Level of involvement: I’m not an EA, but I’m EA-adjacent and EA-sympathetic.
EA seems to have picked all the low-hanging fruit and doesn’t know what to do with itself now. Standard health and global poverty feel like trying to fill a bottomless pit. It’s hard to get excited about GiveWell Report #3543 about how we should be focusing on a slightly different parasite and that the cost of saving a life has gone up by $3. Animal altruism is in a similar situation, and is also morally controversial and tainted by culture war. The benefits of more long-shot interventions are hard to predict, and some of them could also have negative consequences. AI risk is a target for mockery by outsiders, and while the theoretical arguments for its importance seem sound, it’s hard to tell whether an organization is effective in doing anything about it. And the space of interventions in politics is here-be-dragons.
The lack of salient progress is a cause of some background frustration. Some of those who think their cause is best try to persuade others in the movement, but to little effect, because there’s not much new to say to change people’s minds; and that contributes to the feeling of stagnation. This is not to say that debate and criticism are bad; being open to them is much better than the alternative, and the community is good at being civil and not getting too heated. But the motivation for them seems to draw more from ingrained habits and compulsive behavior than from trying to expose others to new ideas. (Because there aren’t any.)
Others respond to the frustration by trying to grow the movement, but that runs into the real (and in my opinion near-certain) dangers of mindkilling politics, stifling PR, dishonesty (Sarah Constantin’s concerns), and value drift.
And others (there’s overlap between these groups) treat EA as a social group, whether that means house parties or memes. Which is harmless fun in itself, but hardly an inspiring direction for the movement.
What would improve the movement most is a wellspring of new ideas of the quality that inspired it to begin with. Apart from that, it seems quite possible that there’s not much room for improvement; most tradeoffs seem to not be worth the cost. That means that it’s stuck as it is, at best—which is discouraging, but if that’s the reality, EAs should accept it.
I think EA may have picked the lowest-hanging fruit, but there’s lots of low-ish hanging fruit left unpicked. For example: who, exactly, should be seen as the beneficiaries aka allkind aka moral patients? EAs disagree about this quite a lot, but there hasn’t been that much detailed + broadly informed argument about it inside EA. (This example comes to mind because I’m currently writing a report on it for OpenPhil.)
There are also a great many areas that might be fairly promising, but which haven’t been looked into in much breadth+detail yet (AFAIK). The best of these might count as low-ish hanging fruit. E.g.: is there anything to be done about authoritarianism around the world? Might certain kinds of meta-science work (e.g. COS) make future life science and social science work more robust+informative than it is now, providing highly leveraged returns to welfare?
There is also non-AI global catastrophic risk, like engineered pandemics, and low hanging fruit for dealing with agricultural catastrophes like nuclear winter.
Anonymous #39:
I think EA may have picked the lowest-hanging fruit, but there’s lots of low-ish hanging fruit left unpicked. For example: who, exactly, should be seen as the beneficiaries aka allkind aka moral patients? EAs disagree about this quite a lot, but there hasn’t been that much detailed + broadly informed argument about it inside EA. (This example comes to mind because I’m currently writing a report on it for OpenPhil.)
There are also a great many areas that might be fairly promising, but which haven’t been looked into in much breadth+detail yet (AFAIK). The best of these might count as low-ish hanging fruit. E.g.: is there anything to be done about authoritarianism around the world? Might certain kinds of meta-science work (e.g. COS) make future life science and social science work more robust+informative than it is now, providing highly leveraged returns to welfare?
There is also non-AI global catastrophic risk, like engineered pandemics, and low hanging fruit for dealing with agricultural catastrophes like nuclear winter.
What’s wrong with low hanging fruit? Not entertaining enough?
I agree that we’re in danger of having picked all the low-hanging fruit. But I think there’s room to fix this.