Thanks for this post! I agree that the EA movement has a lot of momentum right now and “steering” is potentially relatively more important than “rowing”.
Funding and praising someone for pointing out a harmful community norm or inadequate institution is only valuable alongside concrete steps to remedy the issues
I think this is the biggest bottleneck I see in the EA community. Within EA, I see some concrete action based on core EA principles established over the last decade; I also see some criticism of EA or suggestions for how to do things differently. I’m most excited about the middle ground—”speeding up” efforts to move EA in a new direction.
For example, I think Phil Trammell did a great job outlining the idea of patient philanthropy [1], and I’m excited that Founder’s Pledge took the next step and created the Patient Philanthropy Fund [2]. WANBAM took concrete steps to address problems with diversity in the EA community. I’m not sure if these counts as steering or rowing.
I wholeheartedly agree that taking action to do something is often the most important, and most desperately lacking, component. Why is it lacking?
One potential cause could be if many people agree with a critical take, but those people are not the ones who have a lot of influence, e.g. because decision-making power is concentrated.
Another explanation could be that there are actually many people who agree with a critical take on the direction of effective altruism and would have the ability to do something about it, but they just can’t/won’t dedicate time to it given their other professional commitments. (I count myself in that category. If I had a clone of myself that had to work on something other than biorisk, I might ask them to work full-time on ‘steering’ for this movement.)
Thankfully, we can expect a large influx of new, exciting members of the community (thanks to the awesome rowing of so many community builders!) looking for projects to take up. For that reason, I think it’s important that (1) there’s a culture of dissent that prompts people to think about new directions to pull the movement in, and (2) there are institutions in place that can facilitate the implementation of critical work, e.g. funding, positions within organisations, or mechanisms for distributed decision-making for the movement.
Thanks for this post! I agree that the EA movement has a lot of momentum right now and “steering” is potentially relatively more important than “rowing”.
I think this is the biggest bottleneck I see in the EA community. Within EA, I see some concrete action based on core EA principles established over the last decade; I also see some criticism of EA or suggestions for how to do things differently. I’m most excited about the middle ground—”speeding up” efforts to move EA in a new direction.
For example, I think Phil Trammell did a great job outlining the idea of patient philanthropy [1], and I’m excited that Founder’s Pledge took the next step and created the Patient Philanthropy Fund [2]. WANBAM took concrete steps to address problems with diversity in the EA community. I’m not sure if these counts as steering or rowing.
[1] https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/phil-trammell-patient-philanthropy/
[2] https://founderspledge.com/funds/patient-philanthropy-fund
Thanks for your comment, much appreciated!
I wholeheartedly agree that taking action to do something is often the most important, and most desperately lacking, component. Why is it lacking?
One potential cause could be if many people agree with a critical take, but those people are not the ones who have a lot of influence, e.g. because decision-making power is concentrated.
Another explanation could be that there are actually many people who agree with a critical take on the direction of effective altruism and would have the ability to do something about it, but they just can’t/won’t dedicate time to it given their other professional commitments. (I count myself in that category. If I had a clone of myself that had to work on something other than biorisk, I might ask them to work full-time on ‘steering’ for this movement.)
Thankfully, we can expect a large influx of new, exciting members of the community (thanks to the awesome rowing of so many community builders!) looking for projects to take up. For that reason, I think it’s important that (1) there’s a culture of dissent that prompts people to think about new directions to pull the movement in, and (2) there are institutions in place that can facilitate the implementation of critical work, e.g. funding, positions within organisations, or mechanisms for distributed decision-making for the movement.