When you start talking about silicon valley in particular, you start getting confounders like AI, which has a high chance of killing everyone. But if we condition on that going well or assume the relevant people won’t be working on that, then yes that does seem like a useful activity, though note that silicon valley activities are not very neglected, and you can certainly do better than them by pushing EA money (not necessarily people[1]) into the research areas which are more prone to market failures or are otherwise too “weird” for others to believe in.
On the former, vaccine development & distribution or gene drives are obvious ones which comes to mind. Both of which have a commons problem. For the latter, intelligence enhancement.
Why not people? I think EA has a very bad track record of extreme group think, caused by a severe lack of intellectual diversity & humility. This is obviously not very good when you’re trying to increase the productivity of a field or research endeavor.
When you start talking about silicon valley in particular, you start getting confounders like AI, which has a high chance of killing everyone. But if we condition on that going well or assume the relevant people won’t be working on that, then yes that does seem like a useful activity, though note that silicon valley activities are not very neglected, and you can certainly do better than them by pushing EA money (not necessarily people[1]) into the research areas which are more prone to market failures or are otherwise too “weird” for others to believe in.
On the former, vaccine development & distribution or gene drives are obvious ones which comes to mind. Both of which have a commons problem. For the latter, intelligence enhancement.
Why not people? I think EA has a very bad track record of extreme group think, caused by a severe lack of intellectual diversity & humility. This is obviously not very good when you’re trying to increase the productivity of a field or research endeavor.