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I’m concerned about getting involved in politics on an explicitly EA framework when currently only 6.7% of Americans have heard of EA (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qQMLGqe4z95i6kJPE/how-many-people-have-heard-of-effective-altruism). This is because there is serious risk of many people’s first impressions of EA to be bad/politicized, with bad consequences for the longterm potential of the movement. This is because political opponents will be incentivized to attack EA directly when attacking a candidate running on an EA platform. If people are exposed to EA in other more faithful ways first, EA is likely to be more successful longterm.
Agreed. By the way, the survey is not representative, and people often say they’ve heard of things that they have not. I think the true number is an order of magnitude lower than the survey suggests.
I’m really surprised to read this!
I guess this points strongly towards EA being just longtermism now, at least in how “the leading EA people” present it
It’s definitely not just long termism—and at least before sbf’s money started becoming a huge thing there is still an order of magnitude more money going to children in Africa than anything else. For that matter, I’m mostly longtermist mentally, and most of what I do (partly because of inertia, partly because it’s easier to promote) is saving children in Africa style donations.
Not sure how visible it is, but I was linking to this post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LRmEezoeeqGhkWm2p/is-ea-just-longtermism-now-1
For what it’s worth, something like one fifth of EAs don’t identify as consequentialist.
I would recommend crossposting the entire article, since it’s a public one.
(Matt if you’re readign this and would prefer us not to crosspost your articles, please say, but uh I think you’ll get more clicks this way anyway)
Feel free to cross-post!
Done, thanks!
It is really annoying for Flynn to be perceived as “the crypto candidate”. Hopefully future donations encourage candidates to position themselves more explicitly as favoring EA ideas. The core logic that we should invest more money in preventing pandemics seems like it should make political sense, but I am no political expert.
This is also just an example of how growing and diversifying the EA funding base can be useful even if EA is not on the whole funding constrained … a longtermist superpac that raised $1 million each from 12 different rich guys who got rich in different ways would arguably be more credible than one with a single donor.