This is a special post for quick takes by Davis_Kingsley. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
One of my biggest regrets in EA is not having spoken out more boldly about how one of the most pressing outreach concerns by a lot was political diversity and how major EA figures/orgs openly supporting Democratic politics as an EA intervention was a major error.
Many people might of course be sympathetic to such causes and might well support them privately, but I think it is critically important for EA to be a big tent that is mostly politically neutral, and in recent years we've lost a lot of ground there.
I have believed this and spoke out about it in minor ways and in private since seeing talk of phone banking for Hillary as an EA intervention -- which struck me as surprising misconduct at the time -- but I now think I probably should have made a bigger deal of it.
I'm not sure my speaking up would have solved things, but I regret not being more open about it since things seem to have gone really wrong on this front recently. Unfortunately, this error now seems very relevant to the current AI safety debates...
A while ago -- 2017, maybe? -- I remember attending EA Global in San Francisco, where Will MacAskill gave as either the keynote or the closing talk an address on the theme "Keep EA Weird". Do people still support this ideal? I notice that GoodVentures recently stopped funding some "weirder" cause areas, for instance.
It's at least possible to me that as EA has gotten bigger, some of the "weird" stuff has been pushed to the margins more and that's correct, but I'm not sure I've seen a detailed discussion of this, at least when it comes to cause areas rather than debates about polyamory and the like.
A while ago I remember seeing some discussion of EA analysis of Ukraine relief following the Russian invasion -- perhaps some EAs from Poland were involved? Did this ever get comprehensively written up anywhere?
Here was one project: https://efektywnyaltruizm.org/blog/help-for-ukrainians/. I found that link on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gacpE79RKke2foG9K/rough-attempt-to-profile-charities-which-support-ukrainian.
One of my biggest regrets in EA is not having spoken out more boldly about how one of the most pressing outreach concerns by a lot was political diversity and how major EA figures/orgs openly supporting Democratic politics as an EA intervention was a major error.
Many people might of course be sympathetic to such causes and might well support them privately, but I think it is critically important for EA to be a big tent that is mostly politically neutral, and in recent years we've lost a lot of ground there.
I have believed this and spoke out about it in minor ways and in private since seeing talk of phone banking for Hillary as an EA intervention -- which struck me as surprising misconduct at the time -- but I now think I probably should have made a bigger deal of it.
I'm not sure my speaking up would have solved things, but I regret not being more open about it since things seem to have gone really wrong on this front recently. Unfortunately, this error now seems very relevant to the current AI safety debates...