Worth pointing out a potential benefit of this imbalance:
Most work in 3 of EA’s main cause areas, development, animal welfare and pandemic preparedness, takes place outside of EA, and it may be good for object level discussions in these areas to take place in places other than the EA Forum, to benefit from external expertise and intellectual diversity.
This is probably true for engineered pandemics and AI safety too but to a lesser extent because a high proportion of the work in these areas is done by EAs.
I think it is overall a good thing for the EA Forum to focus on the community, and for the community to act as a co-ordinating forum for people working in different high impact cause areas. I think it’s better for an object level discussion on development, for example, to take place somewhere where feedback can be obtained from non-EA development economists, over somewhere like the EA Forum, where a lot of feedback will be from students, animal welfare activists, AI researchers, etc.
Worth pointing out a potential benefit of this imbalance:
Most work in 3 of EA’s main cause areas, development, animal welfare and pandemic preparedness, takes place outside of EA, and it may be good for object level discussions in these areas to take place in places other than the EA Forum, to benefit from external expertise and intellectual diversity.
This is probably true for engineered pandemics and AI safety too but to a lesser extent because a high proportion of the work in these areas is done by EAs.
I think it is overall a good thing for the EA Forum to focus on the community, and for the community to act as a co-ordinating forum for people working in different high impact cause areas. I think it’s better for an object level discussion on development, for example, to take place somewhere where feedback can be obtained from non-EA development economists, over somewhere like the EA Forum, where a lot of feedback will be from students, animal welfare activists, AI researchers, etc.