I think the problem here is that it makes a category mistake about how the move to longtermism happened. It wasn’t because of any success or failure metric that moved things but the actual underlying arguments becoming convincing to people. For example, Holden Karnofsky moving from founding Givewell to heading the longtermist side of OpenPhil and focusing on AI.
The people who made neartermist causes successful chose on their own accord to move to the longtermist. They aren’t being coerced away. GHW donations are growing in absolute terms. The weird feeling that there isn’t enough institutional support isn’t a funding problem it’s a weird vibes problem.
Additionally, I don’t even know if people would say longtermism has had a negative impact outside of the doomiest people given it also accelerated alignment organisations (obviously contingent on your optimism on solving alignment). Most people think there’s decent headway insofar as Greg Brockman is talking about alignment seriously and this salience doesn’t spiral into a race dynamic.
Is the idea of an EA split to force Holden back to Givewell? Is it to make it so that Ord and Macaskill go back to GWWC? I just find these posts kind of weird in that they imagine people being pushed into longtermism forgetting that a lot of longtermists were neartermists at one point and made the choice to switch.
I think OP’s idea is not to get longermists to switch back, but to insulate neartermists from the harms that one might argue come from sharing a broader movement name with the longtermist movement.
I think the problem here is that it makes a category mistake about how the move to longtermism happened. It wasn’t because of any success or failure metric that moved things but the actual underlying arguments becoming convincing to people. For example, Holden Karnofsky moving from founding Givewell to heading the longtermist side of OpenPhil and focusing on AI.
The people who made neartermist causes successful chose on their own accord to move to the longtermist. They aren’t being coerced away. GHW donations are growing in absolute terms. The weird feeling that there isn’t enough institutional support isn’t a funding problem it’s a weird vibes problem.
Additionally, I don’t even know if people would say longtermism has had a negative impact outside of the doomiest people given it also accelerated alignment organisations (obviously contingent on your optimism on solving alignment). Most people think there’s decent headway insofar as Greg Brockman is talking about alignment seriously and this salience doesn’t spiral into a race dynamic.
Is the idea of an EA split to force Holden back to Givewell? Is it to make it so that Ord and Macaskill go back to GWWC? I just find these posts kind of weird in that they imagine people being pushed into longtermism forgetting that a lot of longtermists were neartermists at one point and made the choice to switch.
I think OP’s idea is not to get longermists to switch back, but to insulate neartermists from the harms that one might argue come from sharing a broader movement name with the longtermist movement.