One of the vague ideas spinning around in my head is that maybe in addition to EA which is a fairly open, loosely co-ordinated, big-tent movement with several different cause areas, there would also in value in a more selective, tightly co-ordinated, narrow movement focusing just on the long term future. Interestingly, this would be an accurate description of some EA orgs, with the key difference being that these orgs tend to rely on paid staff rather than volunteers. I don’t have a solid idea of how this would work, but just thought I’d put this out there...
casebash
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casebash’s Shortform
That is pretty concerning. I would love an explanation of this as well!
I’m strongly in favour of creating a fellowship with a fancy name and website in order to allow people to build career capital; or at least make accepting these fellowships not a step backwards. EA Grant doesn’t exactly sound prestigious.
“I have seen EAs circulate half-baked fears of suicide drones making it easy to murder people (just carry a tennis racket, or allow municipalities to track or ban drone flights if they so choose) or assassinate political leaders (they already speak behind bullet-resistant plexiglass sometimes, this is not a problem)”—Really not that easy. A tennis racket? Not like banning drones stops someone flying a drone from somewhere else. And political leaders sure you can speak behind the glass, but are you going to spend your whole life behind a screen?
Maybe EA should grow more, but I don’t think that the issue is that we are “not ruthless enough”. Instead I’d argue that meta is currently undervalued, at least in terms of donations.
People often assume that tagging is strictly better than sub-forums because it is more flexible, but categories have advantages too. For one, it is easier to filter them out, since there are less categories. Additionally, if you visit one category, then another, you are less likely to see duplicate posts.
Wow, they all sound so fascinating!
“What if you share short-termists’ skepticism of weird claims and hypothetical risks, but you’re willing to focus on first-principles reasoning and work on a long time scale?”—then you’d probably focus on nuclear which isn’t at all hypothetical
Here’s the link: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Sorry, I can’t respond to this in detail, because the conversation was a while back. Further, I don’t have independent confirmation on any of the factual claims.
I could PM you one name they mentioned for point three, but out of respect for their privacy I don’t want to post this publicly. Regarding point four, they mentioned article as a description of the dynamic they were worried about.
In terms of resources being directed to something that is not the mission, I can’t remember what was said by these particular people, but I can list the complaints I’ve heard in general: circling, felon voting rights, the dispute over meat at EAG, copies of HPMoR. Since this is quite a wide spread of topics, this probably doesn’t help at all.
“EAs seem to mostly interact with research groups and non-profits”—They were talking more about the kinds of people who are joining effective altruism than the groups we interact with
What’s EAF focusing on now and why did it decide to deprioritise community building?
This doesn’t really seem to be a question; just a statement. Might be worthwhile to make the question explicit.
I agree; this is a duplicate
I can’t say exactly what the people I was talking about meant since I don’t want to put words in their mouth, but controversial figures was likely at least part of it.
Rationality, EA and being a movement
Happy to see this post. Definitely feels like security issues have received insufficient attention.
Interesting, unfortunately teammates are only available on the $500 per month version :-(
Suggesting a tried and true model is a major plus!
Interesting reading your strategy, particularly what you aren’t focusing on. The one part I’d be somewhat skeptical of is decreasing upskilling. People, particularly the people that we want to join our community, want to grow and improve. It’s important to be realistic about how much someone can upskill in a limited amount of time, but these kinds of events seem like a key draw.