Per others: This selection isn’t really ‘leans towards a focus on longtermism’, but rather ‘almost exclusively focuses on longtermism’: roughly any ‘object level’ cause which isn’t longtermism gets a passing mention, whilst longtermism is the subject of 3⁄10 of the selection. Even some not-explicitly-longtermist inclusions (e.g. Tetlock, MacAskill, Greaves) ‘lean towards’ longtermism either in terms of subject matter or affinity.
Despite being a longtermist myself, I think this is dubious for a purported ‘introduction to EA as a whole’: EA isn’t all-but-exclusively longtermist in either corporate thought or deed.
Were I a more suspicious sort, I’d also find the ‘impartial’ rationales offered for why non-longtermist things keep getting the short (if not pointy) end of the stick scarcely credible:
i) we decided to focus on our overall worldview and way of thinking rather than specific cause areas (we also didn’t include a dedicated episode on biosecurity, one of our ‘top problems’), and ii) both are covered in the first episode with Holden Karnofsky, and we prominently refer people to the Bollard and Glennerster interviews in our ‘episode 0’, as well as the outro to Holden’s episode.
The first episode with Karnofsky also covers longtermism and AI—at least as much as global health and animals. Yet this didn’t stop episodes on the specific cause areas of longtermism (Ord) and AI (Christiano) being included. Ditto the instance of “entrepreneurship, independent thinking, and general creativity” one wanted to highlight just-so-happens to be a longtermist intervention (versus, e.g. this).
Per others: This selection isn’t really ‘leans towards a focus on longtermism’, but rather ‘almost exclusively focuses on longtermism’: roughly any ‘object level’ cause which isn’t longtermism gets a passing mention, whilst longtermism is the subject of 3⁄10 of the selection. Even some not-explicitly-longtermist inclusions (e.g. Tetlock, MacAskill, Greaves) ‘lean towards’ longtermism either in terms of subject matter or affinity.
Despite being a longtermist myself, I think this is dubious for a purported ‘introduction to EA as a whole’: EA isn’t all-but-exclusively longtermist in either corporate thought or deed.
Were I a more suspicious sort, I’d also find the ‘impartial’ rationales offered for why non-longtermist things keep getting the short (if not pointy) end of the stick scarcely credible:
The first episode with Karnofsky also covers longtermism and AI—at least as much as global health and animals. Yet this didn’t stop episodes on the specific cause areas of longtermism (Ord) and AI (Christiano) being included. Ditto the instance of “entrepreneurship, independent thinking, and general creativity” one wanted to highlight just-so-happens to be a longtermist intervention (versus, e.g. this).