Aaron Gertler 🔸 comments on EA is more than longtermism

[Aaron Gertler 🔸]

A count of topics at EAG and EAGx’s from this year show a roughly 3:1 AI/​longtermist to anything else ratio

I’m not sure where to find agendas for past EAGx events I didn’t attend. But looking at EAG London, I get a 4:3 ratio for LT/​non-LT (not counting topics that fit neither “category”, like founding startups):

LT

• “Countering weapons of mass destruction”

• “Acquiring and applying information security skills for long-term impact”

• “How to contribute to the UN’s ‘Our Common Agenda’ report” (maybe goes in neither category? Contributions from EA people so far have been LT-focused, but I assume the process is the same for anything someone wants to add)

• “Exploring AI Futures with Role Play”

• “Speed meeting + discussion: biosecurity and engineering interventions”

• “Ambitious thinking in longtermist community building”

• “What’s new in biosecurity? Concepts and priorities for the coming decade”

• “Transformer interpretability tool walk-through”

• “Longtermist talent search”

• “Workshop: New research topics in global priorities research” (maybe goes in neither category, most speakers from LT-focused orgs but topics were broad/​varied)

• “So, how freaked out should we be about AI?”

• “Workshop: Possible research projects for AI safety”

Non-LT

• “Dispensers for Safe Water Experiments”

• “Community Event: Alt Proteins”

• “The state of aquatic animal advocacy”

• “Workshop: Wild animal advocacy”

• “Workshop: The international development sector should be much better at learning”

• “Are you a good fit for nonprofit entrepreneurship?” (talk by Charity Entrepreneurship, I assume it was non-LT-focused)

• “The changing landscape of climate and energy and its implications for high-impact climate philanthropy” (maybe goes in neither category, but feels pretty distinct from what people mostly think about when they discuss LT in EA)

• “How to present big ideas and complex data to the public”, Our World in Data (maybe goes in neither category?)

• “Community Event: EA Africa” (maybe goes in neither category, but I’d guess that community building in Africa ends up leading to a lot of additional staff/​projects in the global dev/​animal welfare spaces relative to LT spaces)

Note that I’ve focused on talks and events rather than office hours, since the latter feel more like meetings than “official topics” to me. The split didn’t seem very different for the latter two.

I don’t know whether there’s a public agenda I can link to, but let me know if you think I’m missing or miscategorizing something.

(I also remain confused as to whether things like bio or nuclear war actually fit cleanly into longtermism or whether their “focus” is best thought of as split between LT/​non-LT, these are not natural categories.)