Great post, thank you for compiling this list, and especially for the pointers for further reading.
In addition to Tobias’s proposed additions, which I endorse, I’d like to suggest protecting effective altruism as a very high priority problem area. Especially in the current political climate, but also in light of base rates from related movements as well as other considerations, I think there’s a serious risk (perhaps 15%) that EA will either cease to exist or lose most of its value within the next decade. Reducing such risks is not only obviously important, but also surprisingly neglected. To my knowledge, this issue has only been the primary focus of an EA Forum post by Rebecca Baron, a Leaders’ Forum talk by Roxanne Heston, an unpublished document by Kerry Vaughan, and an essay by Leverage Research (no longer online). (Risks to EA are also sometimes discussed tangentially in writings about movement building, but not as a primary focus.)
Update: There’s also the recent post EA considerations regarding increasing political polarization, which does, in some sections, directly discuss one pathway by which EA might end or lose most of its value. I’ve now added that to my collection too.
Thanks Pablo—I agree we should discuss risks to EA more. It seems like it should be a natural part of ‘building effective altruism’ to me. I wonder why we don’t discuss it more in that area. Maybe people are afraid it will seem self-indulgent?
I think I’d worry about how to frame it in 80k content because our stuff is very outward-facing and people who aren’t already part of the community might not respond well to it. But that’s less of an issue with forum posts, etc.
I’d also guess most people’s estimates for EA going away or becoming much less valuable in the next 10 years are lower than yours. Want to expand a bit on why you think it’s as high as you do?
Thanks for bringing this up and also for the list of places this has been discussed!
Relevant Metaculus question about whether the impact of the Effective Altruism movement will still be picked up by Google Trends in 2030 (specifically, whether it will have at least .2 times the total interest from 2017) has a community prediction of 70%
Yes, though it’s possible that some or all of the ideas and values of effective altruism could live on under other names or in other forms even if the name “effective altruism” ceased to be used much.
This made me think of backing up online EA content. It’s not that hard to automatize backing up the content on the EA Forum, the EA Hub and the websites of CEA, GiveWell and other organizations. Not all movement collapse scenarios involve loosing access to online content and communication platforms, but it may be part of both internal conflict scenarios and external shocks.
Our database provider provides backups automatically. I would be very surprised if they lost it. I think the largest remaining risk is that I accidentally issued a command to delete everything. In that worst case scenario, I’d be able to get one-off copies of the database that I’ve made at various points.
There’s still a single point of failure at the level of my organization. If something (maybe a lawsuit? seems unlikely) were to force us to intentionally take the site down, you’d want to have backups outside of our control. For that you might want to see this question, which your comment may have prompted.
Can’t you release the backups on torrent in the event of a legal shutdown? Without actually admitting that you “leaked” the data, of course. Considering how successful piracy has been, making a first-party backup persist on the net seems like a low hanging fruit to me.
I agree this is a broad and worthwhile area to think about. The community health team at CEA (Sky Mayhew, Nicole Ross, and I) do some work in this area, and I know of various staff at other orgs who also think about risks to EA and incorporate that thinking into their work. That’s not to say I think we have this completely covered or that no risk remains.
Great post, thank you for compiling this list, and especially for the pointers for further reading.
In addition to Tobias’s proposed additions, which I endorse, I’d like to suggest protecting effective altruism as a very high priority problem area. Especially in the current political climate, but also in light of base rates from related movements as well as other considerations, I think there’s a serious risk (perhaps 15%) that EA will either cease to exist or lose most of its value within the next decade. Reducing such risks is not only obviously important, but also surprisingly neglected. To my knowledge, this issue has only been the primary focus of an EA Forum post by Rebecca Baron, a Leaders’ Forum talk by Roxanne Heston, an unpublished document by Kerry Vaughan, and an essay by Leverage Research (no longer online). (Risks to EA are also sometimes discussed tangentially in writings about movement building, but not as a primary focus.)
That reasoning makes sense to me.
I’ve collected a bunch of EA analyses of how social social movements rise, fall, can be influential, etc. These are relevant to this issue, but, in line with your comment, I think none except the Rebecca Baron post are specifically about how EA might end or lose most of its value.
Just to say that I appreciate all the “mini literature reviews” you have been posting!
Update: There’s also the recent post EA considerations regarding increasing political polarization, which does, in some sections, directly discuss one pathway by which EA might end or lose most of its value. I’ve now added that to my collection too.
(I’m not saying I fully endorse that post.)
This is great, thanks!
Thanks Pablo—I agree we should discuss risks to EA more. It seems like it should be a natural part of ‘building effective altruism’ to me. I wonder why we don’t discuss it more in that area. Maybe people are afraid it will seem self-indulgent?
I think I’d worry about how to frame it in 80k content because our stuff is very outward-facing and people who aren’t already part of the community might not respond well to it. But that’s less of an issue with forum posts, etc.
I’d also guess most people’s estimates for EA going away or becoming much less valuable in the next 10 years are lower than yours. Want to expand a bit on why you think it’s as high as you do?
Thanks for bringing this up and also for the list of places this has been discussed!
Hi Arden,
Your worries seem sensible, and discussing it under ‘building effective altruism’ might be the way to go.
Relevant Metaculus question about whether the impact of the Effective Altruism movement will still be picked up by Google Trends in 2030 (specifically, whether it will have at least .2 times the total interest from 2017) has a community prediction of 70%
Yes, though it’s possible that some or all of the ideas and values of effective altruism could live on under other names or in other forms even if the name “effective altruism” ceased to be used much.
This made me think of backing up online EA content. It’s not that hard to automatize backing up the content on the EA Forum, the EA Hub and the websites of CEA, GiveWell and other organizations. Not all movement collapse scenarios involve loosing access to online content and communication platforms, but it may be part of both internal conflict scenarios and external shocks.
Is the EA Forum regularly backed up, Aaron?
Short answer: Yes.
Our database provider provides backups automatically. I would be very surprised if they lost it. I think the largest remaining risk is that I accidentally issued a command to delete everything. In that worst case scenario, I’d be able to get one-off copies of the database that I’ve made at various points.
There’s still a single point of failure at the level of my organization. If something (maybe a lawsuit? seems unlikely) were to force us to intentionally take the site down, you’d want to have backups outside of our control. For that you might want to see this question, which your comment may have prompted.
Can’t you release the backups on torrent in the event of a legal shutdown? Without actually admitting that you “leaked” the data, of course. Considering how successful piracy has been, making a first-party backup persist on the net seems like a low hanging fruit to me.
No. The backups contain data like user emails and private messages that are, well, private. We expose all our public information over our API.
I agree this is a broad and worthwhile area to think about. The community health team at CEA (Sky Mayhew, Nicole Ross, and I) do some work in this area, and I know of various staff at other orgs who also think about risks to EA and incorporate that thinking into their work. That’s not to say I think we have this completely covered or that no risk remains.