Thanks for engaging and for giving me the chance to outline more clearly and with more nuance what my take is.
I covered some of this in my reply to Ollie, but basically (a) I do think that Forum weeks are significant attentional devices signaling what we see as priorities, (b) the Forum has appeared in detail in many EA-critical pieces and (c) there are many Forum weeks we could be running right now that would be much better both from a point of action guiding and perception in the wider world.
I take as given—I am not the right person to evaluate this—that there are some interventions that some EA funders might decide along those considerations.
But I am pretty confident it won’t matter to the wider philanthropic world, almost no one is thinking about philanthropic interventions saying “does this make a world better where we survive v does this mostly affect probability of extinction?”
If EA were ascendant and we’d be a significant share of philanthropy maybe that’d be a good question to ask.
But in a world where our key longtermist priorities are not well funded and where most of the things we can be doing to broadly reduce risks are not clearly alignable to either side of the crux here, I think making this a key attentional priority seems to have, at least, significant opportunity cost.
EDIT:
I am mostly trying to give a consistent and clearly articulated perspective here, I am surely overlooking things and you have information on this that I do not have. I hope this is useful to you, but I don’t want to imply I am able to have an all-things-considered view.
Thanks for engaging on this as well! I do feel the responsibility involved in setting event topics, and it’s great to get constructive criticism like this.
To respond to the points a bit (and this is just my view- quite quickly written because I’ve got a busy day today and I’m happy to come back and clarify/change my mind in another reply):
(a) - maybe, but I think the actual content of the events almost always contains some scepticism of the question itself, discussion of adjacent debates etc… The actual topic of the event doesn’t seem like a useful place to look for evidence on the community’s priorities. Also, I generally run events about topics I think people aren’t prioritising. However, I think this is the point I disagree with the least—I can see that if you are looking at the forum in a pretty low-res way, or hearing about the event from a friend, you might get an impression that ‘EA cares about X now’.
(b) - The Forum does appear in EA-critical pieces, but I personally don’t think those pieces distinguish much between what one post on the Forum says and what the Forum team puts in a banner (and I don’t think readers who lack context would distinguish between those things either). So, I don’t worry too much about what I’m saying in the eyes of a very adversarial journalist (there are enough words on the forum that they can probably find whatever they’d like to find anyway).
To clarify—for readers and adversarial journalists—I still have the rule of “I don’t post anything I wouldn’t want to see my name attached to in public” (and think others should too), but that’s a more general rule, not just for the Forum.
(c)- I’m sure that it isn’t the optimum Forum week. However (1) I do think this topic is important and potentially action-relevant—there is increasing focus on ‘AI Safety’, but AI Safety is a possibly vast field with a range of challenges that a career or funding could address, and the topic of this debate is potentially an important distinction to have a take on when you are making those decisions. And (2) I’m pretty bullish on forum events, and I’d like to run more, and get the community involved more, so any suggestions for future events are always welcome.
I think ultimately we seem to have quite different intuitions on the trade-offs, but that seems unresolvable. Most of my intuitions there come from advising non-EA HNWs (and from spending time around advisors specialized in advising these), so this is quite different from mostly advising EAs.
Thanks for engaging and for giving me the chance to outline more clearly and with more nuance what my take is.
I covered some of this in my reply to Ollie, but basically (a) I do think that Forum weeks are significant attentional devices signaling what we see as priorities, (b) the Forum has appeared in detail in many EA-critical pieces and (c) there are many Forum weeks we could be running right now that would be much better both from a point of action guiding and perception in the wider world.
I take as given—I am not the right person to evaluate this—that there are some interventions that some EA funders might decide along those considerations.
But I am pretty confident it won’t matter to the wider philanthropic world, almost no one is thinking about philanthropic interventions saying “does this make a world better where we survive v does this mostly affect probability of extinction?”
If EA were ascendant and we’d be a significant share of philanthropy maybe that’d be a good question to ask.
But in a world where our key longtermist priorities are not well funded and where most of the things we can be doing to broadly reduce risks are not clearly alignable to either side of the crux here, I think making this a key attentional priority seems to have, at least, significant opportunity cost.
EDIT: I am mostly trying to give a consistent and clearly articulated perspective here, I am surely overlooking things and you have information on this that I do not have. I hope this is useful to you, but I don’t want to imply I am able to have an all-things-considered view.
Thanks for engaging on this as well! I do feel the responsibility involved in setting event topics, and it’s great to get constructive criticism like this.
To respond to the points a bit (and this is just my view- quite quickly written because I’ve got a busy day today and I’m happy to come back and clarify/change my mind in another reply):
(a) - maybe, but I think the actual content of the events almost always contains some scepticism of the question itself, discussion of adjacent debates etc… The actual topic of the event doesn’t seem like a useful place to look for evidence on the community’s priorities. Also, I generally run events about topics I think people aren’t prioritising. However, I think this is the point I disagree with the least—I can see that if you are looking at the forum in a pretty low-res way, or hearing about the event from a friend, you might get an impression that ‘EA cares about X now’.
(b) - The Forum does appear in EA-critical pieces, but I personally don’t think those pieces distinguish much between what one post on the Forum says and what the Forum team puts in a banner (and I don’t think readers who lack context would distinguish between those things either). So, I don’t worry too much about what I’m saying in the eyes of a very adversarial journalist (there are enough words on the forum that they can probably find whatever they’d like to find anyway).
To clarify—for readers and adversarial journalists—I still have the rule of “I don’t post anything I wouldn’t want to see my name attached to in public” (and think others should too), but that’s a more general rule, not just for the Forum.
(c)- I’m sure that it isn’t the optimum Forum week. However (1) I do think this topic is important and potentially action-relevant—there is increasing focus on ‘AI Safety’, but AI Safety is a possibly vast field with a range of challenges that a career or funding could address, and the topic of this debate is potentially an important distinction to have a take on when you are making those decisions. And (2) I’m pretty bullish on forum events, and I’d like to run more, and get the community involved more, so any suggestions for future events are always welcome.
Thanks for clarifying this!
I think ultimately we seem to have quite different intuitions on the trade-offs, but that seems unresolvable. Most of my intuitions there come from advising non-EA HNWs (and from spending time around advisors specialized in advising these), so this is quite different from mostly advising EAs.