This article is kind of too “feel good” for my tastes. I’d also like to see a more angsty post that tries to come to grips with the fact that most of the impact is most likely not going to come from the individual people, and tries to see if this has any new implications, rather than justifying that all is good.
For instance,
Maybe given that there are billions of money floating around the kind of thing would be to try to influence them
But OpenPhil doesn’t seem that approachable, and its not like they can be influenced all that much by that many people
Maybe there is some cause X that we’re missing that would make the broad EA community great again
etc.
More generally, maybe the patterns in the early EA community were more suitable to a social movement without billionaires, and there are better patterns that we could be executing now. For instance, maybe trying to get prestige outside of EA dominates earning to give now that EA is better funded. Or maybe EA is better funded but you’d still expect most people to have idiosyncratic preferences not shared by central funders.
I believe both this post and Ben’s original ‘Funding Overhang’ post mentioned that this is an update towards a career with direct impact vs earning-to-give.
But earning-to-give is still very high impact in absolute terms.
Yes, my main attempt to discuss the implications of the extra funding is in the Is EA growing? post and my talk at EAG. This post was aimed at a specific misunderstanding that seems to have come up. Though, those posts weren’t angsty either.
I agree, this makes me uncomfortable. I feel like the large organisations still lack a lot of transparency in their reasoning—I still don’t really understand why OpenPhil don’t fill all of the funding gaps in Givewell’s top charities, for eg. And this post reads rather like a post hoc justification for this lacuna.
This article is kind of too “feel good” for my tastes. I’d also like to see a more angsty post that tries to come to grips with the fact that most of the impact is most likely not going to come from the individual people, and tries to see if this has any new implications, rather than justifying that all is good.
For instance,
Maybe given that there are billions of money floating around the kind of thing would be to try to influence them
But OpenPhil doesn’t seem that approachable, and its not like they can be influenced all that much by that many people
Maybe there is some cause X that we’re missing that would make the broad EA community great again
etc.
More generally, maybe the patterns in the early EA community were more suitable to a social movement without billionaires, and there are better patterns that we could be executing now. For instance, maybe trying to get prestige outside of EA dominates earning to give now that EA is better funded. Or maybe EA is better funded but you’d still expect most people to have idiosyncratic preferences not shared by central funders.
I believe both this post and Ben’s original ‘Funding Overhang’ post mentioned that this is an update towards a career with direct impact vs earning-to-give.
But earning-to-give is still very high impact in absolute terms.
Yes, my main attempt to discuss the implications of the extra funding is in the Is EA growing? post and my talk at EAG. This post was aimed at a specific misunderstanding that seems to have come up. Though, those posts weren’t angsty either.
Linking to make it easier for anybody who wants to check these out.
Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs. people
What does the growth of EA mean for our priorities and level of ambition? [talk transcript]
I agree, this makes me uncomfortable. I feel like the large organisations still lack a lot of transparency in their reasoning—I still don’t really understand why OpenPhil don’t fill all of the funding gaps in Givewell’s top charities, for eg. And this post reads rather like a post hoc justification for this lacuna.