What surprised me was not the critiques themselves, but the fact that I was hearing them from prominent people in the West Coast smart-philanthropy set who advocate evidence-based giving every day.
This is a shame, and I hope we can work to overcome this situation, but it’s maybe not as surprising as it first seems. The existing “strategic philanthropy” community has very little overlap with EA, both in terms of its membership and priorities (e.g. strategic philanthropists often think cause selection is a bad idea).
If you were a big shot in this community controlling hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, it would take a lot of humility to come to an EA event where you’re an outsider, everyone’s speaking about different topics, and a bunch of kids are the high-status ones rather than yourself.
It seems similar to lots of other cases of industries getting disrupted by outsiders. The established group don’t recognise them until the outsider group gets so large that they have no choice.
I think there is some truth to the second part of this, although I would encourage folks not to see it as a reason to be dismissive towards people in the strategic philanthropy community. A lot of them have spent decades banging their heads against the wall trying to motivate the kinds of changes that EA advocates, and they have valuable lessons to share from that experience.
This is a shame, and I hope we can work to overcome this situation, but it’s maybe not as surprising as it first seems. The existing “strategic philanthropy” community has very little overlap with EA, both in terms of its membership and priorities (e.g. strategic philanthropists often think cause selection is a bad idea).
If you were a big shot in this community controlling hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, it would take a lot of humility to come to an EA event where you’re an outsider, everyone’s speaking about different topics, and a bunch of kids are the high-status ones rather than yourself.
It seems similar to lots of other cases of industries getting disrupted by outsiders. The established group don’t recognise them until the outsider group gets so large that they have no choice.
I think there is some truth to the second part of this, although I would encourage folks not to see it as a reason to be dismissive towards people in the strategic philanthropy community. A lot of them have spent decades banging their heads against the wall trying to motivate the kinds of changes that EA advocates, and they have valuable lessons to share from that experience.
Definitely.
Do you think we can get one of these people to write up their thoughts in a formal EA critique?