I agree that EA might be somewhat “intellectually adrift”, and yes the forum could be more vibrant, but I don’t think these are the only metric for EA success or progress—and maybe not even the most important.
The EA movement attracted a bunch of talent by being intellectually vibrant. If I thought that the EA movement was no longer intellectually vibrant, but it was attracting a different kind of talent (such as the doers you mention) instead, this would be less of a concern, but I don’t think that’s the case.
(To be clear, I’m talking about the EA movement, as opposed to EA orgs. So even if EA orgs are doing a great job at finding doers, the EA movement might still be in a bad place if it isn’t contributing significantly to this).
1. Rutger Bregman going viral with “The school for Moral ambition” launch 2. Lewis Bollard’s Dwarkesh podcast, Ted talk and public fundraising. 3. Anthropic at the frontier of AI building and public sphere, with ongoing EA influence 4. The shrimp Daily show thing… 5. GiveWell raised $310 million dollars last year NOT from OpenPhil, the most ever. 6. Impressive progress on reducing factory farming 7. 80,000 hours AI video reaching 7 million views 8. Lead stuff 9. CE incubated charities gaining increasing prominence and funding outside of EA, with many sporting multi-million dollar budgets and producing huge impact 10. Everyone should have a number 10....
These really are some notable successes, but one way to lose is to succeed at lots of small things, whilst failing to succeed at the most important things.
Once people have built career capital in AI/Animal welfare/ETG or whatever, I think we should be cautious about encouraging those people on to the next thing too quickly
You mostly only see the successes, but in practise this seems to be less of an issue I initially would have thought.
The EA movement attracted a bunch of talent by being intellectually vibrant. If I thought that the EA movement was no longer intellectually vibrant, but it was attracting a different kind of talent (such as the doers you mention) instead, this would be less of a concern, but I don’t think that’s the case.
(To be clear, I’m talking about the EA movement, as opposed to EA orgs. So even if EA orgs are doing a great job at finding doers, the EA movement might still be in a bad place if it isn’t contributing significantly to this).
These really are some notable successes, but one way to lose is to succeed at lots of small things, whilst failing to succeed at the most important things.
You mostly only see the successes, but in practise this seems to be less of an issue I initially would have thought.