Fun post. Thanks for adding it and to Patrick and Jason.
And similarly, as we have a look at the things that in hindsight seem like very good things to have happen in the world, it’s often unclear to me how an EA oriented intuition might have caused somebody to do so
I think this point is a good one but it doesn’t hold up. This post has 40 upvotes and no negative comments. Seemlingly everone agrees that it’s good for people to follow non-standard paths. This is literally how “an EA oriented intuition might have caused somebody to do so”.
Does someone want to send Patrick his membership details?
Yeah, it does sound like he might be open to fund EA causes at some point in the future.
I do think though that it is still a good criticism. There is a risk that people who would otherwise pursue some weird idiosyncratic, yet impactful, projects might be discouraged by the fact that it might be hard to justify it from a simple EA framework. I think that one potential downside risk of 80k’s work for example is that some people might end up being less impactful because they choose the “safe” EA path rather than a more unusual, risky, and, from the EA community’s perspective, low status path.
Let’s model it. Currently it seems a very vague risk. If it’s a significant risk, it seems worth considering in a way that we could find out if we were wrong.
I’d also say things like:
EAs do a lot of projects, many of which are outlandish or not obviously impactful, how does this compare to the counterfactual?
But it’s hard for me to see how, you know, writing a treatise of human nature would score really highly in an EA oriented framework. As assessed ex-post that looked like a really valuable thing for Hume to do.
Actually, there’s a lot of EAs researching philosophy and human psychology.
I think Collison’s conception of EA is something like “GiveWell charity recommendations”—this seems to be a common misunderstanding shared by most non-EA people. I didn’t check the whole interview, but it seems weird that he doesn’t account for the contrast between what he had just said about EA and his comments on x-risks and longtermism.
Fun post. Thanks for adding it and to Patrick and Jason.
I think this point is a good one but it doesn’t hold up. This post has 40 upvotes and no negative comments. Seemlingly everone agrees that it’s good for people to follow non-standard paths. This is literally how “an EA oriented intuition might have caused somebody to do so”.
Does someone want to send Patrick his membership details?
Yeah, it does sound like he might be open to fund EA causes at some point in the future.
I do think though that it is still a good criticism. There is a risk that people who would otherwise pursue some weird idiosyncratic, yet impactful, projects might be discouraged by the fact that it might be hard to justify it from a simple EA framework. I think that one potential downside risk of 80k’s work for example is that some people might end up being less impactful because they choose the “safe” EA path rather than a more unusual, risky, and, from the EA community’s perspective, low status path.
Let’s model it. Currently it seems a very vague risk. If it’s a significant risk, it seems worth considering in a way that we could find out if we were wrong.
I’d also say things like:
EAs do a lot of projects, many of which are outlandish or not obviously impactful, how does this compare to the counterfactual?
Actually, there’s a lot of EAs researching philosophy and human psychology.
I think Collison’s conception of EA is something like “GiveWell charity recommendations”—this seems to be a common misunderstanding shared by most non-EA people. I didn’t check the whole interview, but it seems weird that he doesn’t account for the contrast between what he had just said about EA and his comments on x-risks and longtermism.