Let's take the next decisive step and turn it into a proper guerilla underground movement! We must all scatter and during the day pretend to be effective egoists, but when the night falls we will show our real faces...

It’s nice to see this level of strategic leadership—thank you for sharing your plans. In my view, one of the top priorities for sustainable growth is attracting and retaining participants who have both strong commitment to altruistic causes and also the knowledge and good judgment to advance effective approaches. Perhaps we could start a focused discussion on EA Groups Slack about practical steps on how to improve outreach and bring in people who will genuinely strengthen the movement.

On a related note, I have a proposal (with some valuable inputs from @David_Moss) for a new event format designed to deepen connections in the EA community. In short, it's retreat-style gatherings in informal settings during holidays (like Cyprus) that will feature plenty of open-ended social time, to spark fresh ideas and foster collaboration. Such interactions often build the kind of relationships that sustain long-term commitment. We prepared a detailed concept and I'd be glad to discuss this in more detail with CEA team how it can be piloted to complement existing EA Global events.

Why not add to this highly interesting event an option for online participation?

Vasco, I absolutely agree with you. My idea was just a small thought experiment to let those people who disagree to view this from another angle.

Worrying about shrimp may seem like a mild form of insanity—until one considers: what if there are powerful beings in the universe for whom we are like shrimp? )))

Intuitively, it's all been very clear (to me, at least!) - but thanks for spending time on making those calculations. An extra argument to convince sceptics is always useful.

 

In one of his books, Gerald Durrell described in vivid detail how he extracted a particularly evil parasite living in an animal's tail. The parasite lived inside and gradually ate the tail, and at the smallest alarm, it would hide deep inside the tail. Durrell added - I wish all those protesting to animals living in zoos and claiming animals lead far happier lives in the wild - I wish they all saw this!

I have my own cat shelter so I know too well how many risks cats are facing. In my cat zoo, there are for example a three legged cat and another cat that was hit by a car - if I did not happen to be nearby purely by chance and take her immediately to a clinic, she would have died. 

Of course, people are unable to stop suffering of their own kind, not to mention other species. But it does not mean that we don't need to do anything about it.

It's great idea - I sent you my suggestion by dm

Sarah, thanks for the post, very interesting. 2 ideas:

1) Why not form a group of volunteers that will be a combination of:
- a focus group (to test new ideas or have quick surveys or something else) and 
- an advisory group (to propose new ideas)?

2) Why not have a regular remote (text only or video) interview with an interesting (but maybe not so well-known) person from outside of EA? You could post a list of potential candidates (and broad topics) for such an interview (whom we may already know how to approach) and ask to vote. To add some extra weight to their votes, people could complement them with some specific questions to the "speakers" they choose. Of course, you could also choose some speakers solely at your team's discretion.

This will: (a) generate new interesting content for the users and (b) at the same time will attract more attention to EA.

Just as an example - here is a research report on the Russian funding of war that was recently widely quoted - https://navigatingrussia.substack.com/p/russias-hidden-war-debt

The author is a top expert on Russia but he is not widely known outside of Russia-focused expert community, so he is clearly undervalued from the viewpoint of publicity. And there are a lot of such interesting people.

And finally, my strong view is that if suddenly EA forum disappeared it could not be substituted by any other platform - neither Reddit, nor Twitter, nor Substack nor something else. So please continue to move on!

We're focused on AI safety, which no doubt is important. However, we should also consider the moral implications of potentially creating AI beings capable of:

a) thinking independently, i.e. beyond merely fulfilling human requests

b) setting their own goals

How can we ensure a future where humans and AI beings can co-exist, minimizing suffering for both and maximising the potential benefits of collaboration – from scientific discovery to solving global challenges?