And the leaders’ forum is quite representative of highly engaged EAs , who also favour AI & longtermist causes over global poverty work by a 4:1 ratio anyway.
If it’s a 4:1 ratio only, I don’t think that should mean that longtermist content should be ~95% of the content on 80K’s Intro to EA collection. That survey shows that some leaders and some highly engaged EAs still think global poverty or animal welfare work are the most important to work on, so we should put some weight on that, especially given our uncertainty (moral and epistemic).
As such, it makes sense for 80K to have at least 1-2 out of 10 episodes to be focused on neartermist priorities like GH&D and animal welfare. This is similar to how I think it makes sense for some percentage of the EA (or “priorities”) community to work on neartermist work. It doesn’t have to be a winner-take-all approach to cause prioritization and what content we say is “EA”.
Based on their latest comment below, 80K seems to agree with putting in 1-2 episodes on neartermist work. Would you disagree with their decision?
It seems like 80K wants to feature some neartermist content in their next collection, but I didn’t object to the current collection for the same reason I don’t object to e.g. pages on Giving What We Can’s website that focus heavily on global development (example): it’s good for EA-branded content to be fairly balanced on the whole, but that doesn’t mean that every individual project has to be balanced.
Some examples of what I mean:
If EA Global had a theme like “economic growth” for one conference and 1⁄3 of the talks were about that, I think that could be pretty interesting, even if it wasn’t representative of community members’ priorities as a whole.
Sometimes, I send out an edition of the EA Newsletter that is mostly development-focused, or AI-focused, because there happened to be a lot of good links about that topic that month. I think the newsletter would be worse if I felt compelled to have at least one article about every major cause area every month.
It may have been better for 80K to refer to their collection as an “introduction to global priorities” or an “introduction to longtermism” or something like that, but I also think it’s perfectly legitimate to use the term “EA: An Introduction”. Giving What We Can talks about “EA” but mostly presents it through examples from global development. 80K does the same but mostly talks about longtermism. EA Global is more balanced than either of those. No single one of these projects is going to dominate the world’s perception of what “EA” is, and I think it’s fine for them to be a bit different.
(I’m more concerned about balance in cases where something could dominate the world’s perception of what EA is — I’d have been concerned if Doing Good Better had never mentioned animal welfare. I don’t think that a collection of old podcast episodes, even from a pretty popular podcast, has the same kind of clout.)
I generally agree with the following statements you said:
“It’s good for EA-branded content to be fairly balanced on the whole, but that doesn’t mean that every individual project has to be balanced.”
“If EA Global had a theme like “economic growth” for one conference and 1⁄3 of the talks were about that, I think that could be pretty interesting, even if it wasn’t representative of community members’ priorities as a whole.
“Sometimes, I send out an edition of the EA Newsletter that is mostly development-focused, or AI-focused, because there happened to be a lot of good links about that topic that month. I think the newsletter would be worse if I felt compelled to have at least one article about every major cause area every month.”
Moreover, I know that a collection of old podcast episodes from 80K isn’t likely to dominate the world’s perception of what EA is. But I think it would benefit 80K and EA more broadly if they just included 1 or 2 episodes about near-termism. I think I and others would be more interested to share their collection to people as an intro to EA if there were 1 or 2 episodes about GH&D and animal welfare. Not having any makes me know that I’ll only share this to people interested in longtermism.
Anyway, I guess 80K’s decision to add one episode on near-termism is evidence that they think that neartermist interventions do merit some discussion within an “intro to EA” collection. And maybe they sense that more people would be more supportive of 80K and this collection if they did this.
Just a quick point on this:
If it’s a 4:1 ratio only, I don’t think that should mean that longtermist content should be ~95% of the content on 80K’s Intro to EA collection. That survey shows that some leaders and some highly engaged EAs still think global poverty or animal welfare work are the most important to work on, so we should put some weight on that, especially given our uncertainty (moral and epistemic).
As such, it makes sense for 80K to have at least 1-2 out of 10 episodes to be focused on neartermist priorities like GH&D and animal welfare. This is similar to how I think it makes sense for some percentage of the EA (or “priorities”) community to work on neartermist work. It doesn’t have to be a winner-take-all approach to cause prioritization and what content we say is “EA”.
Based on their latest comment below, 80K seems to agree with putting in 1-2 episodes on neartermist work. Would you disagree with their decision?
It seems like 80K wants to feature some neartermist content in their next collection, but I didn’t object to the current collection for the same reason I don’t object to e.g. pages on Giving What We Can’s website that focus heavily on global development (example): it’s good for EA-branded content to be fairly balanced on the whole, but that doesn’t mean that every individual project has to be balanced.
Some examples of what I mean:
If EA Global had a theme like “economic growth” for one conference and 1⁄3 of the talks were about that, I think that could be pretty interesting, even if it wasn’t representative of community members’ priorities as a whole.
Sometimes, I send out an edition of the EA Newsletter that is mostly development-focused, or AI-focused, because there happened to be a lot of good links about that topic that month. I think the newsletter would be worse if I felt compelled to have at least one article about every major cause area every month.
It may have been better for 80K to refer to their collection as an “introduction to global priorities” or an “introduction to longtermism” or something like that, but I also think it’s perfectly legitimate to use the term “EA: An Introduction”. Giving What We Can talks about “EA” but mostly presents it through examples from global development. 80K does the same but mostly talks about longtermism. EA Global is more balanced than either of those. No single one of these projects is going to dominate the world’s perception of what “EA” is, and I think it’s fine for them to be a bit different.
(I’m more concerned about balance in cases where something could dominate the world’s perception of what EA is — I’d have been concerned if Doing Good Better had never mentioned animal welfare. I don’t think that a collection of old podcast episodes, even from a pretty popular podcast, has the same kind of clout.)
Thanks for sharing your thinking!
I generally agree with the following statements you said:
“It’s good for EA-branded content to be fairly balanced on the whole, but that doesn’t mean that every individual project has to be balanced.”
“If EA Global had a theme like “economic growth” for one conference and 1⁄3 of the talks were about that, I think that could be pretty interesting, even if it wasn’t representative of community members’ priorities as a whole.
“Sometimes, I send out an edition of the EA Newsletter that is mostly development-focused, or AI-focused, because there happened to be a lot of good links about that topic that month. I think the newsletter would be worse if I felt compelled to have at least one article about every major cause area every month.”
Moreover, I know that a collection of old podcast episodes from 80K isn’t likely to dominate the world’s perception of what EA is. But I think it would benefit 80K and EA more broadly if they just included 1 or 2 episodes about near-termism. I think I and others would be more interested to share their collection to people as an intro to EA if there were 1 or 2 episodes about GH&D and animal welfare. Not having any makes me know that I’ll only share this to people interested in longtermism.
Anyway, I guess 80K’s decision to add one episode on near-termism is evidence that they think that neartermist interventions do merit some discussion within an “intro to EA” collection. And maybe they sense that more people would be more supportive of 80K and this collection if they did this.