[I’m doing a bunch of low-effort reviews of posts I read a while ago and think are important. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to re-read them or say very nuanced things about them.]
I think this is a great summary. I have some hesitations about quite how canonical this has become, but I do think this is a really important piece in terms of EA’s history.
I think this post was harmful in one particular way even though it was most likely net-positive. At least in my conceptual landscape it helped crystallize this appearance that these focus areas were the only ones in existence. Early EA culture could have done a lot better at recognizing a potential vast plethora of yet-unknown causes rather than hill-climbing on what was known. Many times I saw the meme of people claiming “the four cause areas of EA” which may have stemmed from this post. A lot of it was my own psychology of course, though this is correlated with others’. Of course, people need a map of causes to navigate and communicate about.
[I’m doing a bunch of low-effort reviews of posts I read a while ago and think are important. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to re-read them or say very nuanced things about them.]
I think this is a great summary. I have some hesitations about quite how canonical this has become, but I do think this is a really important piece in terms of EA’s history.
I think this post was harmful in one particular way even though it was most likely net-positive. At least in my conceptual landscape it helped crystallize this appearance that these focus areas were the only ones in existence. Early EA culture could have done a lot better at recognizing a potential vast plethora of yet-unknown causes rather than hill-climbing on what was known. Many times I saw the meme of people claiming “the four cause areas of EA” which may have stemmed from this post. A lot of it was my own psychology of course, though this is correlated with others’. Of course, people need a map of causes to navigate and communicate about.