Generally I curate posts from the last few weeks. This post is from 12 years ago. I’m doing this because I’ve had a few discussions recently about how much evergreen content there is on the EA Forum, and how it is surfaced too rarely.
I’d like present-day commenters to feel encouraged to comment on this post. Specifically, I think it’s interesting to look at this post more than a decade after it was written, and ask—was our allocation of resources correct in that decade? Should we in fact have focused more on building funding, power, generalist expertise, community size and cohesion?
Here’s a poll that gets at one slice of that question:
Over the last decade, we should have invested more in community growth at the expense of research.
Being very confident on this question because would be questioning a pretty marked success, but it does seems like 1) we’re short of the absolute talent/​power threshold big problems demand and 2) like energy/​talent/​resources have been sucked out of good growth engines multiple times in the past decade.
Over the last decade, we should have invested more in community growth at the expense of research.
I think it might have been worth to invest in community growth in the same way as The School for Moral Ambition. I know Rutger Bregman has taken the 10 % pledge but I don’t know how much Moral Ambition collaborate with EA organizations. But it would probably be very valuable to collaborate with them and possibly give them some funding in exchange for help with community growth. They made Harvard students consider a meaningful career instead of a high paid career.
Generally I curate posts from the last few weeks. This post is from 12 years ago. I’m doing this because I’ve had a few discussions recently about how much evergreen content there is on the EA Forum, and how it is surfaced too rarely.
I’d like present-day commenters to feel encouraged to comment on this post. Specifically, I think it’s interesting to look at this post more than a decade after it was written, and ask—was our allocation of resources correct in that decade? Should we in fact have focused more on building funding, power, generalist expertise, community size and cohesion?
Here’s a poll that gets at one slice of that question:
(Apologies @Lizka for the ‘EA Should’)
Being very confident on this question because would be questioning a pretty marked success, but it does seems like 1) we’re short of the absolute talent/​power threshold big problems demand and 2) like energy/​talent/​resources have been sucked out of good growth engines multiple times in the past decade.
I think it might have been worth to invest in community growth in the same way as The School for Moral Ambition. I know Rutger Bregman has taken the 10 % pledge but I don’t know how much Moral Ambition collaborate with EA organizations. But it would probably be very valuable to collaborate with them and possibly give them some funding in exchange for help with community growth. They made Harvard students consider a meaningful career instead of a high paid career.
My answer is largely based on my view that short-timeline AI risk people are more dominant in the discourse that the credence I give them, ymmv