Co-founder and executive director at Oxford Biosecurity Group
Creator of the ‘Introduction to Biosecurity’ course. Put together a 1-pager of resources to help people get started in biosecurity.
All opinions I post on the forum are my own. Tell me why I’m wrong.
I would call the way it has been posted on Twitter a meme, and the main point was on how much to update not on the format (meme or video) this information was presented in! For which I think we are in agreement
I don’t think I would update at all based just on those memes—particularly as my understanding is that he lived in group houses! (I know a lot of other EAs are vegan, but not everyone is)
That link doesn’t work for me. Do you have another one, or has it been taken down?
Well done Dion!
This is powerful and moving just reading it, I bet it would have been even better sitting in the room listening to it and seeing the people raise their hands.
Glad EAGxSingapore went well.
Sounds like a very interesting concept! Writing was basically my main hobby as a teenager, I’d love to publish a book at some point myself and find it great when other people do.
I don’t have time over the next few weeks, but may be able to read/give feedback after that. When are you planning on publishing this more publicly?
(I have not yet joined the Discord as I’m also not really a Discord person, but may do later)
Who have you spoken to already about this? There is definitely work done to try to make community building as impactful as possible, but I am not sure much variance there is between the strategies of different groups (there seem to be a lot of socials, speaker events and intro fellowships).
I do not have the time right now to do my own research (e.g. speaking to people I know in various places doing active community building, reading past forum posts, reading other web sources), but I am interested to hear about your conclusions.
Very interesting read, thanks for writing.
I remember when I first joined EA the thing that I found the most different/beneficial was the community. I’ve met various people who care about having an impact, and about maximising their impact, and about rationality. But it is the community within EA and the concentration of these people all in one place that would be very difficult to replicate.
I know I’m a bit late to this post/thread, but I’d like to add a +1 to the above comment. I found reading this very useful (having already been to a few EAGs/EAGxs), however I have sometimes gained as much/more value out of some longer small group conversations. So it’s a case of finding what works for you, and not worrying if you aren’t doing all of the above!
I’ve also found ‘accidental 1:1s’ very useful (but with more variance), i.e. spending e 10-30 minutes speaking to random people you come across in the mornings/while having a snack/having lunch. Of course there’s a larger chance that you won’t have much in common with those that you meet at random, but I’ve also found that some of my most productive meetings at some EAGs have been the chance ones. Because of this, I deliberately leave some time free rather than booking 1:1s both for rest and for chance meetings.
I found this very interesting to read, not because I agree with everything that was said (some bits I do, some bits I don’t) but because I think someone should be saying it.
I have had thoughts about the seeming divide between ‘longtermism’ vs ‘shorttermism’, when to me there seems to be a large overlap between the two, which kind of goes in line with what you mentioned: x-risk can occur within this lifetime, therefore you do not need to be convinced about longtermism to care about it. Even if future lives had no value (I’m not making that argument), and you only take into account current lives, preventing x-risk has a massive value because that is still nearly 8 billion people we are talking about!
Therefore I like the point that x-risk does not need to be altruistic. But it also very much can be, therefore having it separate from effective altruism is not needed:
1. I want to save as many people as possible therefore stopping extinction is good—altruism, and it is a good idea to do this as effectively as possible
2. I want to save myself from extinction—not altruism, but can lead to the same end therefore there can be a high benefit of promoting it this way to more general audiences
So I do not think that ‘effective altruism’ is the wrong name, as I think everyone so far I’ve come across in EA has been in the first category. EA is also broader, including things like animal welfare and global health and poverty and various other areas to improve the lives on sentient beings (and I think this should be talked about more). I think EA is a good name for all of those things.
But if the goal is to reduce x-risk in any way possible, working with people who fall into the second category, who want to save themselves and their loved ones, is good. If we want large shifts in global policy and people generally to act a certain way, things need to be communicated to a general audience, and people should be encouraged to work on high impact things even if they are ‘not aligned’.
I am not saying that this doesn’t exist within EA (have not spoken to every EA anyway!) just that there is less emphasis on this than I think there should be:
- Modelling indirect impact: often people seem to be speaking about direct risks, e.g. from AI or bio, with other areas such as climate change being less discussed and global health and poverty being seen as ‘neartermist’. But for example more inequality can lead to greater instability, which increases chances of conflict which increases chances of other xrisks. Or climate change increases the chance of pandemics when e.g. more people are climate refugees (just two examples, not intending to put numbers on them but to illustrate a point).
- Applied psychology/communication (if that’s the right phrasing): when I first started joining EA I was mentioning how useful it would be to gain a deeper understanding of why people do what they do. If they currently aren’t don’t something that would be very beneficial from them to do (e.g. working on a high impact career), why? And if you want to convince them to do something like that and communicate with them effectively, how would you go about it? It’s difficult to answer either of those things without understanding why people do what they do, and more broadly why groups do what they do, or governments do what they do.
Commenting as I’d also like to see a response to this. I guess it depends how they define ‘working directly’, perhaps emphasizing certain orgs? I am not focussed on AI myself, but I have spoken to loads of EAs who have an AI focus (even if nobody is doing this outside of EA) that this number seems surprisingly low. Not to say it isn’t neglected!
Thanks for this post. However, one of the first things that came to mind was the EA Forum itself.
It is completely public, much EA discourse happens here, and a lot of people use their real names/full names (I believe this is even encouraged). Clearly forum communication is not intended to be the same as an interview, and that it can’t be quoted as an interview (I expect/hope—I have no experience with journalism), and I think many people will already be bearing this in mind. It is also hard to prove of course who it is who is actually commenting, and whether people are using their own names, so it is less reliable there than an actual interview.
But the advice for talking to journalists seems to be for everyone in EA thinking about giving an interview, and generally I see it being very easy for a journalist to go on the forum and use that as a source (even including screenshots).
People being able to have discussions is one of the best things about the forum in my mind, and it’s good for people to be able to express their views without self-censoring. But also, anything written on the internet in public is clearly public.
I’m sure there are some nuances here. Does anyone have thoughts on this?