Somewhat sceptical of this, mainly because of the first 2 counterarguments mentioned:
In my view, a surprisingly large fraction of people now doing valuable x-risk work originally came in from EA (though also a lot of people have come in via the rationality community), compared to how many I would have expected, even given the historical strong emphasis on EA recruiting.
We’re still highly uncertain about which strategies are best from an EA perspective, which is a big part of why truth-seeking and patience are important.
Focusing on the underlying search for what is most impactful seems a lot more robust than focusing on the main opportunity this search currently nets. An EA/longtermist is likely to take x-risk seriously as long as this is indeed a top priority, but you can’t flip this. The ability of the people working on the world’s most pressing problems updating on what is most impactful to work on (arguable the core of what makes EA ‘work’) would decline without any impact-driven meta framework.
An “x-risk first” frame could quickly become more culty/dogmatic and less epistemically rigorous, especially if it’s paired with a lower resolution understanding of the arguments and assumptions for taking x-risk reduction (especially) seriously, less comparison with and dialogue between different cause areas, and less of a drive for keeping your eyes and ears open for impactful opportunities outside of the thing you’re currently working on, all of which seems hard to avoid.
It definitely makes sense to give x-risk reduction a prominent place in EA/longtermist outreach, and I think it’s important to emphasize that you don’t need to “buy into EA” to take a cause area seriously and contribute to it. We should probably also build more bridges to communities that form natural allies. But I think this can (and should) be done while maintaining strong reasoning transparency about what we actually care about and how x-risk reduction fits in our chain of reasoning. A fundamental shift in framing seems quite rash.
EDIT:
More broadly, I think we should be running lots of experiments (communicating a wide range of messages in a wide range of styles) to increase our “surface area”.
Agreed that more experimentation would be welcome though!
Somewhat sceptical of this, mainly because of the first 2 counterarguments mentioned:
Focusing on the underlying search for what is most impactful seems a lot more robust than focusing on the main opportunity this search currently nets. An EA/longtermist is likely to take x-risk seriously as long as this is indeed a top priority, but you can’t flip this. The ability of the people working on the world’s most pressing problems updating on what is most impactful to work on (arguable the core of what makes EA ‘work’) would decline without any impact-driven meta framework.
An “x-risk first” frame could quickly become more culty/dogmatic and less epistemically rigorous, especially if it’s paired with a lower resolution understanding of the arguments and assumptions for taking x-risk reduction (especially) seriously, less comparison with and dialogue between different cause areas, and less of a drive for keeping your eyes and ears open for impactful opportunities outside of the thing you’re currently working on, all of which seems hard to avoid.
It definitely makes sense to give x-risk reduction a prominent place in EA/longtermist outreach, and I think it’s important to emphasize that you don’t need to “buy into EA” to take a cause area seriously and contribute to it. We should probably also build more bridges to communities that form natural allies. But I think this can (and should) be done while maintaining strong reasoning transparency about what we actually care about and how x-risk reduction fits in our chain of reasoning. A fundamental shift in framing seems quite rash.
EDIT:
Agreed that more experimentation would be welcome though!