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.
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.