EA - Ways in which EA could fail by michel

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Ways in which EA could fail, published by michel on October 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is the first post in a series of posts attempting to make EA strategy discussions more productive. I try to lay out a framework and shared vocabulary for navigating important risks and opportunities faced by EA decision-makers. The following posts will be linked here. Summary Following an influx of funding, media attention, and influence, the EA movement is speeding along an exciting, yet perilous, trajectory. A lot of the EA community’s future impact rests on this uncertain growth going well (and thereby avoiding movement collapse scenarios). Yet, discussions or critiques of EA’s trajectory rarely feel action-guiding. Even when critiques propose course corrections that are tempting to agree with (e.g., EA should be bigger!), proposed course corrections to make EA more like X often don’t rigorously engage with the downsides of being more like X, or the opportunity cost of not being like Y. Proposals to make EA more like X also often leave me with only a vague understanding of what X looks like and how we get from here to X. In hopes of making discussions of the EA community’s trajectory more productive (and to clarify my own thinking on the matter), I will lay out a series of posts that provide an overview of: (1) Important ways in which the EA movement could fail(2) “Domains” in which EA could make course corrections (e.g., more cause-area tailored outreach, new professional networks and events, etc.)(3) Key considerations that inform course corrections (i.e., places to disagree about course corrections)(4) Next steps to help guide the EA movement through exciting and perilous times This is the first post in this series: Ways in which EA could fail. Consider it an attempt at bounding the later discussions of strategy updates. Ways in which EA could fail The EA movement could collapse. Many movements before us have, and we’re not that special. But other movements, like abolitionism, have left lasting social change. In hopes of being the type of movement that does so well it doesn’t need to exist anymore, this section outlines many of the ways EA could fail. In this post, I’ll define “failure” as the EA/EA-adjacent ecosystem achieving substantially less impact than it could have along some other trajectory. Note that this is a pretty broad definition. Depending on your worldview and person-affecting ethical views, failure could look more like millions or billions of people alive in the near-future suffering in ways that could have been prevented – or failure could look more like an existential catastrophe that permanently stops sentient life from achieving its full potential. Implicit in this definition of failure is a statement about the influence EA already has, or could grow to have: I think our ideas and resources are powerful enough to seriously influence how many beings suffer today and how many beings live beautiful lives in the future, such that there’s a massive difference between the most good a flourishing EA ecosystem could achieve (i.e., upper bound) and the good, or possibly even harm, a collapsed EA ecosystem leaves us with (i.e., lower bound). In order to land closer to the heights of positive impact, let’s think concretely about the worst cases that we must collectively avoid. In what ways might the EA movement fail? I identify four clusters of failures: Reputation failures: failures that result in EA losing a substantial amount of possible impact because the EA community develops a negative reputation. Resource failures: failures that result in EA losing a substantial amount of possible impact because the community becomes preventably constrained by financial, human, or infrastructure resources. Rigor failures: failures that result in EA losing ...