Should EA be large and welcoming or small and weird?
Related: How important is it for EAs to follow regular social norms? How important is diversity and inclusion in the EA community?
To what extent should EA get involved in politics or push for political change?
I just want to note that in principle, large & weird or small & welcoming movements are both possible. 60s counterculture was a large & weird movement. Quakers are a small & welcoming movement. (If you want to be small & welcoming, I guess it helps to not advertise yourself very much.)
I think you are right that there’s a debate around whether EA should be sanitized for a mass audience (by not betting on pandemics or whatever). But e.g. this post mentions that caution around growth could be good because growth is hard to reverse, but I don’t see weirdness advocacy.
Whether effective altruism should be sanitized seems like an issue separate from how big the movement can or should grow. I’m also not sure questions of sanitization should be reduced to just either doing weird things openly, or not doing them at all. That framing ignores the possibility of how something can be changed to be less ‘weird’, like has been done with AI alignment, or, to a lesser extent, wild animal welfare. Someone could figure out how to make it so betting on pandemics or whatever can be done without it becoming a liability for the reputation of effective altruism.
Expanding on those points:
Should EA be small and elite (i.e. to influence important/powerful actors) or broad and welcoming?
How many people should earn to give and how effective is this on the margin? (Maybe not a huge debate but a lot of uncertainty)
How much/should we grow EA in non-Western countries? (I think there’s a fair deal of ignorance on this topic overall)
Related to D&I:
How important is academic diversity in EA? And what blindspots does the EA movement have as a result?
I don’t think all of these have been always publicly discussed, but there is definitely a lack of consensus and differing views.
I think there’s quite a large diversity in what people in EA did in undergrad / grad school. There’s plenty of medics and a small but nontrivial number of biologists around, for example.
What they wish they’d done at university, or what they’re studying now, might be another matter.
Along the same lines of community health and movement growth, in what situations should individual censor their views or expect to be censored by someone else (eg a Forum moderator or Facebook group admin)?
Should EA be large and welcoming or small and weird? Related: How important is it for EAs to follow regular social norms? How important is diversity and inclusion in the EA community?
To what extent should EA get involved in politics or push for political change?
I just want to note that in principle, large & weird or small & welcoming movements are both possible. 60s counterculture was a large & weird movement. Quakers are a small & welcoming movement. (If you want to be small & welcoming, I guess it helps to not advertise yourself very much.)
I think you are right that there’s a debate around whether EA should be sanitized for a mass audience (by not betting on pandemics or whatever). But e.g. this post mentions that caution around growth could be good because growth is hard to reverse, but I don’t see weirdness advocacy.
Whether effective altruism should be sanitized seems like an issue separate from how big the movement can or should grow. I’m also not sure questions of sanitization should be reduced to just either doing weird things openly, or not doing them at all. That framing ignores the possibility of how something can be changed to be less ‘weird’, like has been done with AI alignment, or, to a lesser extent, wild animal welfare. Someone could figure out how to make it so betting on pandemics or whatever can be done without it becoming a liability for the reputation of effective altruism.
See also: https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anonymous-answers-effective-altruism-community-and-growth/
Expanding on those points: Should EA be small and elite (i.e. to influence important/powerful actors) or broad and welcoming? How many people should earn to give and how effective is this on the margin? (Maybe not a huge debate but a lot of uncertainty) How much/should we grow EA in non-Western countries? (I think there’s a fair deal of ignorance on this topic overall)
Related to D&I: How important is academic diversity in EA? And what blindspots does the EA movement have as a result?
I don’t think all of these have been always publicly discussed, but there is definitely a lack of consensus and differing views.
What does “academic diversity” mean? I could imagine a few possible interpretations.
Getting people from non-STEM backgrounds, specifically non-econ social sciences and humanities.
I read it as ‘getting some people who aren’t economists, philosophers, or computer scientists’. (:
(Speaking as a philosophy+economics grad and a sort-of computer scientist.)
I think there’s quite a large diversity in what people in EA did in undergrad / grad school. There’s plenty of medics and a small but nontrivial number of biologists around, for example.
What they wish they’d done at university, or what they’re studying now, might be another matter.
Along the same lines of community health and movement growth, in what situations should individual censor their views or expect to be censored by someone else (eg a Forum moderator or Facebook group admin)?