Rockwell
On Living Without Idols
US Supreme Court Upholds Prop 12!
An Incomplete List of Things I Think EAs Probably Shouldn’t Do
On the First Anniversary of my Best Friend’s Death
Two Years Community Building, Ten Lessons (Re)Learned
Announcing the April 1st Purchase of Bodhi Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant by EA NYC
Best Use of 2 Minutes this Month (U.S.)
[Question] What would it look like for AIS to no longer be neglected?
Orgs & Individuals Should Spend ~1 Hour/Month Making More Introductions
EA NYC’s Community Health Infrastructure
Thank you for this timely and transparent post, and for all the additional work I’m sure your team is shouldering in response to this situation.
With Giving Tuesday and general end-of-year giving on the horizon, I think any indication from OPP of new anticipated funding gaps would be useful to the EA community as a whole. It would also be helpful to get a sense as soon as the information is available of what the overall cause area funding distribution in EA is likely to look like after this week.
I’m also sorry to hear this has been your experience and as both a woman and the director of EA NYC, I am always here to discuss cultural issues and possible recourse, as is our dedicated EA NYC community health coordinator, Megan Nelson: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSerQKtoQULEjuGGqTaKPoqj-WwCZJqKKri_pi0fdQ-Ag5xANQ/viewform We both think about these topics a lot and are working to steer the community in an increasingly healthy and safe direction.
Meta EA Regional Organizations (MEAROs): An Introduction
I found this post very informative. Thank you for sharing.
Some miscellaneous questions:There was significant disagreement whether OP should start a separate program (distinct from Claire’s and James’ teams) focused on “EA-as-a-principle”/”EA qua EA”-grantmaking.
1. Is there information on why Open Phil originally made the decision to bifurcate community growth funding between LT and GHWB? (I’ve coincidentally been trying to better understand this and was considering asking on the Forum!) My impression is that this has had extreme shaping effects on EA community-building efforts, possibly more so than any other structural decision in EA.
There was consensus that it would be good if CEA replaced one of its (currently) three annual conferences with a conference that’s explicitly framed as being about x-risk or AI-risk focused conference.
Open Phil’s Longtermist EA Community Growth team expects to rebalance its field-building investments by proportionally spending more on longtermist cause-specific field building and less on EA field building than in the past
2. There are two perspectives that seem in opposition here:
The first is that existing organizations that have previously focused on “big tent EA” should create new x-risk programming in the areas they excel (e.g. conference organizing) and it is okay that this new x-risk programming will be carried out by an EA-branded organization.
The second is that existing organizations that have previously focused on “big tent EA” should, to some degree, be replaced by new projects that are longtermist in origin and not EA-branded.
I share the concern of “scaling back on forms of outreach with a strong track-record and thereby ‘throwing out the baby with the bathwater.’” But even beyond that, I’m concerned that big tent organizations with years of established infrastructure and knowledge may essentially be dismantled and replaced with brand new organizations, instead of recruiting and resourcing the established organizations to execute new, strategic projects. Just like CEA’s events team is likely better at arranging an x-risk conference than a new organization started specifically for that purpose, a longstanding regional EA group will have many advantages in regional field-building compared to a brand-new, cause-specific regional group. We are risking losing infrastructure that took years to develop, instead fo collectively figuring out how we might reorient it.In March 2023, Open Philanthropy’s Alexander Berger invited Claire Zabel (Open Phil), James Snowden (Open Phil), Max Dalton (CEA), Nicole Ross (CEA), Niel Bowerman (80k), Will MacAskill (GPI), and myself (Open Phil, staffing the group) to join a working group on this and related questions.
3. Finally, I would love to see a version of this that incorporates leaders of cause area and big tent “outreach/recruitment/movement-building” organizations who engage “on the ground” with members of the community. I respect the perspectives of everyone involved. I also imagine they have a very different vantage point than our team at EA NYC and other regional organizations. We directly influence hundreds of people’s experiences of both big-tent EA and cause-specific work through on-the-ground guidance and programming, often as one of their first touchpoints to both. My understanding of the value of cause-specific work is radically different from what it would have been without this in-person, immersive engagement with hundreds of people at varying stages of the engagement funnel, and at varying stages of their individual progress over years of involvement. And though I don’t think this experience is necessary to make sound strategic decisions on the topics discussed in the post, I’m worried that the disconnect between the broader “on the ground” EA community and those making these judgments may lead to weaker calibration.
I appreciate the extensive time and effort you’ve put into this post/project, and I also find the framing odd and potentially misleading. Health risks change when someone stops eating animal products, but the health risks of a vegan diet are substantially less bad than the health risks of a standard diet.
I believe you overstate the risks of nutrient insufficiency generally and largely fail to engage with the health ramifications of animal product consumption. The “trade-off” is a possible increased risk of nutrient deficiency and decreased risk of a host of pervasive and debilitating health issues. If option A is “the nutrient deficiencies you found in previous research, such as iron and Vitamin D, which can have palpable effects if left unaddressed” and option B is “the standard risk of nutrient insufficiencies/deficiencies and an increased for cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and foodborne illness,” I think most people would readily opt for option A. All else equal and ethics aside, I’d personally rather take some supplements than increase my risk of cancer or salmonella or E. coli.
The “trade-off,” as a result, ends up skewing in a positive direction for most people switching from e.g. the Standard American Diet to a vegan diet; the vegan diet just comes with new, readily addressable, and substantially less scary risks.People should pay attention to their nutrition. They should e.g. get blood tests at their yearly checkups. And no one should act like veganism is a silver bullet to all health issues. But I find this post overall misleading.
While I think I disagree pretty strongly with the idea CEA CH should be disbanded, I would like to see an updated post from the team on what the community should and should not expect from them, with the caveat that they may be somewhat limited in what they can say legally about their scope.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe CEA was operating without in-house legal counsel until about a year ago. This was while engaging in many situations that could have easily led to a defamation suit should they have investigated someone sufficiently resourced and litigious. I think it makes sense their risk tolerance will have shifted while EVF is under Charity Commission investigation post-FTX and with the hiring of attorneys who are making risk assessments and recommendations across programs.
The issue for me is less “are they doing everything I’d like them to do” and more “does the community have appropriate expectations for them,” which is in keeping with the general idea EA projects should make their scopes transparent.
I have no personal insight on Nonlinear, but I want to chime in to say that I’ve been in other communities/movements where I both witnessed and directly experienced the effects of defamation-focused civil litigation. It was devastating. And I think the majority of the plaintiffs, including those arguably in the right, ultimately regretted initiating litigation. I sincerely hope this does not occur in the EA community. And I hope that threats of litigation are also discontinued. There are alternatives that are dramatically less monetarily and time-intensive, and more likely to lead to productive outcomes. I think normalizing (threats of) defmation-focused civil litigation is extremely detrimental to community functioning and community health.