Thread by @EpistemicHope

EAs are my favorite type of people.

Like, if I list my top 5 people in the world, all of them have a very strong EA stain (stronger than that of most EAs).

But I'm also flipping through attendees of EAG reconnect, and feeling boredom / despair.

I'm starting to put my finger on the signs that make me feel pessimistic about talking with someone.

I'm still feeling this out, and none of these are prefect indicators, but...

One bad sign is if a person seems interested in talking about the EA movement, instead of the problems to be solved.

This suggest to me that their intuitive/natural impact model is something like "coalition building", or if I'm being uncharitable, a "pyramid scheme."

Like, it seems to me that the majority of people in EA don't really have a grasp on how to, personally, make progress on the hard problems that the EA community has identified.

But, they're covering this up from themselves by trying to get more people on board.

Movement building and outreach feels like a useful thing to do. But if you don't have a machine that can actually solve the hard problems, adding more people to the mix doesn't actually help.

It feels like a pyramid scheme to me because the impact-story implicitly bottoms out at people doing things that make progress on the problems. But for most EAs, their mental map of the world doesn't actually have any detail in that step.

Which is to say, they're just guessing, or trusting, that it DOES bottom out.

But I don't think that's well founded. I think that...

1) it isn't usually the case that adding more people helps you solve hard, barely-specified problems and

2) it is really easy for people to do useless work and if you can't identify good work yourself, you can't know if you're funneling people-hours into a useless machine.

I think this difference between me and my projection of a stereotypical EA probably comes down to a crux of how doomed we are and how tractable things seem.

Like, I imagine people having an attitude of "EA is great. [It is so much better than other kinds of non-profit work]. Obviously we should spread this good thing far and wide."

Whereas, I'm like "The world is not on track to survival, and EA is not on track to solving that. The default trajectory for EA has some people doing some plausibly good things, most people doing things that don't matter at all, and then everyone dying shortly afterwards."

Another related crux is how good donations to effective charities are. I think that most EAs think that donations to effective charities are great, and we should get more people excited about giving to them.

In contrast, I am pretty uncertain how good our best near-term interventions are, but I broadly agree with @TheZvi that most of the good done in the world is not done by non-profits or by donations.

"The most impactful and successful charity in the world is Amazon.com."

thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/20/alt…

Therefore, if you really want to do the most good (near term), you have to step outside the frame of non-profits, and just ask where "good" comes from, not how to do good via charity.

https://twitter.com/EpistemicHope/status/1352128793020833792?s=20

And and thinking about the long term: it currently seems pretty hard to turn money into x-risk reduction.

(Another possible crux is just how sensible it is to trust the leadership of the EA moment about what things are good to do.

In brief: I think it is decently sensible, if you gotta trust someone, but really what is most needed is people who can contribute to the figuring out.)

Relatedly, I was sort of amused at myself, when I noticed, looking at EAG reconnect profiles, that I felt exasperated because (to quote my verbal loop)"these people all have jobs."

Which, apparently, implies that they "don't get it."

(Noticeable, because usually being unemployed is a bad sign.)

[Also, I am arguably unemployed right now.]

Like, obviously, it often makes sense to have a job in this world, because it gives you money to live and a "face" for engaging with the world. And it often makes sense to do one's work in a job. Some work can ONLY be done in a job in an institution.

But I imagine that these people are asking themselves a question like "what job should I get to have impact in my career?" instead stepping back and asking "What is happening in the world and what needs to be done?"

This is related to what @paulg says in "How to Make Wealth".

"Having a job" is an artificial level of abstraction. The natural level of abstraction, the one that matters is "creating value."

paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Or another tact is the advice that I give people aspiring x-risk-migrators about grad school:

"I'm not saying that you shouldn't do grad school. Maybe you do actually need the credentials.

But don't confuse credentialing with your _real_ Job, attempting to solving the core problem / figuring out how to become an excellent scientist."

Sometimes you can use grad school to do that. If you can get actual mentor-ship from an excellent scientist, that sounds amazing.

But, usually, you have to work to make that happen.

Getting a PhD does not, by default, make you an excellent scientist, or institutional science would look pretty different.

[Full disclosure: I dropped out of undergrad, and you might want to take that into account when I give you advice about grad school.]

In both these examples, the point is that you need to zero in on the _work_ that is actually being done, not the social categorization of the people that typically (at least according to the prevailing narrative) do that work.

(Because, [spoiler alert], the actual work often looks very different from the societal stereotype of the work, and the people actually doing the work often don't look anything like the people who the prevailing narrative says does the work.)

https://twitter.com/SamoBurja/status/1344702022101196808?s=20

I've often said that I feel like the main problem with EA is that EAs think that their Job is to get a job at an EA org. But actually, their Job should be to figure out what the frick is happening in the world.

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