While I do think EA has been spreading, I do want to caution against generalizing from your personal social network to the broad population. As Scott Alexander put it:
According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.
And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.
About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.
People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.
I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.
Filter bubbles are really strong. You are probably astronomically more likely to meet people who might have heard of Effective Altruism than the baseline suggests.
In the examples I was talking about, it was ads in one of the biggest fast food franchises in the country, and the random people I talk to about AI safety are at bus stops and airports. This isn’t just from my social network.Like I said, it’s only a lot of people in my social network who have heard the words ‘effective altruism,’ or know what they refer to. I was mostly talking about the things EA has impacted, like AI safety and the Beyond Burger, receiving a lot of public attention, even if EA doesn’t receive credit. I took the outcomes of EA receiving attention to be a sign of steps toward the movement’s goals as a good thing without regard to whether people have heard of EA.
Nice. And even more so if you broaden the definition of EAs to include people who would have been EAs now if EA material had been available at their college eg. older people and mathematically inclined Quakers and Universalist Unitarians.
While I do think EA has been spreading, I do want to caution against generalizing from your personal social network to the broad population. As Scott Alexander put it:
Filter bubbles are really strong. You are probably astronomically more likely to meet people who might have heard of Effective Altruism than the baseline suggests.
In the examples I was talking about, it was ads in one of the biggest fast food franchises in the country, and the random people I talk to about AI safety are at bus stops and airports. This isn’t just from my social network.Like I said, it’s only a lot of people in my social network who have heard the words ‘effective altruism,’ or know what they refer to. I was mostly talking about the things EA has impacted, like AI safety and the Beyond Burger, receiving a lot of public attention, even if EA doesn’t receive credit. I took the outcomes of EA receiving attention to be a sign of steps toward the movement’s goals as a good thing without regard to whether people have heard of EA.
Nice. And even more so if you broaden the definition of EAs to include people who would have been EAs now if EA material had been available at their college eg. older people and mathematically inclined Quakers and Universalist Unitarians.