It’s very difficult to underrate how much EA has changed over the past two years.
For context, two years ago was 2022 July 30. It was 17 days prior to the “What We Owe the Future” book launch. It was also about three months before the FTX fraud was discovered (but at this time it was massively underway in secret) and the ensuing bankruptcy. We were still at the height of the Big Money Big Longtermism era.
It was also about eight months before the FLI Pause Letter, which I think coincided with roughly when the US and UK governments took very serious and intense interest in AI risk.
I think these two events were really key changes for the EA movement and led to a huge vibe shift. “Longtermism” feels very antiquated now and feels abandoned in the name of “holy crap we have to deal with AI risk occurring within the next ten years”. Big Money is out, but we still have a lot of money, and it feels more responsible and somewhat more sustainable now. There are no longer regrantors running around everywhere, for better and for worse.
Many of the people previously working on longtermism have pivoted to “pandemics and AI” and many of the people previously working on pandemic risk have pivoted to “AI x bio intersections”. WWOTF captures the current mid-2024 vibe of EA much less than Leopold’s “Situational Awareness”.
There also has been a massive pivot towards mainstream engagement. Many EAs have edited their LinkedIns to purge that two-word phrase and now barely and begrudgingly admit to being “EA-adjacent”. These people now take meetings in DC and engage in the mainstream policy process (whereas previously “politics was the mindkiller”). Many AI policy orgs have popped up or become more prominent as a result. Even MIRI, which had just announced “Death with Dignity” only about three months prior to that date of 2022 July 30, has now given up on giving up and pivoted to policy work. DC is a much bigger EA hub than it was two years ago, but the people working in DC certainly wouldn’t refer to it as that.
The vibe shift towards AI has also continued to cannibalize the rest of EA as well, for better and for worse. This trend was already in full swing in 2022 but became much more prominent over 2023-2024. There’s a lot less money available for global health and animal welfare work than before, especially if you worked on more weird stuff like shrimp. Shrimp welfare kinda peaked in 2022 and the past two years have unfortunately not been kind to shrimp.
This looks pretty much right, as a description of how EA has responded tactically to important events and vibe shifts. Nevertheless it doesn’t answer OP’s questions, which I’ll repeat:
What ideas that were considered wrong/low status have been championed here?
What has the movement acknowledged it was wrong about previously?
What new, effective organisations have been started?
Your reply is not about new ideas, or the movement acknowledging it was wrong (except about Bankman-Fried personally, which doesn’t seem like what OP is asking about), or new organizations.
It seems important, to me, that EA’s history over the last two years is instead mainly the story of changes in funding, in popular discourse, and in the social strategy of preexisting institutions. e.g. the FLI pause letter was the start of a significant PR campaign, but all the *ideas* in it would’ve been perfectly familiar to an EA in 2014 (except for “Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?”, which is a consequence of then-unexpected developments in AI technology rather than of intellectual work by EAs).
I’m not sure I understand the expectations enough about what these questions are looking for to answer.
Firstly, I don’t think “the movement” is centralized enough to explicitly acknowledge things as a whole—that may be a bad expectation. I think some individual people and organizations have done some reflection (see here and here for prominent examples), though I would agree that there likely should be more.
Secondly, It definitely seems very wrong to me though to say that EA has had no new ideas in the past two years. Back in 2022 the main answer to “how do we reduce AI risk?” was “I don’t know, I guess we should urgently figure that out” and now there’s been an explosion of analysis, threat modeling, and policy ideas—for example Luke’s 12 tentative ideas were basically all created within the past two years. On top of that, a lot of EAs were involved in the development of Responsible Scaling Policies which is now the predominant risk management framework for AI. And there’s way more too.
Unfortunately I can mainly only speak to AI as it is my current area of expertise, but there’s been updates in other areas as well. For example, at just Rethink Priorities, welfare ranges, CRAFT, and CURVE were all done within the past two years. Additionally, the Rethink Priorities model estimating the value of research influencing funders flew under the EA radar IMO but actually has led to very significant internal shifts in Rethink Priorities’s thinking on which funders to work for and why.
I also think a lot of the genesis of the current focus on lead started in 2021 but significant work on pushing this forward happened in the 2022-2024 window.
As for new effective organizations, a bit of this depends on your opinions about what is “effective” and to what extent new organizations are “EA”, but there are many new initiatives around, especially in the AI space.
It’s very difficult to underrate how much EA has changed over the past two years.
