One of the functions of institution-building triangulate underutilized funding, leadership, and talent to create value and opportunity for the local community. Successful efforts at the city and state level were seen as creating value for the country as a whole. These agglomerations are now also seen as creating value for the entire planet.
Many of these founders were explicitly optimizing for prestige.
Founders were working cooperatively with cities, states, and founders to mutually enhance their collective prestige.
A lot of care was given to trying to craft the right culture, and balance growth with protecting the reputation of the institution. Not all of the decisions were correct, but it was a constant concern.
This analysis is flawed in all kinds of ways: small sample size, qualitative, susceptible to selection bias.
Universities may not be the right reference class for EA movement growth. This is particularly because EA often seeks to fill in gaps in altruistic work that are not adequately filled by current institutions, including universities.
There are forms of altruistic work that are neglected precisely because they are not very prestige-enhancing. There is not a lot of money or power to be had in alleviating insect suffering, for example, and by the ITN framework, that’s what makes it an ideal EA cause.
On the other hand, I think this points out the operating strategy for EA, which is to engineer prestige, funding, and visibility in order to better align it with the altruistic work that we think is most pressing. In this, we may be most successful if we figure out how to benefit from and to enhance the prestige of other supporters.
These universities focused on mutual prestige-enhancement with their cities and states. We seem to be focusing on our relationships with media outlets (i.e. Vox, and perhaps now the New Yorker and similar), and also with universities themselves. I suspect that succeeding in establishing the nucleic acid observatory system would be a coup—we’d then be enhancing the prestige of the US government, and the US government may then see EA as a source of prestige.
I see a realignment of prestige being one of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s major contributions to the field of AI safety. While there are plenty of AI researchers who dismiss his concerns out of hand, it’s increasingly difficult to do so, and he’s made it higher prestige to at least act as if you care about AI safety, and to legitimize AI safety as a field of research.
We also have failures to account for. I think that the Carrick Flynn campaign has to count as prestige-degrading. Not only did we fail in a rather humiliating way to get our candidate elected, “crypto-funded shadow group tries to buy election” is going to be something critics can say about us in the future. I think one concern about our current reliance on billionaire dollars is that we’re pretty susceptible to our broader perception in society being colored by their whims and judgment and aesthetics.
My takeaways:
One of the functions of institution-building triangulate underutilized funding, leadership, and talent to create value and opportunity for the local community. Successful efforts at the city and state level were seen as creating value for the country as a whole. These agglomerations are now also seen as creating value for the entire planet.
Many of these founders were explicitly optimizing for prestige.
Founders were working cooperatively with cities, states, and founders to mutually enhance their collective prestige.
A lot of care was given to trying to craft the right culture, and balance growth with protecting the reputation of the institution. Not all of the decisions were correct, but it was a constant concern.
This analysis is flawed in all kinds of ways: small sample size, qualitative, susceptible to selection bias.
Universities may not be the right reference class for EA movement growth. This is particularly because EA often seeks to fill in gaps in altruistic work that are not adequately filled by current institutions, including universities.
There are forms of altruistic work that are neglected precisely because they are not very prestige-enhancing. There is not a lot of money or power to be had in alleviating insect suffering, for example, and by the ITN framework, that’s what makes it an ideal EA cause.
On the other hand, I think this points out the operating strategy for EA, which is to engineer prestige, funding, and visibility in order to better align it with the altruistic work that we think is most pressing. In this, we may be most successful if we figure out how to benefit from and to enhance the prestige of other supporters.
These universities focused on mutual prestige-enhancement with their cities and states. We seem to be focusing on our relationships with media outlets (i.e. Vox, and perhaps now the New Yorker and similar), and also with universities themselves. I suspect that succeeding in establishing the nucleic acid observatory system would be a coup—we’d then be enhancing the prestige of the US government, and the US government may then see EA as a source of prestige.
I see a realignment of prestige being one of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s major contributions to the field of AI safety. While there are plenty of AI researchers who dismiss his concerns out of hand, it’s increasingly difficult to do so, and he’s made it higher prestige to at least act as if you care about AI safety, and to legitimize AI safety as a field of research.
We also have failures to account for. I think that the Carrick Flynn campaign has to count as prestige-degrading. Not only did we fail in a rather humiliating way to get our candidate elected, “crypto-funded shadow group tries to buy election” is going to be something critics can say about us in the future. I think one concern about our current reliance on billionaire dollars is that we’re pretty susceptible to our broader perception in society being colored by their whims and judgment and aesthetics.