JWS, do you think EA could work as a professional network of “impact analysts” or “impact engineers” rather than as a “movement”? Ryan, do you have a sense of what that would concretely look like?
Well I’m not sure it makes sense to try to fit all EAs into one professional community that is labelled as such, since we often have quite different jobs and work in quite different fields. My model would be a patchwork of overlapping fields, and a professional network that often extends between them.
It could make sense for there to be a community focused on “effective philanthropy”, which would include OpenPhil, Longview, philanthropists, and grant evaluators. That would be as close to “impact analysis” as you would get, in my proposal.
There would be an effective policymaking community too.
And then a bevy of cause-specific research communities: evidence-based policy, AI safety research, AI governance research, global priorities research, in vitro meat, global catastrophic biorisk research, global catastrophic risk analysis, global health and development, and so on.
Lab heads and organisation leaders in these research communities would still know that they ought to apply to the “effective philanthropy” orgs to fund their activities. And they would still give talks at universities to try to attract top talent. But there wouldn’t be a common brand or cultural identity, and we would frown upon the risk-increasing factors that come from the social movement aspect.
Well I’m not sure it makes sense to try to fit all EAs into one professional community that is labelled as such, since we often have quite different jobs and work in quite different fields. My model would be a patchwork of overlapping fields, and a professional network that often extends between them.
It could make sense for there to be a community focused on “effective philanthropy”, which would include OpenPhil, Longview, philanthropists, and grant evaluators. That would be as close to “impact analysis” as you would get, in my proposal.
There would be an effective policymaking community too.
And then a bevy of cause-specific research communities: evidence-based policy, AI safety research, AI governance research, global priorities research, in vitro meat, global catastrophic biorisk research, global catastrophic risk analysis, global health and development, and so on.
Lab heads and organisation leaders in these research communities would still know that they ought to apply to the “effective philanthropy” orgs to fund their activities. And they would still give talks at universities to try to attract top talent. But there wouldn’t be a common brand or cultural identity, and we would frown upon the risk-increasing factors that come from the social movement aspect.