Tl;dr: I’m kicking off a push for public discussions about EA strategy that will be happening June 12-24. You’ll see new posts under this tag, and you can find details about people who’ve committed to participating and more below.
Motivation and what this is(n’t)
I feel (and, from conversations in person and seeing discussions on the Forum, think that I am not alone in feeling) like there’s been a dearth of public discussion about EA strategy recently, particularly from people in leadership positions at EA organizations.
To help address this, I’m setting up an “EA strategy fortnight” — two weeks where we’ll put in extra energy to make those discussions happen. A set of folks have already volunteered to post thoughts about major strategic EA questions, like how centralized EA should be or current priorities for GH&W EA.
This event and these posts are generally intended to start discussion, rather than give the final word on any given subject. I expect that people participating in this event will also often disagree with each other, and participation in this shouldn’t imply an endorsement of anything or anyone in particular.
I see this mostly as an experiment into whether having a simple “event” can cause people to publish more stuff. Please don’t interpret any of these posts as something like an official consensus statement.
Some people have already agreed to participate
I reached out to people through a combination of a) thinking of people who had shared private strategy documents with me before that still had not been published b) contacting leaders of EA organizations, and c) soliciting suggestions from others. About half of the people I contacted agreed to participate. I think you should view this as a convenience sample, heavily skewed towards the people who find writing Forum posts to be low cost. Also note that I contacted some of these people specifically because I disagree with them; no endorsement of these ideas is implied.
People who’ve already agreed to post stuff during this fortnight [in random order]:
Posts will be tagged with this tag. As there is no formal posting schedule, you might want to subscribe to the tag to be notified when new posts get made.
If you want to start reading now, the Building Effective Altruism tag has a bunch of already-published posts on this subject.
EA Strategy Fortnight (June 12-24)
Tl;dr: I’m kicking off a push for public discussions about EA strategy that will be happening June 12-24. You’ll see new posts under this tag, and you can find details about people who’ve committed to participating and more below.
Motivation and what this is(n’t)
I feel (and, from conversations in person and seeing discussions on the Forum, think that I am not alone in feeling) like there’s been a dearth of public discussion about EA strategy recently, particularly from people in leadership positions at EA organizations.
To help address this, I’m setting up an “EA strategy fortnight” — two weeks where we’ll put in extra energy to make those discussions happen. A set of folks have already volunteered to post thoughts about major strategic EA questions, like how centralized EA should be or current priorities for GH&W EA.
This event and these posts are generally intended to start discussion, rather than give the final word on any given subject. I expect that people participating in this event will also often disagree with each other, and participation in this shouldn’t imply an endorsement of anything or anyone in particular.
I see this mostly as an experiment into whether having a simple “event” can cause people to publish more stuff. Please don’t interpret any of these posts as something like an official consensus statement.
Some people have already agreed to participate
I reached out to people through a combination of a) thinking of people who had shared private strategy documents with me before that still had not been published b) contacting leaders of EA organizations, and c) soliciting suggestions from others. About half of the people I contacted agreed to participate. I think you should view this as a convenience sample, heavily skewed towards the people who find writing Forum posts to be low cost. Also note that I contacted some of these people specifically because I disagree with them; no endorsement of these ideas is implied.
People who’ve already agreed to post stuff during this fortnight [in random order]:
Habryka—How EAs and Rationalists turn crazy
MaxDalton—In Praise of Praise
MichaelA—Interim updates on the RP AI Governance & Strategy team
William_MacAskill—Decision-making in EA
Ardenlk—On reallocating resources from EA per se to specific fields
Ozzie Gooen—Centralize Organizations, Decentralize Power
Julia_Wise—EA reform project updates
Shakeel Hashim—EA Communications Updates
Jakub Stencel—EA’s success no one cares about
lincolnq—Why Altruists Can’t Have Nice Things
Ben_West and 2ndRichter—FTX’s impacts on EA brand and engagement with CEA projects
jeffsebo and Sofia_Fogel—EA and the nature and value of digital minds
Anonymous – Diseconomies of scale in community building
Luke Freeman and Sjir Hoeijmakers—Role of effective giving within E
kuhanj—Reflections on AI Safety vs. EA groups at universities
Joey—The community wide advantages of having a transparent scope
JamesSnowden—Current priorities for Open Philanthropy’s Effective Altruism, Global Health and Wellbeing program
Nicole_Ross—Crisis bootcamp: lessons learned and implications for EA
Rob Gledhill—AIS vs EA groups for city and national groups
Vaidehi Agarwalla—The influence of core actors on the trajectory and shape of the EA movement
Renan Araujo—Thoughts about AI safety field-building in LMICs
ChanaMessinger—Reducing the social miasma of trust
particlemania—Being Part of Systems
jwpieters—Thoughts on EA community building
MichaelPlant—The Hub and Spoke Model of Effective Altruism
Quadratic Reciprocity—Best guesses for how public discourse and interest in AI existential risk over the past few months should update EA’s priorities
OllieBase—Longtermism
Peter Wildeford and Marcus_A_Davis—Past and future of Rethink Priorities
If you would like to participate
If you are able to pre-commit to writing a post: comment below and I will add you to this list.
If not: you can publish a post normally, and then tag your post with this tag.
And include the following at the bottom of your post:[1]
How to follow posts from this event
Posts will be tagged with this tag. As there is no formal posting schedule, you might want to subscribe to the tag to be notified when new posts get made.
If you want to start reading now, the Building Effective Altruism tag has a bunch of already-published posts on this subject.
Thanks to @Vaidehi Agarwalla for suggesting people do this