Who’s the “we” in “we are not doing phase 2 work”?
You seem to have made estimates that “we” are not doing phase 2 work, but I don’t understand where such estimates come from, and they aren’t sourced.
If the point of your post is “more people should think about doing Phase 2 work” then I totally agree with the conclusion! But if your argument hinges on the fact that “we” aren’t doing enough of it, I think that might be wrong because it is totally non-obvious to me how to measure how much is being done.
This seems like an easy pitfall, to squint at what’s happening on the EA forum or within EA-labeled orgs and think “gee that’s mostly Phase 1 work”, without considering that you may have a biased sample of a fuzzily-defined thing. In this case it seems perfectly obvious that things explicitly labeled EA are going to lean Phase 1, but things influenced by EA are dramatically larger, mostly invisible, and obviously going to lean Phase 2.
(Context: I run a 2000+ person org, Wave, founded under EA principles but presumably not being counted in the “we” who are doing Phase 2 work because we’re not posting on the Forum all the time, or something.)
Yeah I did mean “longtermist EA”, meaning “stuff that people arrived at thinking was especially high priority after taking a long hard look at how most of the expected impact of our actions is probably far into the future and how we need to wrestle with massive uncertainty about what’s good to do as a result of that”.
I was here imagining that the motivation for working on Wave wasn’t that it seemed like a top Phase 2 priority from that perspective. If actually you start with that perspective and think that ~Wave is one of the best ways to address it, then I would want to count Wave as Phase 2 for longtermist EA (I’d also be super interested to get into more discussion about why you think that, because I’d have the impression that there was a gap in the public discourse).
Thanks. I definitely can’t count Wave in that category because longtermism wasn’t a thing on my radar when Wave was founded. Anyway, I missed that in your original post and I think it somewhat invalidates my point; but only somewhat.
I don’t think predating longtermism rules out Wave. I would count Open Phil’s grants to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which was established before EA (let alone longtermism), because Open Phil chose to donate to them for longtermist reasons. Similarly, if you wanted to argue that advancing Wave was one of our current best options for improving the long term future, that would be an argument for grouping Wave in with longtermist work.
(I’m really happy that you and Wave are doing what you’re doing, but not because of direct impact on the long-term future.)
Jeff’s comment (and my reply) covers ~50% of my response here, with the remaining ~50% splitting as ~20% “yeah you’re right that I probably have a sampling bias” and ~30% “well we shouldn’t be expecting all the Phase 2 stuff to be in this explicitly labelled core, but it’s a problem that it’s lacking the Phase 1.5 stuff that connects to the Phase 2 stuff happening elsewhere … this is bad because it means meta work in the explicitly labelled parts is failing to deliver on its potential”.
Who’s the “we” in “we are not doing phase 2 work”?
You seem to have made estimates that “we” are not doing phase 2 work, but I don’t understand where such estimates come from, and they aren’t sourced.
If the point of your post is “more people should think about doing Phase 2 work” then I totally agree with the conclusion! But if your argument hinges on the fact that “we” aren’t doing enough of it, I think that might be wrong because it is totally non-obvious to me how to measure how much is being done.
This seems like an easy pitfall, to squint at what’s happening on the EA forum or within EA-labeled orgs and think “gee that’s mostly Phase 1 work”, without considering that you may have a biased sample of a fuzzily-defined thing. In this case it seems perfectly obvious that things explicitly labeled EA are going to lean Phase 1, but things influenced by EA are dramatically larger, mostly invisible, and obviously going to lean Phase 2.
(Context: I run a 2000+ person org, Wave, founded under EA principles but presumably not being counted in the “we” who are doing Phase 2 work because we’re not posting on the Forum all the time, or something.)
I was thinking that Wave (and GiveWell donations, etc) weren’t being counted because Owen is talking specifically about “longtermist EA”?
Yeah I did mean “longtermist EA”, meaning “stuff that people arrived at thinking was especially high priority after taking a long hard look at how most of the expected impact of our actions is probably far into the future and how we need to wrestle with massive uncertainty about what’s good to do as a result of that”.
I was here imagining that the motivation for working on Wave wasn’t that it seemed like a top Phase 2 priority from that perspective. If actually you start with that perspective and think that ~Wave is one of the best ways to address it, then I would want to count Wave as Phase 2 for longtermist EA (I’d also be super interested to get into more discussion about why you think that, because I’d have the impression that there was a gap in the public discourse).
Thanks. I definitely can’t count Wave in that category because longtermism wasn’t a thing on my radar when Wave was founded. Anyway, I missed that in your original post and I think it somewhat invalidates my point; but only somewhat.
I don’t think predating longtermism rules out Wave. I would count Open Phil’s grants to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which was established before EA (let alone longtermism), because Open Phil chose to donate to them for longtermist reasons. Similarly, if you wanted to argue that advancing Wave was one of our current best options for improving the long term future, that would be an argument for grouping Wave in with longtermist work.
(I’m really happy that you and Wave are doing what you’re doing, but not because of direct impact on the long-term future.)
Jeff’s comment (and my reply) covers ~50% of my response here, with the remaining ~50% splitting as ~20% “yeah you’re right that I probably have a sampling bias” and ~30% “well we shouldn’t be expecting all the Phase 2 stuff to be in this explicitly labelled core, but it’s a problem that it’s lacking the Phase 1.5 stuff that connects to the Phase 2 stuff happening elsewhere … this is bad because it means meta work in the explicitly labelled parts is failing to deliver on its potential”.