Of these, roughly eight are very esoteric and strange. (“Extreme power concentration [from AI],” “Engineered pandemics,” “Moral status of digital minds,” “Gradual disempowerment,” “S-risks,” “AI-enhanced decision making,” “Space governance,” and “Wild animal suffering”).

I would feel pretty uncomfortable endorsing these ideas at a party, and I imagine you would be too.

80K's cause area list has had esoteric stuff for years now, and their career guide still seems to be mostly generally appealing. There are some AI-focused write-ups (part 9 seems to have undergone revision), but most of the core write-ups look exactly like they used to two years ago. 

I think it is still the highest quality career guide out there and still worth recommending it to newcomers.

--

I don't know if their pivot was detrimental for the world. It is possible that the future will unfold exactly how the Berkeley people think it will, in which case, maybe it was positive. Even if it doesn't, it could still be argued that the pivot was positive. 

But the loss of 80K as a cause general meta EA org has most likely been bad for the community, and especially for those who are not into AIS. They used to effectively function as a movement building / comms org. Their podcast was the best way to learn what prominent EAs were working on and the set of ideas the movement was into, but their pivot left a vacuum that I doubt will be filled any time soon.^[1]

1. ^{^}

   On a personal level, I miss when 80K's podcast episodes were more varied. It was my top podcast from ~2021 to 2024, but I no longer engage with their content (partly because my brain is oversaturated with AI content, but also because there are other podcasts like Dwarkesh that do a pretty good job of talking about TAI without an overwhelming focus on AIS).

> EA works best as a cluster of ideas and a loose professional network (a lot like the YIMBY movement) rather than a “community.” 

Could you expand on this? The bullet is too short, and I don't know what conclusions to draw here 
 

"Oh it's just been a few weeks of not being perpetually online I am sure there is not much on the Forum ..."

They are not neglected problems compared to, say, direct cash transfers or farm animal welfare.

I made claude do some quick maths:

Apparently, even $1 invested into Situational Awareness LP 6 months ago is worth $1.78 now. Totally possible he is not a savant whisperer and had enough knowledge and connections to make great bets, but the bets are still paying off. Time will tell if their hedging strategy is actually sound or just lucky. 

But I don't think this is comparable to FTX or contains any lessons for the EA community. Is Situational Awareness LP an EA venture? I could be wrong but I don't think so. I have always thought of it as "oh I guess Aschenbrenner is doing his own thing, cool."

However, it is objectively nuts to put a 24-year-old with no experience in charge of a $50B hedge fund.

? It is his fund. He started it.

I feel with the FTX and rat culture reflection, you are reading into the situation too much.

The losses, as you pointed out, happened due to highly leveraged bets. He didn't expect memory stocks to bleed as much as they did. Besides, it is possible that the fund will survive because his core thesis has paid off exceptionally well so far. He also has a rumored $5B equity stake in a certain large AI company. 

Tough time for Situational Awareness LP, but I hope they make it!

Which sources of funding would you recommend for those interested in generalist EA community building? 2/3 examples are AIS-related for which there are overwhelming sums of funding available (and they are doing work that is better not done at CEA anyway). 

I was beyond excited to read NEST's introductory announcement last month. Curious how they are funded, because I thought OP is no longer super interested in EA community building.

Because those approximately 10,000 pre-existing web forum software packages are generic / bad and the EA forum has unique features like upvotes, agree-votes, karma, the user map, polls, moderation norms, cause area wikis ... 

The rest of us are generally resigned to biological humans disappearing once we have transformative AI

Do you mean TAI or the singularity? Or are those synonyms in your personal dictionary? 

When people say TAI, I think of OpenPhil's old article which seems to no longer have a live link, ugh!

Dare I say that non-native english speakers have the most to gain by going through the pain of writing english not well! But I like and endorse this strategy