I am not saying that this doesn’t exist within EA (have not spoken to every EA anyway!) just that there is less emphasis on this than I think there should be:
- Modelling indirect impact: often people seem to be speaking about direct risks, e.g. from AI or bio, with other areas such as climate change being less discussed and global health and poverty being seen as ‘neartermist’. But for example more inequality can lead to greater instability, which increases chances of conflict which increases chances of other xrisks. Or climate change increases the chance of pandemics when e.g. more people are climate refugees (just two examples, not intending to put numbers on them but to illustrate a point). - Applied psychology/communication (if that’s the right phrasing): when I first started joining EA I was mentioning how useful it would be to gain a deeper understanding of why people do what they do. If they currently aren’t don’t something that would be very beneficial from them to do (e.g. working on a high impact career), why? And if you want to convince them to do something like that and communicate with them effectively, how would you go about it? It’s difficult to answer either of those things without understanding why people do what they do, and more broadly why groups do what they do, or governments do what they do.
I am not saying that this doesn’t exist within EA (have not spoken to every EA anyway!) just that there is less emphasis on this than I think there should be:
- Modelling indirect impact: often people seem to be speaking about direct risks, e.g. from AI or bio, with other areas such as climate change being less discussed and global health and poverty being seen as ‘neartermist’. But for example more inequality can lead to greater instability, which increases chances of conflict which increases chances of other xrisks. Or climate change increases the chance of pandemics when e.g. more people are climate refugees (just two examples, not intending to put numbers on them but to illustrate a point).
- Applied psychology/communication (if that’s the right phrasing): when I first started joining EA I was mentioning how useful it would be to gain a deeper understanding of why people do what they do. If they currently aren’t don’t something that would be very beneficial from them to do (e.g. working on a high impact career), why? And if you want to convince them to do something like that and communicate with them effectively, how would you go about it? It’s difficult to answer either of those things without understanding why people do what they do, and more broadly why groups do what they do, or governments do what they do.