Thanks for writing this up! I’ve found this thread super interesting to follow, and it’s shifted my view on a few important points.
One lingering thing that seems super important is longtermism vs prioritising currently existing people. It still seems to me that GiveWell charities aren’t great from a longtermist perspective, but that the vast majority of people are not longtermists. Which creates a weird tension when doing outreach, since I rarely want to begin by trying to pitch longtermism, but it seems disingenuous to pitch GiveWell charities.
Given that many EAs are not longtermist though, this seems overall fine for the “is the movement massively misleading people” question
I don’t think that the moral differences between longtermists and most people in similar circles (e.g. WEIRD) are that relevant, actually. You don’t need to be a longtermist to care about massive technological change happening over the next century. So I think it’s straightforward to say things like “We should try to have a large-scale moral impact. One very relevant large-scale harm is humans going extinct; so we should work on things which prevent it”.
This is what I plan to use as a default pitch for EA from now on.
Thanks for writing this up! I’ve found this thread super interesting to follow, and it’s shifted my view on a few important points.
One lingering thing that seems super important is longtermism vs prioritising currently existing people. It still seems to me that GiveWell charities aren’t great from a longtermist perspective, but that the vast majority of people are not longtermists. Which creates a weird tension when doing outreach, since I rarely want to begin by trying to pitch longtermism, but it seems disingenuous to pitch GiveWell charities.
Given that many EAs are not longtermist though, this seems overall fine for the “is the movement massively misleading people” question
I don’t think that the moral differences between longtermists and most people in similar circles (e.g. WEIRD) are that relevant, actually. You don’t need to be a longtermist to care about massive technological change happening over the next century. So I think it’s straightforward to say things like “We should try to have a large-scale moral impact. One very relevant large-scale harm is humans going extinct; so we should work on things which prevent it”.
This is what I plan to use as a default pitch for EA from now on.