For context, two years ago was 2022 July 30. It was 17 days prior to the “What We Owe the Future” book launch. It was also about three months before the FTX fraud was discovered (but at this time it was massively underway in secret) and the ensuing bankruptcy. We were still at the height of the Big Money Big Longtermism era.
It was also about eight months before the FLI Pause Letter, which I think coincided with roughly when the US and UK governments took very serious and intense interest in AI risk.
I think these two events were really key changes for the EA movement and led to a huge vibe shift. “Longtermism” feels very antiquated now and feels abandoned in the name of “holy crap we have to deal with AI risk occurring within the next ten years”. Big Money is out, but we still have a lot of money, and it feels more responsible and somewhat more sustainable now. There are no longer regrantors running around everywhere, for better and for worse.
Many of the people previously working on longtermism have pivoted to “pandemics and AI” and many of the people previously working on pandemic risk have pivoted to “AI x bio intersections”. WWOTF captures the current mid-2024 vibe of EA much less than Leopold’s “Situational Awareness”.
There also has been a massive pivot towards mainstream engagement. Many EAs have edited their LinkedIns to purge that two-word phrase and now barely and begrudgingly admit to being “EA-adjacent”. These people now take meetings in DC and engage in the mainstream policy process (whereas previously “politics was the mindkiller”). Many AI policy orgs have popped up or become more prominent as a result. Even MIRI, which had just announced “Death with Dignity” only about three months prior to that date of 2022 July 30, has now given up on giving up and pivoted to policy work. DC is a much bigger EA hub than it was two years ago, but the people working in DC certainly wouldn’t refer to it as that.
The vibe shift towards AI has also continued to cannibalize the rest of EA as well, for better and for worse. This trend was already in full swing in 2022 but became much more prominent over 2023-2024. There’s a lot less money available for global health and animal welfare work than before, especially if you worked on more weird stuff like shrimp. Shrimp welfare kinda peaked in 2022 and the past two years have unfortunately not been kind to shrimp.
This looks pretty much right, as a description of how EA has responded tactically to important events and vibe shifts. Nevertheless it doesn’t answer OP’s questions, which I’ll repeat:
What ideas that were considered wrong/low status have been championed here?
What has the movement acknowledged it was wrong about previously?
What new, effective organisations have been started?
Your reply is not about new ideas, or the movement acknowledging it was wrong (except about Bankman-Fried personally, which doesn’t seem like what OP is asking about), or new organizations.
It seems important, to me, that EA’s history over the last two years is instead mainly the story of changes in funding, in popular discourse, and in the social strategy of preexisting institutions. e.g. the FLI pause letter was the start of a significant PR campaign, but all the *ideas* in it would’ve been perfectly familiar to an EA in 2014 (except for “Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?”, which is a consequence of then-unexpected developments in AI technology rather than of intellectual work by EAs).
I’m not sure I understand the expectations enough about what these questions are looking for to answer.
Firstly, I don’t think “the movement” is centralized enough to explicitly acknowledge things as a whole—that may be a bad expectation. I think some individual people and organizations have done some reflection (see here and here for prominent examples), though I would agree that there likely should be more.
Secondly, It definitely seems very wrong to me though to say that EA has had no new ideas in the past two years. Back in 2022 the main answer to “how do we reduce AI risk?” was “I don’t know, I guess we should urgently figure that out” and now there’s been an explosion of analysis, threat modeling, and policy ideas—for example Luke’s 12 tentative ideas were basically all created within the past two years. On top of that, a lot of EAs were involved in the development of Responsible Scaling Policies which is now the predominant risk management framework for AI. And there’s way more too.
Unfortunately I can mainly only speak to AI as it is my current area of expertise, but there’s been updates in other areas as well. For example, at just Rethink Priorities, welfare ranges, CRAFT, and CURVE were all done within the past two years. Additionally, the Rethink Priorities model estimating the value of research influencing funders flew under the EA radar IMO but actually has led to very significant internal shifts in Rethink Priorities’s thinking on which funders to work for and why.
I also think a lot of the genesis of the current focus on lead started in 2021 but significant work on pushing this forward happened in the 2022-2024 window.
As for new effective organizations, a bit of this depends on your opinions about what is “effective” and to what extent new organizations are “EA”, but there are many new initiatives around, especially in the AI space.
Nit—I’m pretty sure you mean ‘overrate’.
So you’d say the major shift is:
Towards AI policy work
Towards AI x bio policy work
Also this seems notable: