Just curious—do you not feel like GiveWell, Happier Lives Institute, and some of Founders Pledge’s work, for example, count as randomista-flavoured EA?
Just chiming in here as HLI was mentioned—although this definitely isn’t the most important part of the post. I certainly see us as randomista-inspired—wait, should that be ‘randomista-adjacent’ - but I would say that what we do feels very different from what other EAs, notably longtermists, do. Also, we came into existence about 5 years after Doing Good Better was published.
I also share Habryka’s doubts about how EA’s original top interventions were chosen. The whole “scale, neglectedness, tractability’ framework strikes me as a confusing, indeterminate methodology that was developed post hoc to justify the earlier choices. I moaned about the SNT framework at length in chapter 5 (pp171) of my PhD thesis.
I agree with you about SNT/ITN. I like that chapter of your thesis a lot, and also find John’s post here convincing.
It does seem to me that randomista EA is alive and largely well—GW is still growing, global health still gets the most funding (I think), many of Charity Entrepreneurship’s new charities are randomista-influenced, etc.
There’s a lot of things going on under the “EA” umbrella. HLI’s work feels very different from what other EAs do, but equally a typical animal welfare org’s work will feel very different, and a typical longtermist org’s work will feel very different, because other EAs do a lot of different things now.
“It doesn’t exist” is too strong for sure. I consider GiveWell central to the randomista part and it was my entrypoint into EA at large. Founder’s Pledge was also pretty randomista back when I was applying for a job there in college. I don’t know anything about HLI.
There may be a thriving community around GiveWell etc that I am ignorant to. Or maybe if I tried to filter out non-randomista stuff from my mind then I would naturally focus more on randomista stuff when engaging EA feeds.
The reality is that I find stuff like “people just doing AI capabilities work and calling themselves EA” to be quite emotionally triggering and when I’m exposed to it thats what my attention goes to (if I’m not, as is more often the case, avoiding the situation entirely). Naturally this probably makes me pretty blind to other stuff going on in EA channels. There are pretty strong selection effects on my attention here.
All of that said, I do think that community building in EA looks completely different than how it would look if it were the GiveWell movement.
I can certainly empathize with the longtermist EA community being hard to ignore. It’s much flashier and more controversial.
For what it’s worth I think it would be possible and totally reasonable for you to filter out longtermist (and animal welfare, and community-building, etc.) EA content and just focus on the randomista stuff you find interesting and inspiring. You could continue following GiveWell, Founders Pledge’s global health and development work, and HLI. Plus, many of Charity Entrepreneurship’s charities are randomista-influenced.
For example, I make heavy use of the unsubscribe feature on the Forum to try and keep my attention focused on the issues I care about rather than what’s most popular (ironically I’m unsubscribed and supposed to be ignoring the ‘Community’ feed lol).
Yeah. (as a note I am also a fan of the animal welfare stuff). This is good suggestion.
I think most of this stuff is too dry to hold my attention by itself. I would like a social environment that was engaging yet systematically directed my attention more often to things I care about. This happens naturally if I am around people who are interesting/fun but also highly engaged and motivated about a topic. As such I have focused on community and community spaces more than, for example, finding a good randomista newsletter or extracting randomista posts from the forums.
Another reason to focus on community interaction, is that it is both much more fun and much more useful to help with creative problem solving. But forum posts tend to report the results of problem solving / report news. I would rather be engaging with people before that step, but I don’t know of a place where one could go to participate in that aside from employment. In contrast, I do have a sense of where one could go to participate in this kind of group or community re: AI safety.
Just curious—do you not feel like GiveWell, Happier Lives Institute, and some of Founders Pledge’s work, for example, count as randomista-flavoured EA?
Just chiming in here as HLI was mentioned—although this definitely isn’t the most important part of the post. I certainly see us as randomista-inspired—wait, should that be ‘randomista-adjacent’ - but I would say that what we do feels very different from what other EAs, notably longtermists, do. Also, we came into existence about 5 years after Doing Good Better was published.
I also share Habryka’s doubts about how EA’s original top interventions were chosen. The whole “scale, neglectedness, tractability’ framework strikes me as a confusing, indeterminate methodology that was developed post hoc to justify the earlier choices. I moaned about the SNT framework at length in chapter 5 (pp171) of my PhD thesis.
I agree with you about SNT/ITN. I like that chapter of your thesis a lot, and also find John’s post here convincing.
It does seem to me that randomista EA is alive and largely well—GW is still growing, global health still gets the most funding (I think), many of Charity Entrepreneurship’s new charities are randomista-influenced, etc.
There’s a lot of things going on under the “EA” umbrella. HLI’s work feels very different from what other EAs do, but equally a typical animal welfare org’s work will feel very different, and a typical longtermist org’s work will feel very different, because other EAs do a lot of different things now.
“It doesn’t exist” is too strong for sure. I consider GiveWell central to the randomista part and it was my entrypoint into EA at large. Founder’s Pledge was also pretty randomista back when I was applying for a job there in college. I don’t know anything about HLI.
There may be a thriving community around GiveWell etc that I am ignorant to. Or maybe if I tried to filter out non-randomista stuff from my mind then I would naturally focus more on randomista stuff when engaging EA feeds.
The reality is that I find stuff like “people just doing AI capabilities work and calling themselves EA” to be quite emotionally triggering and when I’m exposed to it thats what my attention goes to (if I’m not, as is more often the case, avoiding the situation entirely). Naturally this probably makes me pretty blind to other stuff going on in EA channels. There are pretty strong selection effects on my attention here.
All of that said, I do think that community building in EA looks completely different than how it would look if it were the GiveWell movement.
I can certainly empathize with the longtermist EA community being hard to ignore. It’s much flashier and more controversial.
For what it’s worth I think it would be possible and totally reasonable for you to filter out longtermist (and animal welfare, and community-building, etc.) EA content and just focus on the randomista stuff you find interesting and inspiring. You could continue following GiveWell, Founders Pledge’s global health and development work, and HLI. Plus, many of Charity Entrepreneurship’s charities are randomista-influenced.
For example, I make heavy use of the unsubscribe feature on the Forum to try and keep my attention focused on the issues I care about rather than what’s most popular (ironically I’m unsubscribed and supposed to be ignoring the ‘Community’ feed lol).
Yeah. (as a note I am also a fan of the animal welfare stuff).
This is good suggestion.
I think most of this stuff is too dry to hold my attention by itself. I would like a social environment that was engaging yet systematically directed my attention more often to things I care about. This happens naturally if I am around people who are interesting/fun but also highly engaged and motivated about a topic. As such I have focused on community and community spaces more than, for example, finding a good randomista newsletter or extracting randomista posts from the forums.
Another reason to focus on community interaction, is that it is both much more fun and much more useful to help with creative problem solving. But forum posts tend to report the results of problem solving / report news. I would rather be engaging with people before that step, but I don’t know of a place where one could go to participate in that aside from employment. In contrast, I do have a sense of where one could go to participate in this kind of group or community re: AI safety.