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Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
I want to start by noting that I am amazed and somewhat in awe of what's been accomplished by the EA animal welfare movement. I am enthusiastically supportive of all campaigns that make living and dying conditions less bad for farmed animals.
I worked on such campaigns for almost 20 years, and I'm proud of that work.
That said, I do think it's a strategic error that the EA animal movement has so thoroughly moved on from advocacy for animal liberation and diet change.&n...
The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time
Until the Hugging Face / OpenAI swarm thing, I think I deep down felt pretty skeptical that extinction or serious loss of control scenarios were plausible in the next few years.
I’ve been lurking on LessWrong for years, and I remember being freaked out by Yudkowsky’s ‘List of Lethalities’ in 2022, and thinking that this did seem intellectually convincing, and maybe I should do something about it. But it didn...
Recent opportunities to take action
Why isn't there more EA focus on state capacity and improving government operations? The one mention of "government" on the EA topics page is "impactful government careers." Furthermore, the "big list of cause candidates" recently shared only mentions government in the context of survivalist bunkers and AGI. This seems... a bit narrow.
If we really want to uplift the human condition, we'd do well to remember that philanthropy as a whole is an absolute drop in the bucket relative to government investment. It's literally a one percent solution. And within that open philanthropy is a small piece of that. This seems like something that would benefit from a focused effort and an area that rather obviously is struggling.
See the many challenges with the Covid-19 response in the US / Europe / other "western" states for lack of a better term, the difficulty in building much of anything in those places and the general public institutional malaise. Reforming and improving state capacity seems like a first order challenge of the day. It also would be a massive force multiplier, whereby a dollar spent on changing government operations could have several orders of magnitude greater impact. The blog Marginal Revolution "state capacity" tag has a lot of great readings for those new to the topic.
#causeprioritization #ea_critiques
EDIT: note I believe this should say billions of dollars rather than millions.
In general there are many important topics EA doesn't focus on, government is just one of many. To answer your question specifically, an EA would probably become easily frustrated with government inefficiency, especially when you are dealing with people who actively try to make it inefficient. I personally have multiple ideas on this topic, but never been able to meaningfully work on them, to some extent directly because of government inefficiency.
The other issue you run into is that to be part of the EA movement you do need some level of privilege, and people with privilege often have a difficult time seeing things that don't impact them. Government isn't seen as so much of an issue when the government is benefitting them.