To be clear, my relocation post was for getting ready to relocate quickly in response to a trigger such as a new infectious, fatal disease being discovered.

No, I don't think mirror bio is coming sooner.

I would like to know why you don't think it would make sense to relocate to a place like New Zealand or Australia. My thought is that they demonstrated that they had the will and the functioning government to suppress COVID, and can take advantage of their isolation. You may be able to prevent your family from getting the disease in the US, but then you may have to deal with no electricity or water or fuel if the vital employees are unable or unwilling to show up to work. Australia could likely keep industry functioning conventionally, but even New Zealand might be able to improvise biofuels or go back to animal power.

But EA seems increasingly ideological to me, it seems to be a lot less concerned with asking and answering a genuinely open question, and a lot more concerned with causing people to follow established paths to impact. 

That may be true, though I would note that EA should have been more open to new causes in the beginning, until it did a bunch of research and found promising cause areas. I will also note that there is evidence that EA is still open to new cause areas, such as the recent shift from focusing on AI catastrophes to making AI futures go well (not to mention many individual EAs shifting between cause areas within EA).

But if EA were more ideological, does this mean it is dying? Maybe it is a worse fit for some people as a community. But I think the most important question is, "Is EA having more positive impact?" I agree that that is not just a function of jobs switched and money moved. But overall, I think it is having more positive impact, so I would not call that dying.

As in my other comment, I am mixing deference to orthodoxy and leaders. I have similar experience duration in academia. I think questioning things like political left positions and the value of education is more discouraged in academia than questioning the common beliefs in EA. I think it also depends on the field. In some academic fields, there are specific camps with a lot of tribal behavior. There's a quote that science advances one funeral at a time. I think that EAs are more open to changing their opinions. There is also a lot of tribal behavior between fields in academia - I think there is significantly more bias towards one's strand of academia than towards one's strand of EA. Maybe that's not deference to leaders, but the questioning of the value of one's field in academia is uncommon. Whereas in EA, there is lots of questioning whether different strands are net negative.

However, I do agree that some EAs like taking contrary opinions and might defer to a random blogger against scientific consensus. Those EAs often have a low opinion of peer review, and are probably more often wrong than the scientific consensus.

I'm blending deference to leaders and orthodoxy here. In UU, questioning of traditional theology is encouraged; questioning the views of the political left, much less so. Of course EA has its own orthodoxy, but questioning and criticism of it is much more encouraged. I think there has been more criticism of Moskovitz, Karnofsky, MacAskill, and Ord in EA than typical leaders in UU (e.g. ministers), but maybe your experience is different?

Habryka has claimed that most EA talent is in Anthropic; I haven’t tried to evaluate this, and it depends on how you measure talent, but it doesn’t seem too far off. 

Habryka was talking about the subset of EA that does AI Safety - EA as a whole has much more talent than that.

One thing that this piece is missing: the extent to which Anthropic is now implicitly the cultural/financial/leadership center of EA. 

It seems very plausible to me that the rest of EA will mainly end up serving as a recruiting pipeline for Anthropic. I’m interested in understanding the extent to which this is already happening. 

I do think a lot of EAs are desperately hoping for an Anthropic IPO so they can help save millions of lives, prevent billions of animal-suffering years, build up resilience to pandemics, and do much more AI safety work. So Anthropic may become the financial center of EA, but at this point it's only in expectation. Also, I don't see how Anthropic is the cultural/leadership center of EA. Jobs at Anthropic are a tiny percent of the jobs that 80k recommends. Maybe I'm not aware of it, but I don't think people at Anthropic get a significant fraction of the current karma on the EA Forum, and I'm pretty sure not historically. Could you explain more your reasoning?

EA has a culture of deferring to leaders and people in positions of expertise, and for good reason - it's impossible for everyone to figure out everything from first principles, and relying on others' judgement is essential for doing good at scale. 

A lot of people have said this, but compared to what? I assume compared to the ideal. Compared to the communities I have spent the most time in, I would say:

Environmentalism: defers far more

Unitarian Universalism: defers a lot more

Academia: defers significantly more

LessWrong: defers a little bit less

Longer-standing EAs also don’t seem to engage much with EA infrastructure. Of the EAs I know who've been around for a while, I don't know any who are part of a local group, and only a small handful actively engage on the Forum.  

Many past leaders of EA no longer seem to support it, and many seem to actively disavow it. 

I would love to hear more anecdata from other early EAs (I realize surveys would be really hard to run). I think it was around 2017 that @Benjamin_Todd estimated an attrition rate of about 2% per year from early EAs, so it would be interesting to hear an update on that. And again, it would be good to compare to other movements.

I dug in a little more, and I think your Earth cooling estimate is high at $2.5–3.0B/GW with water chillers. An NREL study was more like $0.7B/GW with water chillers. Also, we may be able to dispense with the water chiller (as you have assumed in space), and then it could be even cheaper. So I doubt it's actually going to be cheaper to cool in space. However, your point that cooling in space doesn't wreck the economics still stands.

Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%.

Impressive!

Since we're in a good enough position financially and donating seems very urgent, I now think we should stop contributing to have more to donate going forward...

Even though we're drawing down our savings to donate, our net worth rose 18% over the last year (adjusted for inflation).

Of course returns vary, but if you gave away 80% of your income and your net worth still increased, that means you are close to retirement, so I agree it doesn't make sense to continue to contribute to retirement.

I'd put about 10% on futures where things go very badly, where I'm not here to write a followup and you're not here to read one.

As per your comment on LW, biorisk is a large proportion of the risks in the next 2 years. Are you personally preparing to protect yourself and family from mirror bio or to relocate?

Although I’ve referred to there being approximately 1 OOM more capital invested than granted in any one year, there’s some nuance – of the granted funds, all of them are in fact being allocated in that year (by definition); whereas of the invested funds, some of the assets may well have allocated to impact funds some years ago.

This could be 1 OOM effect, if you invest for 10 years, so that's pretty important.

Although 90% (or whatever) of your assets could be invested in impact investing funds, you probably won’t allocate all of your assets to impact investments. For example, you will probably want to hold some of your capital in listed equities, and you might consider it too hard to find effective impact investments in that asset class.

If you do a significant fraction, it's pretty easy to reduce your overall return significantly (if you are trying to maximize returns), which really cuts into your charitable impact. So overall, it doesn't look very promising to me.