Thanks for following up regarding who was consulted on the Fellowship content.
And nice to know you’re planning to run the upcoming update by some critics. Proactively seeking out critical opinions seems quite important, as I suspect many critics won’t respond to general requests for feedback due to a concern that they’ll be ignored. Michael noted that concern, I’ve personally been discouraged from offering feedback because of it (I’ve engaged with this thread to help people understand the context and history of the current state of EA cause prioritization, not because I really expect CEA to meaningfully change its content/behavior), and I can’t imagine we’re alone in this.
I’ve engaged with this thread to help people understand the context and history of the current state of EA cause prioritization, not because I really expect CEA to meaningfully change its content/behavior
Fwiw, my model of CEA is approximately that it doesn’t want to look like it’s ignoring differing opinions but that, nevertheless, it isn’t super fussed about integrating them or changing what it does.
This is my view of CEA as an organisation. Basically, every CEA staff member I’ve ever met (including Max D) has been a really lovely, thoughtful individual.
I agree with your takes on CEA as an organization and as individuals (including Max).
Personally, I’d have a more positive view of CEA the organization if it were more transparent about its strategy around cause prioritization and representativeness (even if I disagree with the strategy) vs. trying to make it look like they are more representative than they are. E.g. Max has made it pretty clear in these comments that poverty and animal welfare aren’t high priorities, but you wouldn’t know that from reading CEA’s strategy page where the very first sentence states: “CEA’s overall aim is to do the most we can to solve pressing global problems — like global poverty, factory farming, and existential risk — and prepare to face the challenges of tomorrow.”
It’s possibly worth flagging that these are (sadly) quite long-running issues. I wrote an EA forum post now 5 years ago on the ‘marketing gap’, the tension between what EA organisations present EA as being about and what those the organisations believe it should be about, and arguing they should be more ‘morally inclusive’. By ‘moral inclusive’, I mean welcoming and representing the various different ways of doing the most good that thoughtful, dedicated individuals have proposed.
This gap has since closed a bit, although not always in the way I hoped for, i.e. greater transparency and inclusiveness. As two examples, GWWC has been spun off from CEA, rebooted, and now does seem to be cause neutral. 80k is much more openly longtermist.
I recognise this is a challenging issue, but I still think the right solution to this is for the more central EA organisations to actually try hard to be morally inclusive. I’ve been really impressed at how well GWWC seem to be doing this. I think it’s worth doing this for the same reasons I gave in that (now ancient) blogpost: it reduces groupthink, increases movement size, and reduces infighting. If people truly felt like EA was morally inclusive, I don’t think this post, or any of these comments (including this one) would have been written.
Well, now that GiveWell has already put in the years of vetting work, we can reliably have a pretty large impact on global poverty just by channeling however many million to AMF + similar. And I guess, it’s not exactly that we need to do too much more than that.
Thanks for following up regarding who was consulted on the Fellowship content.
And nice to know you’re planning to run the upcoming update by some critics. Proactively seeking out critical opinions seems quite important, as I suspect many critics won’t respond to general requests for feedback due to a concern that they’ll be ignored. Michael noted that concern, I’ve personally been discouraged from offering feedback because of it (I’ve engaged with this thread to help people understand the context and history of the current state of EA cause prioritization, not because I really expect CEA to meaningfully change its content/behavior), and I can’t imagine we’re alone in this.
Fwiw, my model of CEA is approximately that it doesn’t want to look like it’s ignoring differing opinions but that, nevertheless, it isn’t super fussed about integrating them or changing what it does.
This is my view of CEA as an organisation. Basically, every CEA staff member I’ve ever met (including Max D) has been a really lovely, thoughtful individual.
I agree with your takes on CEA as an organization and as individuals (including Max).
Personally, I’d have a more positive view of CEA the organization if it were more transparent about its strategy around cause prioritization and representativeness (even if I disagree with the strategy) vs. trying to make it look like they are more representative than they are. E.g. Max has made it pretty clear in these comments that poverty and animal welfare aren’t high priorities, but you wouldn’t know that from reading CEA’s strategy page where the very first sentence states: “CEA’s overall aim is to do the most we can to solve pressing global problems — like global poverty, factory farming, and existential risk — and prepare to face the challenges of tomorrow.”
It’s possibly worth flagging that these are (sadly) quite long-running issues. I wrote an EA forum post now 5 years ago on the ‘marketing gap’, the tension between what EA organisations present EA as being about and what those the organisations believe it should be about, and arguing they should be more ‘morally inclusive’. By ‘moral inclusive’, I mean welcoming and representing the various different ways of doing the most good that thoughtful, dedicated individuals have proposed.
This gap has since closed a bit, although not always in the way I hoped for, i.e. greater transparency and inclusiveness. As two examples, GWWC has been spun off from CEA, rebooted, and now does seem to be cause neutral. 80k is much more openly longtermist.
I recognise this is a challenging issue, but I still think the right solution to this is for the more central EA organisations to actually try hard to be morally inclusive. I’ve been really impressed at how well GWWC seem to be doing this. I think it’s worth doing this for the same reasons I gave in that (now ancient) blogpost: it reduces groupthink, increases movement size, and reduces infighting. If people truly felt like EA was morally inclusive, I don’t think this post, or any of these comments (including this one) would have been written.
Thanks for sharing that post! Very well thought out and prescient, just unfortunate (through no fault of yours) that it’s still quite timely.
Well, now that GiveWell has already put in the years of vetting work, we can reliably have a pretty large impact on global poverty just by channeling however many million to AMF + similar. And I guess, it’s not exactly that we need to do too much more than that.