Another question related to Task Y: supposing Task Y does exist, would you rather people working on Task Y think of themselves as “Soft EAs”, or as people who are part of the “Task Y community”? For example, if eating a vegan diet is Task Y, would you like vegans to start thinking of themselves as EAs due to their veganism? If veganism didn’t exist already, and it was an idea that originated from within the EA community, would it be best to spin it off or keep it internal?
I can think of arguments on both sides:
Maybe there’s already a large audience of people who have heard about EA and think it’s really cool but don’t know how to contribute. If these people already exist, we might as well figure out the best things for them to do. This isn’t necessarily an argument for expansion of EA, however. (It’s also not totally clear which direction this consideration points in.)
If Task Y is a task where the argument for positive impact is abstruse & hard to follow, then maybe a “Task Y Movement” isn’t ever going to get off the ground because it lacks popular appeal. Maybe the EA movement has more popular appeal, and the EA movement’s popular appeal can be directed into Task Y.
Some find the EA movement uninviting in its elitism. Even on this forum, reportedly the most elitist EA discussion venue, a highly upvoted post says: “Many of my friends report that reading 80,000 Hours’ site usually makes them feel demoralized, alienated, and hopeless.” There have been gripes about the difficulty of getting grant money for EA projects from grantmaking organizations after it became known that “EA is no longer funding-limited”. (I might be guilty of this griping myself.) Do we want average Janes and Joes reading EA career advice that Google software engineers find “very depressing”? How will they feel after learning that some EAs are considered 1000x as impactful as them?
Expansion of the EA movement itself could be hard to reverse and destroy option value.
Thanks for this. I’ve edited your question into the post. The third bullet point you wrote I actually think captures a lot of why I’m excited about a potential Task Y (or list, like the one aaron posted). If people have the option to do something which both genuinely is good, and seems good to them, and hear that this is actively encouraged by the EA community and enough to be considered a valuable part of it, I think this goes quite a long way towards stopping it seeming so elitist. Having multiple levels of commitment available to people, with good advice about the most effective thing to do given a particular level of commitment, seems to plausibly have lots of potential.
I have price discrimination in my head as a model here, though I realise the analogy is not a perfect one.
The podcast with Rob Wiblin and Nick Beckstead is about whether EA should “aim to be a very broad movement that appeals to potentially hundreds of millions of people”. I initially read your post as addressing that question. Maybe a good answer to that question is “not before we’ve found useful things for the people already interested in EA to do”. My point about branding is most relevant in the case where we’ve found a useful thing and we want to scale it up beyond the existing EA community.
By the way, this new post is interesting, from a guy with a ridiculous resume who get rejected for 20 different EA positions.
Another question related to Task Y: supposing Task Y does exist, would you rather people working on Task Y think of themselves as “Soft EAs”, or as people who are part of the “Task Y community”? For example, if eating a vegan diet is Task Y, would you like vegans to start thinking of themselves as EAs due to their veganism? If veganism didn’t exist already, and it was an idea that originated from within the EA community, would it be best to spin it off or keep it internal?
I can think of arguments on both sides:
Maybe there’s already a large audience of people who have heard about EA and think it’s really cool but don’t know how to contribute. If these people already exist, we might as well figure out the best things for them to do. This isn’t necessarily an argument for expansion of EA, however. (It’s also not totally clear which direction this consideration points in.)
If Task Y is a task where the argument for positive impact is abstruse & hard to follow, then maybe a “Task Y Movement” isn’t ever going to get off the ground because it lacks popular appeal. Maybe the EA movement has more popular appeal, and the EA movement’s popular appeal can be directed into Task Y.
Some find the EA movement uninviting in its elitism. Even on this forum, reportedly the most elitist EA discussion venue, a highly upvoted post says: “Many of my friends report that reading 80,000 Hours’ site usually makes them feel demoralized, alienated, and hopeless.” There have been gripes about the difficulty of getting grant money for EA projects from grantmaking organizations after it became known that “EA is no longer funding-limited”. (I might be guilty of this griping myself.) Do we want average Janes and Joes reading EA career advice that Google software engineers find “very depressing”? How will they feel after learning that some EAs are considered 1000x as impactful as them?
Expansion of the EA movement itself could be hard to reverse and destroy option value.
Thanks for this. I’ve edited your question into the post. The third bullet point you wrote I actually think captures a lot of why I’m excited about a potential Task Y (or list, like the one aaron posted). If people have the option to do something which both genuinely is good, and seems good to them, and hear that this is actively encouraged by the EA community and enough to be considered a valuable part of it, I think this goes quite a long way towards stopping it seeming so elitist. Having multiple levels of commitment available to people, with good advice about the most effective thing to do given a particular level of commitment, seems to plausibly have lots of potential.
I have price discrimination in my head as a model here, though I realise the analogy is not a perfect one.
That makes sense.
The podcast with Rob Wiblin and Nick Beckstead is about whether EA should “aim to be a very broad movement that appeals to potentially hundreds of millions of people”. I initially read your post as addressing that question. Maybe a good answer to that question is “not before we’ve found useful things for the people already interested in EA to do”. My point about branding is most relevant in the case where we’ve found a useful thing and we want to scale it up beyond the existing EA community.
By the way, this new post is interesting, from a guy with a ridiculous resume who get rejected for 20 different EA positions.