I didn’t make an introduction comment in the last post, so I suppose I should do one here. I’m David Barry—one of the migrated posts from the old blog is authored by the user David_Barry, but I signed up my usual Internet handle before thinking about the account that had already been made for me. I live in Perth, where I moved for work earlier this year, having previously lived in Brisbane.
I always used to think I’d become a physicist one day, but what was supposed to be a PhD went badly for too long and I escaped with a Master’s. I’ve now been working in mining geostatistics for almost six years, and donating a chunk of my salary to GiveWell-recommended charities for five years.
I don’t do much actively in EA apart from the donations I send out roughly once a month. Occasionally I’ll knuckle down and work through cost-effectiveness calcu-guestimates, but mostly I just like skimming the EA Facebook group and this forum, occasionally chipping in.
Moderate long-run EA doesn’t look close to having fully formed ideas to me, and therefore it seems to me a strange way to introduce people to EA more generally.
I don’t understand this. Is there an appropriate research fund to donate to? Or are we talking about profit-driven capital spending? Or just going into applied science research as part of an otherwise unremarkable career?
Who knows how to make economies grow?
What is a “better” global institution, and is there any EA writing on plans to make any such institutions better? (I don’t mean this to come across as entirely critical—I can imagine someone being a bureaucrat or diplomat at the next WTO round or something. I just haven’t seen any concrete ideas floated in this direction. Is there a corner of EA websites that I’m completely oblivious to? A Facebook thread that I missed (quite plausible)?)
I have even less idea of how you plan to make better politicians win elections.
More social science I can at least understand: more policy-relevant knowledge --> hopefully better policy-making.
Underlying some of what you write is, I think, the idea that political lobbying or activism (?) could be highly effective. Or maybe going into the public service to craft policy. And that might well be right, and it would perhaps put this wing of EA, should it develop, comfortably within the sort of common-sense ideas that you say it would. (I say “perhaps” because the most prominent policy idea I see in EA discussions—I might be biased because I agree with and read a lot of it—is open borders, which is decidedly not mainstream.)
But overall I just don’t see where this hypothetical introduction to EA is going to go, at least until the Open Philanthropy Project has a few years under its belt.