Please note that the Twitter thread linked in the first paragraph starts with a highly factually inaccurate claim. In reality, at EAGxBoston this year there were five talks on global health, six on animal welfare, and four talks and one panel on AI (alignment plus policy). Methodology: I collected these numbers by filtering the official conference app agenda by topic and event type.

I think it's unfortunate that the original tweet got a lot of retweets / quote-tweets and Jeff hasn't made a correction. (There is a reply saying "I should add, friend is not 100% sure about the number of talks by subject at EAGx Boston," but that's not an actual correction, and it was posted as a separate comment so it's buried under the "show more replies" button.)

This is not an argument for or against Jeff's broader point, just an attempt to combat the spread of specific false claims.

This post wanted data, and I’m looking forward to that … but here is another anecdotal perspective. 

I was introduced to EA several years ago via a Life You Can Save. I learned a lot about effective, evidence-based giving, and “GiveWell approved” global health orgs. I felt that EA had shared the same values as the traditional “do good” community, just even more obsessed with evidence-based, rigorous measurement. I changed my donation strategy accordingly and didn’t pay much more attention to EA community for a few years.

But in 2020, I checked back in to EA and attended an online conference. I was honestly quite surprised that very little of the conversation was about how to measurably help the world’s poor. Everyone I talked to was now focusing on things like AI Safety and Wild Animal Welfare. Even folks that I met for 1:1s, whose bio included global health work, often told me that they were “now switching to AI, since that is the way to have real impact.” Even more surprising was the fact that the most popular arguments weren’t based on measurable evidence, like GiveWell, but based on philosophical arguments and thought experiments. The “weirdness” of the philosophical arguments was a way to signal EA-ness; lack of empirical grounding wasn’t a dealbreaker anymore.

Ultimately I misjudged what the “core” principles of EA were. Rationalism and logic were a bigger deal than empiricism. But in my opinion, the old EA was defined by citing mainstream RCT studies to defend an intervention that was currently saving X lives. The current EA is defined by citing esoteric debates between Paul Christiano and Eliezer, which themselves cite EA-produced papers… all to decide which AI Safety org is actually going to save the world in 15 years. I’m hoping for a rebalance towards the old EA, at least until malaria is actually eradicated!

Great post! I don't have fully formed view of the consequences of EA's increasing focus on longtermism, but I do think it was important that we notice and discuss these trends.

I actually spent some of my last saturday categorising all EA-forum posts by their cause-area^[1], and am planning on spending my next saturday making a few graphs over any trends I can spot on the forum.

The reason I wanted to do this is exactly because I had an inclination that global poverty posts were getting comparatively less engagement than it used to, and was wondering whether this was actually the case or just my imagination.

1. ^{^}

   Just now put the code I've written so far on github in case else wants to contribute or do something similar: https://github.com/MperorM/ea-forum-analysis

Upvote this if you think that global poverty is appropriately or over prioritised within EA.

All EA funders who give away more than $10 million should produce data on their funding by cause area which can be published on sites like https://www.effectivealtruismdata.com/ 

edited to take Chris Leong's feedback into account.

I think the global poverty thing is great for PR and it's very important to have a highly visible discourse on it in outer EA outposts like the subreddit because otherwise people see us talking about AI and think we're a cult. There's a serious problem on Reddit with many young people getting taken in by an intelligent, fashionable and dangerous anti rationalsphere group that grows at 300% per year. It's very important that EA makes humanitarian noises on Reddit rather than just doing our usual thing of just helping people, to handle the antagonistic group. I used to frequent the sub trying to handle them and I think we got a reputation increase but right now my mental health can't cope with that kind of emotional labour and the required self restraint and empathy for influential insane bpd people who will soon grow up to become journalists. There's already at least one journalist who dedicates his career to attacking rationalsphere x risk and gets published in intellectually fashionable outlets like salon.com -- there's a very real danger imho that we'll have a plague of these bastards soon and we'll be considered the new far right, as this guy is already successfully painting us. We need to make more good PR noises and take a countering violent extremism approach to our adversaries, prevent them from turning young intelligent people against us.

I think there is serious neglect of PR in EA . EAs seem to be PR blind. Those who see the threat are often tempted to argue with nutters and make it worse. People forget that teens grow up to be adults with academic ppsts and journalism careers. I personally understand that mundane humanitarianism is relatively unimportant compared to x risk but we still need to look after the reputation side of things so I suggest retaining some humanitarian stuff on the highly visible outside of the movement and talking about it constantly is necessary for survival. I feel sometimes anti-superficial-bullshit-altruism sentiment in our glorious movement works as a kind of masochism where we basically fail to get credit for anything and invite irrational but intelligent and socially skilled people to attack us. We need a highly socially skilled and emotionally resilient counter-force to spout humanitarianism and take care of people's feelings.

I think global poverty and health is important because…

there is a case that it is the most effective cause from a utilitarian standpoint. This is particularly the case id you have population ethics other than the total view or you are suffering focused (or you think that it is as likely as not that the future will be net bad).

I have not seen any strong case that for someone with, say a person affecting view, it is clear they can have a greater impact by working to prevent extinction risk.

(Animal welfare considerations and the meat eaters dilemma may counteract this. But they also counteract the case for preventing extinction.)

Can you elaborate on your endnote that "this discussion won't work"? What would success look like?