The way to do it would be to create a city, one that ideally brings together people who do want to do the most good, but then gives them the freedom to go build what they need to build. It might be best seen as a proto-network-state as Balaji might say. Or indeed the libertarian argument that the EA initiatives are still very command-and-control and not market-based.
Maybe run prediction markets on what the highest impact investments should be and allocate funding on the basis of people putting money (votes) where their mouth (opinion) is. This would simultaneously mean removing the centralised element of trying to figure out which things to fund and rather see how the city itself flourishes. It’s the only way to have both “individuals work on their best guesses on how to do most good” and “we can’t solve every problem that the world faces top down”.
My sense is you think EA should be more ambitious, and I agree. But also I don’t think EA should always have been more ambitous, ex ante. When EA was growing the careful work they did seemed reasonable, and I am not sure they should have predicted the wild success that happened.
(please someone make the opposite case here)
In that sense, EA did a lot [citation needed] 100,000s of people are alive because of EA who otherwise wouldn’t be. And yeah I want to funamentally improve governance but:
I would like not to die soon—while I agree that we are uncertain about unlikely outcomes, we aren’t always talking about unlikely outcomes. A survey of normal (not just EA) AI researchers found that nearly half had awful outcome probabilites of 5% or higher. This isn’t a .1 or a .01 and it may not be a 1% it may be 10% or higher.
I think that I find cities cool and it would seem convienient if this was really the best way to help the world.
My sense is you think EA should be more ambitious, and I agree. But also I don’t think EA should always have been more ambitous, ex ante. When EA was growing the careful work they did seemed reasonable, and I am not sure they should have predicted the wild success that happened.
(please someone make the opposite case here)
In that sense, EA did a lot [citation needed] 100,000s of people are alive because of EA who otherwise wouldn’t be. And yeah I want to funamentally improve governance but:
I would like not to die soon—while I agree that we are uncertain about unlikely outcomes, we aren’t always talking about unlikely outcomes. A survey of normal (not just EA) AI researchers found that nearly half had awful outcome probabilites of 5% or higher. This isn’t a .1 or a .01 and it may not be a 1% it may be 10% or higher.
I think that I find cities cool and it would seem convienient if this was really the best way to help the world.