EA Forum discourse tracks actual stakes very poorly
Examples:
- There have been many posts about EA spending lots of money, but to my knowledge no posts about the failure to hedge crypto exposure against the crypto crash of the last year, or the failure to hedge Meta/Asana stock, or EA’s failure to produce more billion-dollar start-ups. EA spending norms seem responsible for $1m–$30m of 2022 expenses, but failures to preserve/increase EA assets seem responsible for $1b–$30b of 2022 financial losses, a ~1000x difference.
- People are demanding transparency about the purchase of Wytham Abbey (£15m), but they’re not discussing whether it was a good idea to invest $580m in Anthropic (HT to someone else for this example). The financial difference is ~30x, the potential impact difference seems much greater still.
Basically I think EA Forum discourse, Karma voting, and the inflation-adjusted overview of top posts completely fails to correctly track the importance of the ideas presented there. Karma seems to be useful to decide which comments to read, but otherwise its use seems fairly limited.
(Here's a related post.)
How to fix EA "community building"
Today, I mentioned to someone that I tend to disagree with others on some aspects of EA community building, and they asked me to elaborate further. Here's what I sent them, very quickly written and only lightly edited:
I find it very interesting to think about the difference between what a talent development project would look like vs. a community-building project.
To be clear, are you saying your preference for the phrase 'talent development' over 'community building' is based on your concern that people hear 'community building' and think, 'Oh, these people are more interested in investing in their community as an end in itself than they are in improving the world'?
I don't know about Jonas, but I like this more from the self-directed perspective of "I am less likely to confuse myself about my own goals if I call it talent development."
Thanks! So, to check I understand you, do you think when we engage in what we've traditionally called 'community building' we should basically just be doing talent development?
In other words, your theory of change for EA is talent development + direct work = arrival at our ultimate vision of a radically better world?[1]
Personally, I think we need a far more comprehensive social change portfolio.
E.g., a waypoint described by MacAskill as something like the below:
"(i) ending all obvious grievous contemporary harms, like war, violence and unnecessary suffering; (ii) reducing existential risk down to a very low level; (iii) securing a deliberative process for humanity as a whole, so that we make sufficient moral progress before embarking on potentially-irreversible actions like space settlement."
Yes, this.