If EA decided to pursue the politics and civil society route, I would suggest that it would likely make sense to follow a strategy similar to what the Good Ancestors Project has been following in Australia. This project has done a combination of a) outreach to policy-makers b) co-ordinating an open letter to the government c) making a formal submission to a government inquiry d) walking EA’s through the process of making their own submissions (you’d have to check with Greg to see if he still thinks all of these activities are worthwhile).
Even though AI Policy seems like the highest priority at the moment, there are benefits of working on multiple cause areas since a) you can only submit to an inquiry when one is happening, so more cause areas increases the chance that there is something relevant b) there’s a nice synergy that comes from getting EA’s who have different cause areas as their main focus to submit to the inquiries for other areas.
Greg has a great explanation where he talks about EA having spent a lot of effort figuring out how to leverage our financial capital and our career capital to make the world better, but that we’ve been neglecting our political capital. Obviously there’s the question of whether we have good ways to deploy that capital, but I suspect that this answer is that we do.
I’m not claiming that this is necessarily the route forward, but it is likely worth exploring in countries with well-developed EA communities.
If EA decided to pursue the politics and civil society route, I would suggest that it would likely make sense to follow a strategy similar to what the Good Ancestors Project has been following in Australia. This project has done a combination of a) outreach to policy-makers b) co-ordinating an open letter to the government c) making a formal submission to a government inquiry d) walking EA’s through the process of making their own submissions (you’d have to check with Greg to see if he still thinks all of these activities are worthwhile).
Even though AI Policy seems like the highest priority at the moment, there are benefits of working on multiple cause areas since a) you can only submit to an inquiry when one is happening, so more cause areas increases the chance that there is something relevant b) there’s a nice synergy that comes from getting EA’s who have different cause areas as their main focus to submit to the inquiries for other areas.
Greg has a great explanation where he talks about EA having spent a lot of effort figuring out how to leverage our financial capital and our career capital to make the world better, but that we’ve been neglecting our political capital. Obviously there’s the question of whether we have good ways to deploy that capital, but I suspect that this answer is that we do.
I’m not claiming that this is necessarily the route forward, but it is likely worth exploring in countries with well-developed EA communities.