Disclosure: I copyedited a draft of this post, and do contract work for CEA more generally
I don’t think that longtermism is a consensus view in the movement.
The 2017 EA Survey results had more people saying poverty was the top priority than AI and non-AI far future work combined. Similarly, AMF and GiveWell got by far the most donations in 2016, according to that same survey. While I agree that someone can be a longtermist and think that practicality concerns prioritize near-term good work for now anyway, I don’t think this is a very compelling explanation for these survey results.
As a first pass heuristic, I think EA leadership would guess correctly about community-held views more often if they held the belief “the modal EA-identifying person cares most about solving suffering that is happening in the world right now.”
I agree that I might be wrong about this, but it’s worth noting that I wasn’t trying to make a claim about the modal EA. When talking about the emerging consensus I was implicitly referring to the influence-weighted opinion of EAs or something like that. This could be an area where I don’t have access to a representative sample of influential EAs which would make it likely that the claim is false.
Disclosure: I copyedited a draft of this post, and do contract work for CEA more generally
I don’t think that longtermism is a consensus view in the movement.
The 2017 EA Survey results had more people saying poverty was the top priority than AI and non-AI far future work combined. Similarly, AMF and GiveWell got by far the most donations in 2016, according to that same survey. While I agree that someone can be a longtermist and think that practicality concerns prioritize near-term good work for now anyway, I don’t think this is a very compelling explanation for these survey results.
As a first pass heuristic, I think EA leadership would guess correctly about community-held views more often if they held the belief “the modal EA-identifying person cares most about solving suffering that is happening in the world right now.”
I agree that I might be wrong about this, but it’s worth noting that I wasn’t trying to make a claim about the modal EA. When talking about the emerging consensus I was implicitly referring to the influence-weighted opinion of EAs or something like that. This could be an area where I don’t have access to a representative sample of influential EAs which would make it likely that the claim is false.