In my reading, the OP updated toward the position “it’s plausible that effective altruist community-building activities could be net-negative in impact, and I wanted to explore some conjectures about what that plausibility would entail” based on FTX causing large economic damage. One of the conjectures based on this is “Implement Carla Zoe Cremer’s Recommendations”.
I’m mostly arguing against the position that ‘the update of probability mass on EA community building being negative due to FTX evidence is a strong reason to implement Carla Zoe Cremer’s Recommendations’
For comparison: I held the position that effective altruist community-building activities could be net-negative in impact before FTX and did not update much on the FTX evidence. In my view, the main reason for plausible negativity is EA seems much better at “finding places of high leverage” where you can influence the trajectory of the world a lot, than in figuring out what to actually do in those places. In my view, interventions against the risk include emphasis on epistemics, pushing against local consequentialist reasoning, and pushing against free-floating “community building” where people not working on the object level try mostly to bring in a lot of new people.
Personally, I think implementing Zoe Cremer’s Recommendations as a wholeeither does not impact the largest real risks, orwould make the negative outcomes more likely. Repeated themes in the recommendations are ‘introduce bureaucracy’ and ‘decide democratically’. I don’t think bureaucracies are wise, and in ‘democratizing’ things the big question is ‘who is the demos?’.
I’m not confident what the whole argument is.
In my reading, the OP updated toward the position “it’s plausible that effective altruist community-building activities could be net-negative in impact, and I wanted to explore some conjectures about what that plausibility would entail” based on FTX causing large economic damage. One of the conjectures based on this is “Implement Carla Zoe Cremer’s Recommendations”.
I’m mostly arguing against the position that ‘the update of probability mass on EA community building being negative due to FTX evidence is a strong reason to implement Carla Zoe Cremer’s Recommendations’
For comparison: I held the position that effective altruist community-building activities could be net-negative in impact before FTX and did not update much on the FTX evidence. In my view, the main reason for plausible negativity is EA seems much better at “finding places of high leverage” where you can influence the trajectory of the world a lot, than in figuring out what to actually do in those places. In my view, interventions against the risk include emphasis on epistemics, pushing against local consequentialist reasoning, and pushing against free-floating “community building” where people not working on the object level try mostly to bring in a lot of new people.
Personally, I think implementing Zoe Cremer’s Recommendations as a whole either does not impact the largest real risks, or would make the negative outcomes more likely. Repeated themes in the recommendations are ‘introduce bureaucracy’ and ‘decide democratically’. I don’t think bureaucracies are wise, and in ‘democratizing’ things the big question is ‘who is the demos?’.