For example many editions of the EA handbook spend a huge fraction of their introductions to other cause areas effectively arguing why you should work on AI instead. CEA staffers very heavily favor AI.
Just wanted to quickly add that I don’t think that this is quite accurate.
My experience facilitating the Intro Fellowship using the previous version of the EA Handbook was that AI basically didn’t come up until the week about longtermism, and glancing through the current version that doesn’t seem to have changed. Though I welcome people to read the current version of the EA Handbook and come to their own conclusions.
The most recent relevant data on CEA staff cause prio is this post about where people are donating, and I think animal welfare is more common in that list than AI safety (though this only includes a subset of staff who were interested in participating in the post).
I was also confused by that paragraph, as someone who read the handbook in ~2022. I just randomly came across this and this, and apparently this was an issue 7 years ago. I think it’s likely that several people who have been around longer than us haven’t noticed that the handbooks and CEA staff changed a lot.
Just wanted to quickly add that I don’t think that this is quite accurate.
My experience facilitating the Intro Fellowship using the previous version of the EA Handbook was that AI basically didn’t come up until the week about longtermism, and glancing through the current version that doesn’t seem to have changed. Though I welcome people to read the current version of the EA Handbook and come to their own conclusions.
The most recent relevant data on CEA staff cause prio is this post about where people are donating, and I think animal welfare is more common in that list than AI safety (though this only includes a subset of staff who were interested in participating in the post).
I was also confused by that paragraph, as someone who read the handbook in ~2022. I just randomly came across this and this, and apparently this was an issue 7 years ago. I think it’s likely that several people who have been around longer than us haven’t noticed that the handbooks and CEA staff changed a lot.