EA - The 3rd wave of EA is coming - what does it mean for you? by Jakob

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: The 3rd wave of EA is coming - what does it mean for you?, published by Jakob on August 19, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In this post I'll first argue that we may look back at 2021-2022 as a time when EA entered a new phase (a "third wave" or "adulthood" could be appropriate terms). To be more specific, this phase shift would entail a sustained increase in money moved by the EA movement (say, by 2-5x or so? I haven't dug into the data enough to make a proper forecast), as well as the attention that people who don't identify as effective altruists pay to the movement. We are already seeing some of this acceleration (with e.g., Open Philanthropy and GiveWell scaling up significantly in 2021, good growth for CEA in 2021, the FTX Future Fund launching in 2022 and attracting significant attention for donations to congressional candidate Carrick Flynn, record-breaking numbers of EA Global participants in 2022, and the recent publication of Will MacAskill's book What We Owe the Future, with associated media attention), so I don't expect this to be a controversial claim. Then, I'll list some implications for 1) people who identify as (aspiring) effective altruists, 2) leaders in EA-aligned organizations, and 3) people with influence strategy and cultural norms at the movement level (a "movement leader"). In short, many effective altruists can take this moment of positive momentum to raise their ambitions; however, it is also a precarious moment of where the risk of values drift is elevated, so movement leaders should invest more than usually in steering the EA movement in the right direction. Many of these thoughts have already been expressed more eloquently elsewhere; please consider this post my 5 cents chiming in - and for some, perhaps it can serve as a convenient summary. A short history of EA First, one may (somewhat simplified) consider the history of EA in roughly two waves: one may trace the origins of the movement to the first wave ("the infancy" of the movement), which I'll limit to pre-2011, and the second wave (the "youth phase" of the movement), which I'll consider to have lasted around a decade. I'll give some more details below, but since I only learned of EA in 2014 myself, I'm not the best to give a detailed account of the early days. The following paragraphs are a summary and an interpretation of the events described by CEA, Wikipedia, and various Forum articles on the history of EA, and so may be skipped by some readers (though they form some of the context for the argument further down). During the first wave, organizations such as GiveWell (2007), Giving What We Can (2009) and 80000hours (2011) were launched. Peter Singer published his book The Life You Can Save (2009), and the rationalist community grew up around the Overcoming Bias/LessWrong blogs (2006). Individuals within these various communities and organizations sometimes interacted with each other, but there was no explicit unifying umbrella. 2011 marked a pivotal year, with the founding of the Centre for Effective Altruism (and the invention of the term effective altruist), and the launch of GiveWell labs, which later became Open Philanthropy. This is why I've used this as the pivotal year from wave 1 to wave 2. During the following decades, the amount of funding in the EA movement increased substantially, and many new organizations and projects were started. Some projects took names that explicitly showed a link to the EA movement, such as EA Funds, EA Global (which started as the EA summit in 2013), and the EA Foundation, and local effective altruism groups all over the world. Others, Like Longview Philanthropy, Effective Giving, Charity Entrepreneurship, endorsed many of the same values and ideas, and were started by people affiliated with the movement, but did not put the link expl...