Quick takes

I've been thinking a lot about how mass layoffs in tech affect the EA community. I got laid off early last year, and after job searching for 7 months and pivoting to trying to start a tech startup, I'm on a career break trying to recover from burnout and depression. Many EAs are tech professionals, and I imagine that a lot of us have been impacted by layoffs and/or the decreasing number of job openings that are actually attainable for our skill level. The EA movement depends on a broad base of high earners to sustain high-impact orgs through relatively small donations (on the order of $300-3000)—this improves funding diversity and helps orgs maintain independence from large funders like Open Philanthropy. (For example, Rethink Priorities has repeatedly argued that small donations help them pursue projects "that may not align well with the priorities or constraints of institutional grantmakers.") It's not clear that all of us will be able to continue sustaining the level of donations we historically have, especially if we're forced out of the job markets that we spent years training and getting degrees for. I think it's incumbent on us to support each other more to help each other get back to a place where we can earn to give or otherwise have a high impact again.

Hot take, but political violence is bad and will continue to be bad in the foreseeable near-term future. That's all I came here to say folks, have a great rest of your day.

I'm currently reviewing Wild Animal Initiative's strategy in light of the US political situation. The rough idea is that things aren't great here for wild animal welfare or for science, we're at a critical time in the discipline when things could grow a lot faster relatively soon, and the UK and the EU might generally look quite a bit better for this work in light of those changes. We do already support a lot of scientist in Europe, so this wouldn't be a huge shift in strategy. It’s more about how much weight to put toward what locations for community and science building, and also if we need to make any operational changes (at this early stage, we’re trying to be very open-minded about options — anything from offering various kinds of support to staff  to opening a UK branch).  However, in trying to get a sense of whether that rough approach is right, it's extremely hard to get accurate takes (or, at least, to be able to tell whether someone is thinking of the relevant risks rationally). And, its hard to tell whether "how people feel now" will have lasting impact. For example, a lot of the reporting on scientist sentiment sounds extremely grim (example 1, 2, 3), but it's hard to know what level the effect will be over the next few years -- a reduction in scientific talent, certainly, but so much so that the UK is a better place to work given our historical reasons for existing in the US? Less clear.  It doesn't help that I personally feel extremely angry about the political situation so that probably is biasing my research.  Curious if any US-based EA orgs have considered leaving the US or taking some other operational/strategic step, given the political situation/staff concerns/etc? Why or why not? 

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Should the EA Forum facilitate donation swaps? 🤔 Judging from the number of upvotes on this recent swap ask and the fact that the old donation swap platform has retired, maybe there's some unmet demand here? I myself would like to swap donations later this year. Maybe even a low-effort solution (like an open thread) could go a long way?

I used to feel so strongly about effective altruism. But my heart isn't in it anymore. I still care about the same old stuff I used to care about, like donating what I can to important charities and trying to pick the charities that are the most cost-effective. Or caring about animals and trying to figure out how to do right by them, even though I haven't been able to sustain a vegan diet for more than a short time. And so on. But there isn't a community or a movement anymore where I want to talk about these sorts of things with people. That community and movement existed, at least in my local area and at least to a limited extent in some online spaces, from about 2015 to 2017 or 2018. These are the reasons for my feelings about the effective altruist community/movement, especially over the last one or two years: -The AGI thing has gotten completely out of hand. I wrote a brief post here about why I strongly disagree with near-term AGI predictions. I wrote a long comment here about how AGI's takeover of effective altruism has left me disappointed, disturbed, and alienated. 80,000 Hours and Will MacAskill have both pivoted to focusing exclusively or almost exclusively on AGI. AGI talk has dominated the EA Forum for a while. It feels like AGI is what the movement is mostly about now, so now I just disagree with most of what effective altruism is about. -The extent to which LessWrong culture has taken over or "colonized" effective altruism culture is such a bummer. I know there's been at least a bit of overlap for a long time, but ten years ago it felt like effective altruism had its own, unique culture and nowadays it feels like the LessWrong culture has almost completely taken over. I have never felt good about LessWrong or "rationalism" and the more knowledge and experience of it I've gained, the more I've accumulated a sense of repugnance, horror, and anger toward that culture and ideology. I hate to see that become what effective altruism is like. -The stori

Austin Chen (co founder of Manifold) shared some thoughts on the EA community during a recent interview with a former-EA [see transcript here] I think it is good to deter unscrupulous ultra high-net-worth individuals from engaging with EA. I think it was good that various 'EA thought leaders' came out as they did and said something along the lines of "we do not endorse this. Don't commit fraud."  I'm not entirely sure what Chen thinks the alternative could/should have been. Defend SBF's motives? Say nothing? Either of those approaches seem like the kind of optics-maxing he critiques as being a 'huge error' (only instead of aiming to 'broadly protect reputation' it's 'protect reputation in eyes of billionaires'). It's worth pointing out that Chen has a slightly more sympathetic view of Sam than I do:

Richard Ngo has a selection of open-questions in his recent post. One question that caught my eye: I originally created this account to share a thought experiment I suspected might be a little too 'out there' for the moderation team. Indeed, it was briefly redacted and didn't appear in the comment section for a while (it does now). It was, admittedly, a slightly confrontational point and I don't begrudge the moderation team for censoring it. They were patient and transparent in explaining why it was briefly redacted. You can read the comment and probably guess correctly why it was flagged.  Still, I am curious to hear of other cases like this. My guess is that in most of them, the average forum reader will side with the moderation team.   LessWrong publishes most of their rejected posts and comments on a separate webpage. I say 'most' as I suspect infohazards are censored from that list. I would be interested to hear the EA forum's moderation team's thoughts on this approach/whether it's something they've considered, should they read this and have time to respond.[1] 1. ^ Creating such a page would also allow them to collect on Ngo's bounty, since they would be answer both how much censorship they do and (assuming they attach moderation notes) why