Many of the EAs I know who work in policy feel like they ought to keep their involvement in EA a secret. I once attended an event in Brussels where the host asked me to hide the fact I work for EA Netherlands. This was because they were worried their opponents would use their links with EA to discredit them. This seems like a very bad state of affairs.
If what you and Jan say is true (not saying I doubt you, it doesn’t mesh with my experiences being an open EA but then I don’t live in the policy-world) then this does need to be higher up the EA priority list.
I’d strongly, strongly advise against ‘hiding’ beliefs here. If there is already a hostile set of opponents actively looking to discredit EA and EA-links then we need to be a lot more pro-active in countering incorrect framings of EA and being more assertive to opponents who think EA is worth discrediting.
I think one low hanging fruit is publicly dissociating from Elon Musk. He often gets brought up even though he’s not part of the community. There’s also very legitimate EA-/longtermism-based criticism of him available
I think maybe let’s revisit in a month. It’s easy for these things to loom larger than they are.
I think JanPro is talking about the EA and Brussels article I referenced in the OP (‘Stop the killer robots! Musk-backed lobbyists fight to save Europe from bad AI’). This was published in November last year.
Many of the EAs I know who work in policy feel like they ought to keep their involvement in EA a secret. I once attended an event in Brussels where the host asked me to hide the fact I work for EA Netherlands. This was because they were worried their opponents would use their links with EA to discredit them. This seems like a very bad state of affairs.
If what you and Jan say is true (not saying I doubt you, it doesn’t mesh with my experiences being an open EA but then I don’t live in the policy-world) then this does need to be higher up the EA priority list.
I’d strongly, strongly advise against ‘hiding’ beliefs here. If there is already a hostile set of opponents actively looking to discredit EA and EA-links then we need to be a lot more pro-active in countering incorrect framings of EA and being more assertive to opponents who think EA is worth discrediting.
I think one low hanging fruit is publicly dissociating from Elon Musk. He often gets brought up even though he’s not part of the community. There’s also very legitimate EA-/longtermism-based criticism of him available