I really like this take on EA as an intellectual movement, and agree thatEA could focus more on“the mission of making the transition to a post-AGI society go well.”
As important as intellectual progress is, I don’t think it defines EA as a movement. The EA movement is not (and should not be) dependent on continuous intellectual advancement and breakthrough for success. When I look at your 3 categories for the “future” of EA, they seem to refer more to our relevance as thought leaders, rather than what we actually achieve in the world. Not everything needs to be intellectually cutting edge to be doing-lots-of-good. 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.
Intellectual progress moves in waves and spikes—times of excitement and rapid progress, then lulls. EA made exciting leaps over 15 years in the thought worlds of development, ETG, animal welfare, AI and biorisk. Your post-AGI ideas could herald a new spike which would be great. My positive spin is that in the meantime, EAs are “doing” large scale good in many areas, often without quite the peaks and troughs of intellectual progress.
My response to your “EA as a legacy movement set to fade away;” would be that only so far as legacy depends on intellectual progress. Which it does, but also depends on how your output machine is cranking. I don’t think we have stalled to the degree your article seems to make out. On the “doer” front I think EA is progressing OK, and it could be misleading/disheartening to leave that out of the picture.
Here’s a scattergun of examples which came to mind where I think the EA/EA adjacent doing machine is cranking pretty well in both real world progress and the public sphere over the past year or two. They probably aren’t even the most important.
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....
Yes we need to looking for the next big cause areas and intellectual leaps forward, while we also need thousands of people committed to doing good in areas they have already invested, in behind this. There will often be years of lagtime between ideas and doers implementing them. And building takes time. Most of the biggest NGOs in the world are over 50 years old. Even Open AI in a fast-moving field was founded 10 years ago. 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, lest we give up hard fought leverage and progress. In saying that, your new cause areas might be a relatively easy pivot especially for philosophers/AI practitioners.
I appreciate your comment “Are you saying that EA should just become an intellectual club? What about building things!” Definitely not—let’s build, too!”
But I think building/doing is more important than a short comment as we assess EA progress.
I agree with your overall framing and I know you can’t be too balanced or have too many caveats in a short post, but I think as well as considering the intellectual frontier we should keep “how are our doers doing” front and center in any assessment of the general progress/decline of EA.
Thanks, Nick, that’s helpful. I’m not sure how much we actually disagree — in particular, I wasn’t meaning this post to be a general assessment of EA as a movement, rather than pointing to one major issue — but I’ll use the opportunity to clarify my position at least.
The EA movement is not (and should not be) dependent on continuous intellectual advancement and breakthrough for success. When I look at your 3 categories for the “future” of EA, they seem to refer more to our relevance as thought leaders, rather than what we actually achieve in the world
It’s true in principle that EA needn’t be dependent in that way. If we really had found the best focus areas, had broadly allocated right % of labour to each, and have prioritised within them well, too, and the best focus areas didn’t change over time, then we could just focus on doing and we wouldn’t need any more intellectual advancement. But I don’t think we’re at that point. Two arguments:
1. An outside view argument: In my view, we’re more likely than not to see more change and more intellectual development in the next two decades than we saw in the last couple of centuries. (I think we’ve already seen major strategically-relevant change in the last few years.) It would be very surprising if the right prioritisation prior to this point is the right prioritisation through this period, too. 2. An inside view argument: Look at my list of other cause areas. Some might still turn out to be damp squibs, but I’m confident some aren’t. The ideal portfolio involves a lot of effort on some of these areas, and we need thought and research in order to know whichn ones and how best to address them.
I love your list of achievements—I agree the EA movement has had a lot of wins and we should celebrate that. But EA is about asking whether we’re doing the most good, not just a lot of good. And, given the classic arguments around fat-tailed distributions and diminishing returns within any one area, I think if we mis-prioritise we lose a meaningful % of the impact we could have had.
So, I don’t care about intellectual progress intrinsically. I’m making the case that we need it in order to do as much good as we could.
More generally, I think a lot of social movements lose out on a lot of the impact they could have had (even on their own terms) via “ossification”—getting stuck on a set of ideas or priorities that it becomes hard, culturally, to change. E.g. environmentalists opposing nuclear, animal welfare advocates focusing on veganism, workers’ rights opposing capitalism, etc. I think this occurs for structural reasons that we should expect to apply to EA, too.
