Some notes from the transcript:

I believe there are ways to recruit college students responsibly. I don't believe the way EA is doing it really has a chance to be responsible. I would say, the way EA is doing it can't filter and inform the way healthy recruiting needs to.  And they're funneling people, into something that naivete hurts you in. I think aggressive recruiting is bad for both the students and for EA itself.

Enjoyed this point -- I would guess that the feedback loop from EA college recruiting is super long and is weakly aligned.  Those in charge of setting recruiting strategy (eg CEA Groups team, and then university organizers) don't see the downstream impacts of their choices, unlike in a startup where you work directly with your hires, and quickly see whether your choices were good or bad.

Might be worth examining how other recruiting-driven companies (like Google) or movements (...early Christianity?) maintain their values, or degrade over time.

Seattle EA watched a couple of the animal farming suffering documentaries. And everyone was of course horrified But, not everyone was ready to just jump on, let's give this up entirely forever. So we started doing more research, and I posted about, a farm a couple hours away that did live tours, and that seemed like a reasonable thing to learn, like, a limited but useful thing.

Definitely think that on the margin, more "directly verifying base reality with your own eyes" would be good in EA circles. Eg at one point, I was very critical of those mission trips to Africa where high schoolers spend a week digging a well; "obviously you should just send cash!" But now I'm much more sympathetic.

This also stings a bit for Manifund; like 80% of what we fund is AI safety but I don't really have much ability to personally verify that the stuff we funded is any good.

The natural life cycle of movements and institutions is to get captured and be pretty undifferentiated from other movements in their larger cultural context. They just get normal because normal is there for a reason and normal is easiest.  And if you want to do better than that, if you want to keep high epistemics, because normal does not prioritize epistemics, you need to be actively fighting for it, and bringing a high amount of skill to it. I can't tell you if EA is degrading at like 5 percent a year or 25 percent a year, I can tell you that it is not self correcting enough to escape this trap.

I think not enforcing an "in or out" boundary is big contributor to this degradation -- like, majorly successful religions required all kinds of sacrifice and

What I think is more likely than EA pivoting is a handful of people launch a lifeboat and recreate a high integrity version of EA. 

It feels like AI safety is the best current candidate for this, though that is also much less cohesive and not a direct successor for a bunch of ways. I too have been lately wondering what "Post EA" looks like.

I hear that as every true wizard must test the integrity of their teacher or of their school, Hogwarts, whatever the thing is. The reason you don't get to graduate until you actually test the integrity of the school is because if you're just taking it on its own word, then you could become a villain.

You have to respect your own moral compass to be able to be trusted.

Really liked this analogy!

Which EA leaders do you most resonate with?

I would suggest that if you don't care about the movement leaders who have any steering power, you're not in that movement.

I like this as a useful question to keep in mind, though I don't think it's totally explanatory. I think I'm reasonably Catholic, even though I don't know anything about the living Catholic leaders.

Timothy: Give me a vision of a different world where ea would be better served by the by having leadership that actually was willing to own their power more 

Elizabeth: which you'll notice even holden won't do 

Timothy: yeah, he literally doesn't want the power.

Elizabeth: Yeah, none of them do. CEA doesn't want it. 

I've been thinking that EA should try to elect a president, someone who is empowered but also accountable to the general people in the movement, a schelling person to be the face of EA. (plus of course, we'd get to debate stuff like optimal voting systems and enfranchisement -- my kind of catnip)