Re. Gripe #2: I appreciate I haven’t done a perfect job of pinning down the concepts. Rather than try to patch them over now (I think I’ll continue to have things that are in some ways flawed even if I add some patches), I’ll talk a little more about the motivation for the concepts, in the hope that this can help you to triangulate what I intended:
I think that there’s a (theoretically possible) version of EA which has become sort of corrupt, and continues to gather up resources while failing to deploy them for good ends
I think keeping a certain amount of Phase 2 work keeps EA honest, and connecting to its roots of trying to do good in the world
The ability to credibly point to achieved impact is asymmetrically deployable by memeplexes which are really gearing up to do good things and help people achieve more good things, over versions of the memeplex which tell powerful narratives about why they’re really the most important thing but will ultimately fail to achieve anything
In slogan form: “Phase 2 work guarantees EA isn’t a Ponzi scheme”
I think keeping more attention on “what are our current best guesses about concrete things that we can go do” prevents people’s pictures of what’s important from getting too unmoored from reality
Re. Gripe #2: I appreciate I haven’t done a perfect job of pinning down the concepts. Rather than try to patch them over now (I think I’ll continue to have things that are in some ways flawed even if I add some patches), I’ll talk a little more about the motivation for the concepts, in the hope that this can help you to triangulate what I intended:
I think that there’s a (theoretically possible) version of EA which has become sort of corrupt, and continues to gather up resources while failing to deploy them for good ends
I think keeping a certain amount of Phase 2 work keeps EA honest, and connecting to its roots of trying to do good in the world
The ability to credibly point to achieved impact is asymmetrically deployable by memeplexes which are really gearing up to do good things and help people achieve more good things, over versions of the memeplex which tell powerful narratives about why they’re really the most important thing but will ultimately fail to achieve anything
In slogan form: “Phase 2 work guarantees EA isn’t a Ponzi scheme”
I think keeping more attention on “what are our current best guesses about concrete things that we can go do” prevents people’s pictures of what’s important from getting too unmoored from reality
Thanks for the clarification! I would point to this recent post on a similar topic to the last thing you said.