Potential funding gap: full-time EA community strategisers
By “EA community strategy” I mean: Given the goal of “doing the most good”, and the potentially extremely valuable resource of an existing community of thousands of talented people broadly aligned around this goal, what needs to happen next?
Are there any such people? Nearly everyone I can think of who comes close to working on this full-time is also spending a bunch of time managing organisations/people/projects or doing less relevant research. (Lukas Gloor is a possible exception, but it would be good to see the same work without the restriction to negative utilitarianism). Sure, working on these other things occasionally gives you the next crucial insight that you need to make progress on community strategy, but I’d be surprised if that’s the main reason any of these people I’m thinking of are working on these other things.
[Edit: I’ve removed a tangential reference to a polarising organisation, as the responses to this post so far suggest to me that people are focusing on the overly/insufficiently negative comments I made about said organisation rather than the main claim of the post. I apologise for this post now being quite short.]
I hope that Remmelt gets funding. And I hope that more people get funding to do this kind of work and that more people with the ability to do it well consider working on it full-time. If EA isn’t funding-constrained, why does it seem that almost everyone who’s contributing to progress on this crucial area is also working as a programmer, researcher/lecturer in an established institution, EA org leader etc.?
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Why do we need our own Leverage Research? What have they achieved?
I’ve updated the post.
I don’t want to distract from my point even further by going into the common criticisms of Leverage (although to some extent I fear it’s already too late for that...the Leverage reference was the bit I was most unsure about, so I’m assuming that’s what’s driving the downvotes until I see evidence to the contrary).
I don’t really care about Leverage one way or another. I initially downvoted to try to avoid the needless community drama, but I’ve removed my downvote now that you’ve removed that.
However, I’m still not going to upvote and the reason is the the wider and more important point—your post still doesn’t actually argue for anything. Why do we need full-time EA community strategisers? What would they do? What’s wrong with our current approach? I’d love to see more elaboration here.
Thank you so much for taking the time to explain :-) This is really useful.
Ha, yes, this post started as a long comment that I then thought might warrant a post, and I was hoping it might just cause a lightbulb moment for some people and not require much explanation. Alas!
I have a more substantial post r.e. community strategy in the works anyway. I’ll probably just delete this one soon. I apologise for my first post being a bit of a disaster.
Hey, no worries. Sorry this forum can be kinda intense for newcomers. I’ll be really excited to see your more substantial post. :)
Ack, never mind, I think it’s best I just best I shut down my account.
Why?