You shouldn’t be surprised if there’s a significant uptick in public discourse about both effective altruism and longtermism in August!
Has anyone given significant thought to the possibility that hostility to EA and longtermism is stable and/or endemic in current society? For example, if opposing AI capabilities development (a key national security priority in the US and China) has resulted in agreements to mitigate the risk of negative attitudes about AI from becoming mainstream or spreading to a lot of AI workers, regardless of whether the threat comes from an unexpected place like EA (as opposed to an expected place, like Russian Bots on social media, which may even have already used AI safety concepts to target western AI industry workers in the past).
In that scenario, social media and news outlets will generally remain critical to EA, and staying out of the spotlight and focusing on in-person communications would have been a better option than triggering escalating media criticism of EA. We live in the post-truth era after all, and reality is allowed to do this sort of thing to you.
Has anyone given significant thought to the possibility that hostility to EA and longtermism is stable and/or endemic in current society? For example, if opposing AI capabilities development (a key national security priority in the US and China) has resulted in agreements to mitigate the risk of negative attitudes about AI from becoming mainstream or spreading to a lot of AI workers, regardless of whether the threat comes from an unexpected place like EA (as opposed to an expected place, like Russian Bots on social media, which may even have already used AI safety concepts to target western AI industry workers in the past).
In that scenario, social media and news outlets will generally remain critical to EA, and staying out of the spotlight and focusing on in-person communications would have been a better option than triggering escalating media criticism of EA. We live in the post-truth era after all, and reality is allowed to do this sort of thing to you.