Commenting to say I strongly agree that epistemic and attention distortions are big problems. It already seems like future funds has swayed the ideological center of this movement.
Would like to see an analysis on how future funds changed the ideological mass distribution of this community. I think you could argue that most shift it caused was simply by changing incentives and not from new information.
e.g. As someone who has thought EA has underfunded political type stuff for a while, It’s been concerning to see people get more interested in (EA) politics and spend so much attention on whether politics is worth it and/or how best to do politics just because someone in the community donated 12M dollars(and because they have high status, which is because they are rich… ). It’s not like SBF is a poly sci expert or wrote a ground breaking cost benefit to convince us(correct me if I’m wrong). He just went on 80k pod and said he thinks politics is a good bet and then dumped the cash trucks. I understand that even if you disagree w/ flynn campaign you’re going to want to comment on how you disagree, but the implication here is if an EA billionaire gives 12M dollars to have people dig holes in the ground (ok it would have to be something a bit more convoluted and or justifiable) it’s going to at least cause a bunch of impactful people to spend time thinking about the value prop.
If EA people think that project is valuable we would hope there focus would not be super conditional on the current funding streams.
Commenting to say I strongly agree that epistemic and attention distortions are big problems. It already seems like future funds has swayed the ideological center of this movement.
Would like to see an analysis on how future funds changed the ideological mass distribution of this community. I think you could argue that most shift it caused was simply by changing incentives and not from new information.
e.g. As someone who has thought EA has underfunded political type stuff for a while, It’s been concerning to see people get more interested in (EA) politics and spend so much attention on whether politics is worth it and/or how best to do politics just because someone in the community donated 12M dollars(and because they have high status, which is because they are rich… ). It’s not like SBF is a poly sci expert or wrote a ground breaking cost benefit to convince us(correct me if I’m wrong). He just went on 80k pod and said he thinks politics is a good bet and then dumped the cash trucks. I understand that even if you disagree w/ flynn campaign you’re going to want to comment on how you disagree, but the implication here is if an EA billionaire gives 12M dollars to have people dig holes in the ground (ok it would have to be something a bit more convoluted and or justifiable) it’s going to at least cause a bunch of impactful people to spend time thinking about the value prop.
If EA people think that project is valuable we would hope there focus would not be super conditional on the current funding streams.