Are there any amateur EA historians who can help explain how longtermism grew in importance/status? I’d say 80k for instance is much more likely now to encourage folks to start a longtermist org than a global health org. There is lots of funding still moving towards the traditional neartermist causes like malaria and deworming, but not too much funding encouraging people to innovate there (or start another AMF).
Ultimately, I’m curious which person or orgs got convinced about longtermism first! It feels much more driven by top-down propagation than a natural evolution of an EA idea.
Holden Karnofsky wrote in 2016 how his personal thinking evolved on topics that heavily overlap with longtermism and how that was a major factor in Open Phil deciding to work on them:
I recently wrote up a relatively detailed discussion of how my personal thinking has changed about three interrelated topics: (1) the importance of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, particularly the value alignment problem; (2) the potential of many of the ideas and people associated with the effective altruism community; (3) the properties to look for when assessing an idea or intervention, and in particular how much weight to put on metrics and “feedback loops” compared to other properties. My views on these subjects have changed fairly dramatically over the past several years, contributing to a significant shift in how we approach them as an organization.
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The changes discussed here have caused me to shift from being a skeptic of supporting work on potential risks from advanced AI and effective altruism organizations to being an advocate, which in turn has been a major factor in the Open Philanthropy Project’s taking on work in these areas.
Are there any amateur EA historians who can help explain how longtermism grew in importance/status? I’d say 80k for instance is much more likely now to encourage folks to start a longtermist org than a global health org. There is lots of funding still moving towards the traditional neartermist causes like malaria and deworming, but not too much funding encouraging people to innovate there (or start another AMF).
Ultimately, I’m curious which person or orgs got convinced about longtermism first! It feels much more driven by top-down propagation than a natural evolution of an EA idea.
Holden Karnofsky wrote in 2016 how his personal thinking evolved on topics that heavily overlap with longtermism and how that was a major factor in Open Phil deciding to work on them: