, it looks very different today than 5 years ago. It may be a good exercise to look at wether the criticisms that people formulate for EA today would have also applied to EA 5 years ago. A good Alt-EA movement might look like whatever EA was before longtermism and AI x-risk seemingly overpowered other areas of concern. How would the 2017 EA movement compete with the 2022 EA movement?
Thirdly, it’s pretty difficult to compete since EA hit the jackpot. In places like hiring talent, or funding students, there are limited resources that communities or concern areas compete over. If the EA community has this much more money, they suck the air from adjacent areas like near-term AI safety or AI ethics. Why would you work on alignment of not super intelligent but widely deployed ML if you can make three times as much training cool large language models next door? And for studentship funding, being EA-aligned will make an enormous difference to your funding prospects compared to other students who might work on the same thing but don’t go to EAglobal each year. I think this is where a lot of frustration originates.
Finally, it’s very common to point out that EA is open to good-faith criticism. There is indeed often very polite and thoughtful engagement on this forum, but I am not sure how easy it is to actually make people update their pre-existing beliefs on specific points.
A few thoughts:
I think while there may be no competing movements that have the community aspect of EA, there are lots of individuals (and orgs) out there who do charitable giving in an impact-driven/rational way, or take well paid positions with the view of using the income for good without branding it earning-to-give. Some might do this quietly. Some of these individuals might well agree with core EA ideas, and may have learnt from books like doing good better. You can do all of these without being a movement. If a critic thinks EA is a cult, why would they respond by forming a competing cult?
EA has also changed over time, it looks very different today than 5 years ago. It may be a good exercise to look at wether the criticisms that people formulate for EA today would have also applied to EA 5 years ago. A good Alt-EA movement might look like whatever EA was before longtermism and AI x-risk seemingly overpowered other areas of concern. How would the 2017 EA movement compete with the 2022 EA movement?
Thirdly, it’s pretty difficult to compete since EA hit the jackpot. In places like hiring talent, or funding students, there are limited resources that communities or concern areas compete over. If the EA community has this much more money, they suck the air from adjacent areas like near-term AI safety or AI ethics. Why would you work on alignment of not super intelligent but widely deployed ML if you can make three times as much training cool large language models next door? And for studentship funding, being EA-aligned will make an enormous difference to your funding prospects compared to other students who might work on the same thing but don’t go to EAglobal each year. I think this is where a lot of frustration originates.
Finally, it’s very common to point out that EA is open to good-faith criticism. There is indeed often very polite and thoughtful engagement on this forum, but I am not sure how easy it is to actually make people update their pre-existing beliefs on specific points.