This is going to be rambly I don’t have the energy or time to organize my thoughts more atm. tldr is that I think the current uppercase EA movement is broken and not sure it can be fixed. I think there is room for a new uppercase EA movement that is bigger tent, lessed focused on intellectualism, more focused on organizing, and additionally has enough of a political structure that it is transparent who is in charge, by what mechanisms we hold bad behavior accountable, etc. I have been spending increasingly more of my time helping the ethical humanist society organize because I believe while lacking the intellectual core of EA it is more set up with all of the above and it feels easier to shift the intellectual core there than the entire informal structure of EA.
Fundamentally we are a mission with a community not a community with a mission. And that starts from the top (or lack of a clearly defined “top”).
We consistenly overvalue thought leaders and wealthy people and undervalue organizers. Can anyone here name an organizer that they know of just for organizing? I spent a huge amount of my time in college organizing northwestern EA. Of course I don’t regret it because i didn’t do it for myself (mostly) but did I get any status or reputation from my efforts? Not as far as I can tell. Am I wrong to think I’d have more respect if I had never organized but worked at jane street instead of organized + akuna ( a lower tier firm)?
Then after college I stayed in chicago, a city with nearly 1T GDP, with the second most quant traders in the united states, with a history of pushing things forward, and we don’t even have a storefront or church building?
repeating op here, but after a few years of engaging with EA, most people have hit diminishing returns on how new info can help them in their own career, and they will engage more with their own sub community.
How can we keep these people engaged and not just the new people and those whose life mission is cause prio? Build EA churches, develop litury/art/rituals that are independent of finding new intellectual breakthroughs, bond community members. Literally let’s just start by copying the most successful community builders ever and move from there.
Then you have the lack of accountability and transparency. Unless you have money, the best way to gain power in this community seems to me to be moving to SF/DC/oxford and living in a group house. There is no clear pipeline for having large sway over the current orthodoxy of most important cause areas. How would I explain to a 19 year in college how we push forward our ideas? I don’t think it would be fair to call this a pure meritocracy. There is a weird oligopoly of attention that is opaque and could be clarified and altered with a political system or at least by breaking up the location based monopolies.
We continue to basically be an applied utilitarian group that we have mis named (not that big of a deal, but I think we should be bigger tent anyway). Why are we a utilitarian group? Well normative concerns are not logical, so you can’t say merit won out.
Finally there is the bad behavior which we are completely powerless to, because we don’t have any political structure. The very fact that Will continues to hold so much sway and was never formally punished for ftx/twitter/political (if you don’t know what i mean when I say SBF political thing that proves my point even more) is a big part of why there is no trust (edit: i want to clarify that I think will is a good person and didn’t mean this as meaning I specifically don’t trust him rather just the institutions of our community). Currently we have leopold and mechanize, who are now AI accelerationists, who got way they are off the back of our movement, in very small part to the power i gave to the movement by organzing, and I have to watch these people behave in a way I think is bad and I can’t even cast a token vote expressing I would like to see them exhiled or punished.
As angry as people were years ago, WE DIDN’T CHANGE ANYTHING. How can I trust FTX won’t happen again?
This is going to be rambly I don’t have the energy or time to organize my thoughts more atm. tldr is that I think the current uppercase EA movement is broken and not sure it can be fixed. I think there is room for a new uppercase EA movement that is bigger tent, lessed focused on intellectualism, more focused on organizing, and additionally has enough of a political structure that it is transparent who is in charge, by what mechanisms we hold bad behavior accountable, etc. I have been spending increasingly more of my time helping the ethical humanist society organize because I believe while lacking the intellectual core of EA it is more set up with all of the above and it feels easier to shift the intellectual core there than the entire informal structure of EA.
Fundamentally we are a mission with a community not a community with a mission. And that starts from the top (or lack of a clearly defined “top”).
We consistenly overvalue thought leaders and wealthy people and undervalue organizers. Can anyone here name an organizer that they know of just for organizing? I spent a huge amount of my time in college organizing northwestern EA. Of course I don’t regret it because i didn’t do it for myself (mostly) but did I get any status or reputation from my efforts? Not as far as I can tell. Am I wrong to think I’d have more respect if I had never organized but worked at jane street instead of organized + akuna ( a lower tier firm)?
Then after college I stayed in chicago, a city with nearly 1T GDP, with the second most quant traders in the united states, with a history of pushing things forward, and we don’t even have a storefront or church building?
repeating op here, but after a few years of engaging with EA, most people have hit diminishing returns on how new info can help them in their own career, and they will engage more with their own sub community.
How can we keep these people engaged and not just the new people and those whose life mission is cause prio? Build EA churches, develop litury/art/rituals that are independent of finding new intellectual breakthroughs, bond community members. Literally let’s just start by copying the most successful community builders ever and move from there.
Then you have the lack of accountability and transparency. Unless you have money, the best way to gain power in this community seems to me to be moving to SF/DC/oxford and living in a group house. There is no clear pipeline for having large sway over the current orthodoxy of most important cause areas. How would I explain to a 19 year in college how we push forward our ideas? I don’t think it would be fair to call this a pure meritocracy. There is a weird oligopoly of attention that is opaque and could be clarified and altered with a political system or at least by breaking up the location based monopolies.
We continue to basically be an applied utilitarian group that we have mis named (not that big of a deal, but I think we should be bigger tent anyway). Why are we a utilitarian group? Well normative concerns are not logical, so you can’t say merit won out.
Finally there is the bad behavior which we are completely powerless to, because we don’t have any political structure. The very fact that Will continues to hold so much sway and was never formally punished for ftx/twitter/political (if you don’t know what i mean when I say SBF political thing that proves my point even more) is a big part of why there is no trust (edit: i want to clarify that I think will is a good person and didn’t mean this as meaning I specifically don’t trust him rather just the institutions of our community). Currently we have leopold and mechanize, who are now AI accelerationists, who got way they are off the back of our movement, in very small part to the power i gave to the movement by organzing, and I have to watch these people behave in a way I think is bad and I can’t even cast a token vote expressing I would like to see them exhiled or punished.
As angry as people were years ago, WE DIDN’T CHANGE ANYTHING. How can I trust FTX won’t happen again?