SIAI's second priority is to raise the sanity waterline. A lot of people put their efforts towards that. For example: creating LW meetups in new cities, writing articles, and simply being more rational people.
Yes, that's something I'm not sure about. There's plenty of good reasons to pursue the goal, and, as far as I've seen, plenty of people willing to support it on this site... but there isn't any obvious coordination. If enough of us could gain positions at universities, spread out to maximize coverage, or focused to 'take-over' an institution, then we would likely see far more success. (Unfortunately none of our current ad-hoc 'leadership' has that much appeal outside the group, so playing politics doesn't look like it would work out well for us.) I'm prob...
I know that Rationalism is fairly spread out as an ideology, but, thankfully, very few rationalists seem to subscribe to the popular belief that allowing someone you can't see to suffer by your inaction is somehow different from walking on while some kid you don't know bleeds out on the pavement. So, if most of us are consequentialist altruists, precisely what should we be doing? SIAI are working on the Silver-Bullet project, for example, but what about the rest of us? Giles is attempting to form a altruist community, and I'm sure there are a number of other, scattered, projects members are working on independently. (I searched for any previous discussions, but didn't find any. If there are some I missed, please send me the links.)
However, a lot of the community's mid-term plans seem to be riding on the success of the SIAI project, and although I am not qualified to judge it's probability... not having other plans in the event it fails, when most of us don't have any skills that would contribute to the Friendly AI project anyway, seems overly-hopeful. There are of course several short-term projects, the Rationalist Boot-Camps for example, but they don't currently seem to be one of the main focuses.
I suppose, what I'm trying to ask without stepping on too many SIAI researchers toes, is what should non-researchers who want to help be doing in case it doesn't work, and why?