My point is that you could engage in “x-risk community building” which may more effectively get people working on reducing x-risk than “EA community building” would.
There is a bunch of consideration affecting that, including that we already do EA community building and that big switches tend to be costly. However that pans out in aggregate I think “doesn’t make much sense” is an overstatement.
I never actually said we should switch, but if we knew from the start “oh wow we live at the most influential time ever because x-risk is so high” we probably would have created an x-risk community not an EA one.
And to be clear I’m not sure where I personally come out on the hinginess debate. In fact I would say I’m probably more sympathetic to Will’s view that we currently aren’t at the most influential time than most others are.
My feeling is that it was a bit that people who wanted to attack global poverty efficiently decided to call themselves effective altruists, and then a bunch of Less Wrongers came over and convinced (a lot of) them that ‘hey, going extinct is an even biggler deal’, but the name still stuck, because names are sticky things.
I’m not sure I agree with that. It seems to me that EA community building is channelling quite a few people to direct existential risk reduction work.
My point is that you could engage in “x-risk community building” which may more effectively get people working on reducing x-risk than “EA community building” would.
There is a bunch of consideration affecting that, including that we already do EA community building and that big switches tend to be costly. However that pans out in aggregate I think “doesn’t make much sense” is an overstatement.
I never actually said we should switch, but if we knew from the start “oh wow we live at the most influential time ever because x-risk is so high” we probably would have created an x-risk community not an EA one.
And to be clear I’m not sure where I personally come out on the hinginess debate. In fact I would say I’m probably more sympathetic to Will’s view that we currently aren’t at the most influential time than most others are.
My feeling is that it was a bit that people who wanted to attack global poverty efficiently decided to call themselves effective altruists, and then a bunch of Less Wrongers came over and convinced (a lot of) them that ‘hey, going extinct is an even biggler deal’, but the name still stuck, because names are sticky things.