The people who initially set up Givewell, did the research and conivnced Dustin to donate his money did a truly amazing jop. AFAICT the people who currently run Givewell are doing a good job. A large fraction of the good EA has done, in total, is largely do to their work.
But I don’t think its a good idea to frame things as their a bunch of elite EAs and the quality of their work is superb. The EA leadership has fucked up a bunch of stuff. Many ‘elite EAs’ were not part of the parts of EA that went well. Many were involved in the parts of Ea that went quite poorly.
If you are a true altruist you should really reconsider whether you even want to trust the leadership and work under their direction. Maybe you should work at a different sort of charity or get funding from ‘someone who doesn’t ultimately get their money from Givewell’. Unless you really fit in well with the ‘elite Eas’ doing that is likely to be more fun.
‘Think for yourself about how to make the world better and then do it (assuming its not insane)’ is probably both going to be better for you and better for the world.
I agree with some of this comment and disagree with other parts:
“people who initially set up Givewell, did the research and conivnced Dustin to donate his money did a truly amazing jop”
AFAIK Dustin would have donated a roughly similar amount anyway, at least at Gates levels of cost-effectiveness, so I don’t think EA gets any credit for that (unless you include Dustin in EA, which you don’t seem to do)
“The EA leadership has fucked up a bunch of stuff. Many ‘elite EAs’ were not part of the parts of EA that went well.”
I agree, but I think we’re probably thinking of different parts of EA
“‘Think for yourself about how to make the world better and then do it (assuming its not insane)’ is probably both going to be better for you and better for the world”
I agree with this, but I would be careful about where your thoughts are coming from
There are a lot of possible answers to where thoughts come from and which thoughts are useful. One charitable thought is some Elite EAs tried to do things which were all of: hard, extremely costly if you fuck them up, they weren’t able to achieve given the difficulty. I have definitely updated a lot toward trying things that are very crazy but at least obviously only hurt me (or people who follow my example, but those people made their own choice). Fail gracefullly. If you dont know how competent you are make sure not to mess things up for other people. There is a lot of ‘theater’ around this but most people don’t internalize what it really means.
The people who initially set up Givewell, did the research and conivnced Dustin to donate his money did a truly amazing jop. AFAICT the people who currently run Givewell are doing a good job. A large fraction of the good EA has done, in total, is largely do to their work.
But I don’t think its a good idea to frame things as their a bunch of elite EAs and the quality of their work is superb. The EA leadership has fucked up a bunch of stuff. Many ‘elite EAs’ were not part of the parts of EA that went well. Many were involved in the parts of Ea that went quite poorly.
If you are a true altruist you should really reconsider whether you even want to trust the leadership and work under their direction. Maybe you should work at a different sort of charity or get funding from ‘someone who doesn’t ultimately get their money from Givewell’. Unless you really fit in well with the ‘elite Eas’ doing that is likely to be more fun.
‘Think for yourself about how to make the world better and then do it (assuming its not insane)’ is probably both going to be better for you and better for the world.
I agree with some of this comment and disagree with other parts:
“people who initially set up Givewell, did the research and conivnced Dustin to donate his money did a truly amazing jop”
AFAIK Dustin would have donated a roughly similar amount anyway, at least at Gates levels of cost-effectiveness, so I don’t think EA gets any credit for that (unless you include Dustin in EA, which you don’t seem to do)
“The EA leadership has fucked up a bunch of stuff. Many ‘elite EAs’ were not part of the parts of EA that went well.” I agree, but I think we’re probably thinking of different parts of EA
“‘Think for yourself about how to make the world better and then do it (assuming its not insane)’ is probably both going to be better for you and better for the world” I agree with this, but I would be careful about where your thoughts are coming from
There are a lot of possible answers to where thoughts come from and which thoughts are useful. One charitable thought is some Elite EAs tried to do things which were all of: hard, extremely costly if you fuck them up, they weren’t able to achieve given the difficulty. I have definitely updated a lot toward trying things that are very crazy but at least obviously only hurt me (or people who follow my example, but those people made their own choice). Fail gracefullly. If you dont know how competent you are make sure not to mess things up for other people. There is a lot of ‘theater’ around this but most people don’t internalize what it really means.