I’m going to list my answers separately for easier upvoting/commentary.
“Effective Altruism 2050: The Grand Story”, which explores how people might think about EA in the future, and especially how “credit” might be allocated for whatever we’ve accomplished.
The thesis of the piece is that most of our current concerns about which kinds of work are high-status or not may fade away over time, to be replaced by a general sense that everyone who did EA-adjacent things was part of the same “story”, trying to do their best under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Hmm.. I would like to see this with caveats or something: EA is far from being sure of success and there are a number of failure modes I can imagine. The risk of this article might be that it would paint an overly optimistic picture of EA. Although I would love to see the description of a best-case scenario!
It seems more likely that not (at least to me) that EA will make only a small dent in history, if it is remembered at all. The post explores what might happen in the timelines where we succeed.
Alright that seems cool! I look forward to it. I think plenty of people have dreamed of a best case scenario, but it’s definitely good to write that up :)
I would be really interested in seeing this written up. I have many thoughts related to the idea of geting credit (probably not directly related to your post)
I have been thinking a lot about how much of a role high-status plays in influencing people to make decisions, and whether this is always a good thing. For example, many things are highly uncertain but ones endorsed by the community might get a sense of security that even if this doesn’t pan out, the person has the support of the community that they did the best thing. Whereas, another cause or intervention might be avoided due to this lack of support.
I also wonder to what extent people take into account being given ‘credit’ for contributing to a cause or intervention, be it consciously or unconsciously.
Finally, I think post could also raise some interesting questions about the long-term sustainability of EA and its perception to non-EAs, and suggest that tracking as much EA activity as possible now is important if we need to convince people that we made an impact (to combat arguments like “these positive things would have happened anyways/were inevitable”
(Also, perhaps I should have also separated my answers! For next time)
I’m going to list my answers separately for easier upvoting/commentary.
“Effective Altruism 2050: The Grand Story”, which explores how people might think about EA in the future, and especially how “credit” might be allocated for whatever we’ve accomplished.
The thesis of the piece is that most of our current concerns about which kinds of work are high-status or not may fade away over time, to be replaced by a general sense that everyone who did EA-adjacent things was part of the same “story”, trying to do their best under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Hmm.. I would like to see this with caveats or something: EA is far from being sure of success and there are a number of failure modes I can imagine. The risk of this article might be that it would paint an overly optimistic picture of EA. Although I would love to see the description of a best-case scenario!
It seems more likely that not (at least to me) that EA will make only a small dent in history, if it is remembered at all. The post explores what might happen in the timelines where we succeed.
Alright that seems cool! I look forward to it. I think plenty of people have dreamed of a best case scenario, but it’s definitely good to write that up :)
I would be really interested in seeing this written up. I have many thoughts related to the idea of geting credit (probably not directly related to your post)
I have been thinking a lot about how much of a role high-status plays in influencing people to make decisions, and whether this is always a good thing. For example, many things are highly uncertain but ones endorsed by the community might get a sense of security that even if this doesn’t pan out, the person has the support of the community that they did the best thing. Whereas, another cause or intervention might be avoided due to this lack of support.
I also wonder to what extent people take into account being given ‘credit’ for contributing to a cause or intervention, be it consciously or unconsciously.
Finally, I think post could also raise some interesting questions about the long-term sustainability of EA and its perception to non-EAs, and suggest that tracking as much EA activity as possible now is important if we need to convince people that we made an impact (to combat arguments like “these positive things would have happened anyways/were inevitable”
(Also, perhaps I should have also separated my answers! For next time)