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this post isn't what you're after since it's much older than a few months, but it seems like it may be of interest. maybe searching for "meta trap" will help you find what you're looking for?
Curated and popular this week
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Was it Zvi writing about Survival and Flourishing grants?
Yes that was it! That explains why i couldn’t find it on the forum. Thank you!
I think that this is the post being referenced, forgive me if I am wrong.
For those interested, I have pasted the parts that seemed most relevant below. If I have selected the wrong part/post please let me know and I'll edit this comment to point to the right one!
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Access to Power and Money
In my model, one should be deeply skeptical whenever the answer to ‘what would do the most good?’ is ‘get people like me more money and/or access to power.’ One should be only somewhat less skeptical when the answer is ‘make there be more people like me’ or ‘build and fund a community of people like me.’ The more explicitly and centrally this is what one is doing, the more skeptical one should be. The default reasons people advocate for such things are obvious, regardless of how conscious or intentional such paths might or might not be.
The art must have an end other than itself. By its fruits ye shall know it, the shining city on a hill. Power corrupts, if you gaze into the abyss it gazes into you, we are who we pretend to be and our virtues are that which we practice. If we are functionally about seeking power and money then we’ll turn into the same thing as everyone else who is about seeking power and money. Be wary of anyone saying “only I can fix it.” And all that. The more EA funds are giving to other EA funds and those funds are about expanding EA, the more one should worry it’s a giant circle of nothing.
These could be split into a few categories.
Some organizations focus on access and influence. If you can get people with power to listen to you and adopt your ideas, that’s valuable. The best example of this was what is now known as the Center for Long Term Resilience, and at the time was called Alpenglow@CEA. They had a solid case that they were successfully getting meaningful access for people who would use that access in ways that matter.
This was kind of the best case scenario for this sort of thing, where there was relatively less danger of corruption or wasted money compared to the potential for tangible benefit. The bar for such efforts should be quite high. I still think we overfunded because there are others out there and I think SFF overpaid versus its ‘fair share’ here, but that’s not the biggest mistake. I wish we knew how to do such things ‘safely’ in terms of keeping ourselves intact in the process. Until then, I’ll continue to be deeply uncomfortable in such waters.
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