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?
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.
I really like this take on EA as an intellectual movement, and agree that EA could focus more on “the mission of making the transition to a post-AGI society go well.”
As important as intellectual progress is, I don’t think it defines EA as a movement. The EA movement is not (and should not be) dependent on continuous intellectual advancement and breakthrough for success. When I look at your 3 categories for the “future” of EA, they seem to refer more to our relevance as thought leaders, rather than what we actually achieve in the world. Not everything needs to be intellectually cutting edge to be doing-lots-of-good. 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.
Intellectual progress moves in waves and spikes—times of excitement and rapid progress, then lulls. EA made exciting leaps over 15 years in the thought worlds of development, ETG, animal welfare, AI and biorisk. Your post-AGI ideas could herald a new spike which would be great. My positive spin is that in the meantime, EAs are “doing” large scale good in many areas, often without quite the peaks and troughs of intellectual progress.
My response to your “EA as a legacy movement set to fade away;” would be that only so far as legacy depends on intellectual progress. Which it does, but also depends on how your output machine is cranking. I don’t think we have stalled to the degree your article seems to make out. On the “doer” front I think EA is progressing OK, and it could be misleading/disheartening to leave that out of the picture.
Here’s a scattergun of examples which came to mind where I think the EA/EA adjacent doing machine is cranking pretty well in both real world progress and the public sphere over the past year or two. They probably aren’t even the most important.
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....
Yes we need to looking for the next big cause areas and intellectual leaps forward, while we also need thousands of people committed to doing good in areas they have already invested, in behind this. There will often be years of lagtime between ideas and doers implementing them. And building takes time. Most of the biggest NGOs in the world are over 50 years old. Even Open AI in a fast-moving field was founded 10 years ago. 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, lest we give up hard fought leverage and progress. In saying that, your new cause areas might be a relatively easy pivot especially for philosophers/AI practitioners.
I appreciate your comment “Are you saying that EA should just become an intellectual club? What about building things!” Definitely not—let’s build, too!”
But I think building/doing is more important than a short comment as we assess EA progress.
I agree with your overall framing and I know you can’t be too balanced or have too many caveats in a short post, but I think as well as considering the intellectual frontier we should keep “how are our doers doing” front and center in any assessment of the general progress/decline of EA.
Thanks, Nick, that’s helpful. I’m not sure how much we actually disagree — in particular, I wasn’t meaning this post to be a general assessment of EA as a movement, rather than pointing to one major issue — but I’ll use the opportunity to clarify my position at least.
It’s true in principle that EA needn’t be dependent in that way. If we really had found the best focus areas, had broadly allocated right % of labour to each, and have prioritised within them well, too, and the best focus areas didn’t change over time, then we could just focus on doing and we wouldn’t need any more intellectual advancement. But I don’t think we’re at that point. Two arguments:
1. An outside view argument: In my view, we’re more likely than not to see more change and more intellectual development in the next two decades than we saw in the last couple of centuries. (I think we’ve already seen major strategically-relevant change in the last few years.) It would be very surprising if the right prioritisation prior to this point is the right prioritisation through this period, too.
2. An inside view argument: Look at my list of other cause areas. Some might still turn out to be damp squibs, but I’m confident some aren’t. The ideal portfolio involves a lot of effort on some of these areas, and we need thought and research in order to know whichn ones and how best to address them.
I love your list of achievements—I agree the EA movement has had a lot of wins and we should celebrate that. But EA is about asking whether we’re doing the most good, not just a lot of good. And, given the classic arguments around fat-tailed distributions and diminishing returns within any one area, I think if we mis-prioritise we lose a meaningful % of the impact we could have had.
So, I don’t care about intellectual progress intrinsically. I’m making the case that we need it in order to do as much good as we could.
More generally, I think a lot of social movements lose out on a lot of the impact they could have had (even on their own terms) via “ossification”—getting stuck on a set of ideas or priorities that it becomes hard, culturally, to change. E.g. environmentalists opposing nuclear, animal welfare advocates focusing on veganism, workers’ rights opposing capitalism, etc. I think this occurs for structural reasons that we should expect to apply to EA, too.
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?
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.