Open philanthropy is not the only grantmaker in the EA Space! If you add the FTX Community, FTX Future Fund, EA Funds etc. my guess would be that it recently made a large shift towards longtermism, primarily due to the Future fund being so massive.
I also want to emphasize that many central EA Organisations are increasingly focused on longtermist concerns, and not as transparent about it as I would like for them to be. People and organisations should not pretend to care about things they do not for the sake of optics. One of EA’s most central tenets is to hold truth at a very high regard. Being transparent about what we believe is necessary to do so.
I think there are a few pitfalls EA can fall into by its increasing focus on longtermism, but by and large people are noticing these and actively discussing them. This is a good sign! I’m a bit worried if many longtermists entirely stop caring about global poverty and animal suffering. Having a deep intuition that losing your parent to malaria is a horrible thing for a child to go through and that you can prevent it, is a very healthy sanity check.
I think the best strategy for ‘hardcore’ longtermists may very well be to do a bit of both, not because of optics but because regularly working on things with tight feedback loops reminds you just how difficult even well-defined objectives can be to achieve. That said there is enormous value in specialisation, so I’m not sure what the exact optimal trade-off is.
If you add the FTX Community, FTX Future Fund, EA Funds etc. my guess would be that it recently made a large shift towards longtermism, primarily due to the Future fund being so massive.
I think starting in 2022 this will be true in aggregate – as you say largely because of the FTX Future Fund.
In my view, there is some defining tension in rationalist and EA thought regarding epistemic vs. instrumental emphasis on truth: adopting a mindset of rationality/honesty is probably a good mindset—especially to challenge biases and set community standards—but it’s ultimately for instrumental purposes (although, for instrumental purposes, it might be better to think of your mindset as one of honesty/rationality, recursivity problems aside). I don’t think there is much conflict at the level of “lie about what you support”: that’s obviously going to be bad overall. But there are valid questions at the level of “how straightforward/consistent should I be about the way all near-termist cause areas/effects pale in comparison to expected value from existential risk reduction?” It might be the case that it’s obvious that certain health and development causes fail to compare on a long-term scale, but that doesn’t mean heavily emphasizing that is necessarily a good idea, for community health and other reasons like you mention.
Open philanthropy is not the only grantmaker in the EA Space! If you add the FTX Community, FTX Future Fund, EA Funds etc. my guess would be that it recently made a large shift towards longtermism, primarily due to the Future fund being so massive.
I also want to emphasize that many central EA Organisations are increasingly focused on longtermist concerns, and not as transparent about it as I would like for them to be. People and organisations should not pretend to care about things they do not for the sake of optics. One of EA’s most central tenets is to hold truth at a very high regard. Being transparent about what we believe is necessary to do so.
I think there are a few pitfalls EA can fall into by its increasing focus on longtermism, but by and large people are noticing these and actively discussing them. This is a good sign! I’m a bit worried if many longtermists entirely stop caring about global poverty and animal suffering. Having a deep intuition that losing your parent to malaria is a horrible thing for a child to go through and that you can prevent it, is a very healthy sanity check.
I think the best strategy for ‘hardcore’ longtermists may very well be to do a bit of both, not because of optics but because regularly working on things with tight feedback loops reminds you just how difficult even well-defined objectives can be to achieve. That said there is enormous value in specialisation, so I’m not sure what the exact optimal trade-off is.
I think starting in 2022 this will be true in aggregate – as you say largely because of the FTX Future Fund.
However, for EA Funds specifically, it might be worth keeping in mind that the Global Health and Development Fund has been the largest of the four funds by payout amount, and by received donations even is about as big as all other funds combined.
In my view, there is some defining tension in rationalist and EA thought regarding epistemic vs. instrumental emphasis on truth: adopting a mindset of rationality/honesty is probably a good mindset—especially to challenge biases and set community standards—but it’s ultimately for instrumental purposes (although, for instrumental purposes, it might be better to think of your mindset as one of honesty/rationality, recursivity problems aside). I don’t think there is much conflict at the level of “lie about what you support”: that’s obviously going to be bad overall. But there are valid questions at the level of “how straightforward/consistent should I be about the way all near-termist cause areas/effects pale in comparison to expected value from existential risk reduction?” It might be the case that it’s obvious that certain health and development causes fail to compare on a long-term scale, but that doesn’t mean heavily emphasizing that is necessarily a good idea, for community health and other reasons like you mention.