“You should apply for [insert EA grant], all I had to do was pretend to care about x, and I got $$!”
I can speak of one EA institution, which I will not name, that suffers from this. Math and cognitive science majors can get a little too far in EA circles just by mumbling something about AI Safety, and not delivering any actual interfacing with the literature or the community.
So, thanks for posting.
I am commenting to create public knowledge, in a form stronger than a mere upvote, that I think this post is on the right track and that wellbeing increases from just tackling loneliness, lack of affection, lack of validation, etc. directly ought to be a serious cause candidate.
idea: taboo "community building", say "capacity building" instead.
"At least existential"
How do I get into the Groups slack?
Sub-extinction event drills, games, exercises
Civilizational resilience to catastrophes
Someone should build up expertise and produce educational materials / run workshops on questions like
Differentially distributing these materials/workshops to people who live in geographical areas likely to survive at all could help rebuilding efforts in worlds where massive sub-extinction events occur.
Stitcher please? Many shows named "after hours" of some kind, can't find 80k on there.
Related: the term I've been using lately in thinking about this sort of thing is epistemic public goods, which I think was prompted when I saw Julia Galef tweet about the "epistemic commons".
I think you missed a disadvantage: I think there's a free rider problem where everyone reaps the benefits of the research and it's too easy for a given org to decline funding it.
Overall I like the idea a lot and
Some mechanism may be required to ensure that multiple organisations do not fund the same work.
I hope to find time for this exercise later today.
what about taking
exp(normalize(log(x))
for some normalization function that behaves roughly like vector normalization?