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Political feasibility/nonstarters
I share your concerns, and imo it's an actual problem/bottleneck (See Anya Hunt's post on recruitment at OP). I think the reason for student focus is because there is some data that younger people are more likely to be highly engaged/take the ideas more seriously than older people, but I think those data reflect the fact that there havent been good/heavily resourced efforts to change the careers of older people. In policy, it's easy to hop around in your career, so DC is a ripe city for this type of outreach, as is London.
I don't understand why this was downvoted. I really liked this post but the title was misleading.
Thanks for doing this work but I dont have the patience to read entirely. What is it you found exactly? please put at the top of the summary
Excellent! So. so glad you did this!
I think I would ideally want something where only certain people could see my profile and not just anyone who signs up, but I have no good thoughts on how to achieve that. Something like that elite celeb dating app by invite only maybe.
Yass kween
YES, all my yeses.
I dont see the importance, neglectedness, and especially tractability of this as a cause area compared with x-risks. If you could explain that could form better critiques.
Vipul Naik seems to do this but I'm not sure how frequently it is updated and I dont think includes FTX's grantmaking activities.
This is a community service
This is very helpful, thank you!
What is the difference between this, ARC, Redwood Research, MIRI, and Anthropic?
I don't think this is a cause area but do think this is a sub cause area within longtermism. I think if we do want to be able to upload our consciousnesses and live as digital people, the initial formation of the metaverse could pose lock-in effects that could make life not great for future digital people (so I guess more of an s-risk concern). I'm actually already working on a project for this and am glad to see other EAs thinking similarly. Sadly I cannot comment more on it though since I work for the government.
I was just about to make a list of downsides but you did it for me! I agree it's not a false choice, and at the city level can be incorporated well into programming. But my main beef with heavy programming and norms is that giving is actually what made me disengage with the community many years ago and I only re-engaged because of its renewed focus on careers/more of a feeling of movement. A bunch of people randomly coming together and donating their money isn't as compelling when they lack coordination about who's giving what and where. I don't see a bunch of giving folks networking with other giving folks about where they're donating or coordinated efforts on this. But I DO see career folks trying to actively figure out where the career bottlenecks are and funnel people into those positions. I suppose career building feels much more like a team sport and giving feels more like getting a bunch of people together who enjoy solitaire. Which is fine and which has a place!
But I think giving programming is fact dependent and makes more sense for different demographics and at different times than others. A city like New York or London probably has a lot of people who have careers they like and don't want to switch but are interested in EA. The number of such people (along with how old most people in the city are) should drive giving programming. I agree that giving at unis is much trickier.
I also highly value EA becoming accessible to low-income folks, and as someone who was low-income, the giving programming at my uni group is what emphatically made me disengage with the community for a few years. I felt like the people were naive and insensitive to low-income realities or it just wasn't a space meant for low-income people. I only came back because of longtermism. I don't think this is something a training can solve. So main point: incorporation of giving is good but highly fact-dependent and downsides should be considered.
I don't think any of the info hazards are mentioned here, but you're right that good lists like this are a long time coming. I haven't heard that biosec folks actively didn't want people in the field though-- would be interested in who said that.