the-diogenes-of-ea
Comments4
After seeing your SBF post, I checked out your other posts. It's shocking that this has minus -22 votes. That the EA community is willing to embrace fascism for funding is mind-boggling. This whole community is going to fall apart once the FTX spigot is turned off.
Yes, bribing celebrities to convince poor people to put their money into shitcoins is not altriusm. I hope he is sued and every penny is returned to those who fell for this. The EA community is going to need to have a moral reckoning over how the movement was hijacked by a conman.
As the founder of a non-EA nonprofit, here are some things that the EA folks should be thinking about:
1 - For EA to survive, it needs to become a toolkit not a cause.
Philanthropy in general, such as the Gates Foundation, loves giving money to organizations that do research about philanthropy. Rather than EA being about giving to specific causes, EA can become a meta-analysis of what works and doesn't work in philanthropy, and that it is a meta-layer on top of philanthropy rather than a specific cause. All of the EA people who want to work in EA should instead see themselves as people who want to contribute to improving philanthropy generally, and EA is a mindset for assessing giving.
2 - If you want to make an impact, work for a nonprofit that is making an impact, not for infrastructure
The point of EA is to funnel money to effective charities, like Give Directly. If you care about making an impact, why not just apply to work at those organizations, like Give Directly, and help them raise money for their causes? Cut out the middle man of EA itself and commit to the causes that EA cares about.
3 - Longterism needs to be divorced from EA for EA to survive as a coalition of individual donors.
Longtermism work is mostly think-tanky type work, and that is either funded by billionaires or it happens in academia. For EA to thrive here, it needs to embed itself in the world of think-tanks or otherwise find another billionaire patron, but it won't survive from individual donations. For example, if EA can convince the 10,000 EA-committed folks to donate $100 per year to be a member of EA, it can raise $1m per year through these donations - that's not going to be enough to sustain the movement.