It seems like there’s this general pattern, that occurs over and over, where people follow a path going:
1. Woah. Drowning child argument!
2. Woah. Lives are cheap!
3. Woah, obviously this is important to take action on and scale up now. Mass media! Get the message out!
4. Oh. This is more complicated.
5. Oh, I see, it’s even more complicated. (where complication can include moving from global poverty to x-risk as a major focus, as well as realizing that global poverty isn’t as simple to solve)
6. Person has transitioned into a more nuanced and careful thinker, and now is one of the people in charge of some kind of org or at least a local community somewhere. (for one example, see CEA’s article on shifting from mass media to higher fidelity methods of transition)
But, the mass media (and generally simplified types of thinking independent of strategy) are more memetically virulent than the more careful thinking, and new people keep getting excited about them in waves that are self-sustaining and hard to clarify (esp. since the original EA infrastructure was created by people at the earlier stages of thinking). So it keeps on being something that a newcomer will bump into most often in EA spaces.
CEA continues to actively make the kinds of claims implied by taking GiveWell’s cost per life saved numbers literally, as I pointed out in the post. Exact quote from the page I linked:
It seems like there’s this general pattern, that occurs over and over, where people follow a path going:
1. Woah. Drowning child argument!
2. Woah. Lives are cheap!
3. Woah, obviously this is important to take action on and scale up now. Mass media! Get the message out!
4. Oh. This is more complicated.
5. Oh, I see, it’s even more complicated. (where complication can include moving from global poverty to x-risk as a major focus, as well as realizing that global poverty isn’t as simple to solve)
6. Person has transitioned into a more nuanced and careful thinker, and now is one of the people in charge of some kind of org or at least a local community somewhere. (for one example, see CEA’s article on shifting from mass media to higher fidelity methods of transition)
But, the mass media (and generally simplified types of thinking independent of strategy) are more memetically virulent than the more careful thinking, and new people keep getting excited about them in waves that are self-sustaining and hard to clarify (esp. since the original EA infrastructure was created by people at the earlier stages of thinking). So it keeps on being something that a newcomer will bump into most often in EA spaces.
CEA continues to actively make the kinds of claims implied by taking GiveWell’s cost per life saved numbers literally, as I pointed out in the post. Exact quote from the page I linked:
Either CEA isn’t run by people in stage 6, or … it is, but keeps making claims like this anyway.