I don’t think core EA is more “big tent” now than it used to be. Relatively more intellectual effort is devoted to longtermism now than global health and development, which represents more a shift in focus than a widening of focus.
What you might be seeing is an influx of money across the board, which results at least partially in decreasing the bar of funding for more speculative interventions.
Also, many people now believe that the ROI of movement building is incredibly high, which I think was less true even a few years ago. So net positive but not very exciting movement building interventions—both things that look more like traditional “community building” and things that look like “support specific promising young EAs”—are much more likely to be funded than before. In the “support specific promising young EAs” case, this might be true even if they say dumb things or are currently pursuing lower-impact cause areas, as long as the CB case for it is sufficiently strong (above some multiplier for funding, and reasonably probable to be net positive).
I think I no longer endorse this comment. Not sure but it does seem like there’s a much broader set of things that people research, fund, and work on (e.g. I don’t think there was that much active work on biosecurity 5 years ago).
I don’t think core EA is more “big tent” now than it used to be. Relatively more intellectual effort is devoted to longtermism now than global health and development, which represents more a shift in focus than a widening of focus.
What you might be seeing is an influx of money across the board, which results at least partially in decreasing the bar of funding for more speculative interventions.
Also, many people now believe that the ROI of movement building is incredibly high, which I think was less true even a few years ago. So net positive but not very exciting movement building interventions—both things that look more like traditional “community building” and things that look like “support specific promising young EAs”—are much more likely to be funded than before. In the “support specific promising young EAs” case, this might be true even if they say dumb things or are currently pursuing lower-impact cause areas, as long as the CB case for it is sufficiently strong (above some multiplier for funding, and reasonably probable to be net positive).
I think I no longer endorse this comment. Not sure but it does seem like there’s a much broader set of things that people research, fund, and work on (e.g. I don’t think there was that much active work on biosecurity 5 years ago).