Nadia Asparouhova: prediction

Transcript context

…You've talked about the need for more idea machines. You're dissatisfied with the fact that effective altruism is a big game in town. Is there some idea or nascent movement, other than Progress Studies, where you feel this could be a thing but it just needs some charismatic founder to take it to the next level? Or even if it doesn't exist yet. A set of ideas around this vein where it is clear something there is going to exist. Is there anything like that you notice? I outlined a couple of different possibilities in that post. I think progress studies is probably the largest growing contender that I would see right now. I think there's another one right now around the new right. That's not even the best term necessarily for it, but there's a shared set of values there that are maybe starting with politics, but ideally spreading to other areas of public influence. I think those are a couple of the bigger movements that I see right now. And then there's smaller stuff too. I mentioned tools for thought in that post. That's never going to be a huge idea machine but it's one where you have a lot of interesting, talented people that are thinking about the future of computing. And until maybe more recently, there just hasn't been a lot of funding available and the funding is always really uneven and unpredictable. That to me is an example of a smaller community that just needs that extra influx to turn a bunch of abstract ideas into practice. I think there is just so much more potential to do more. I wish people would just think a little bit more creatively because I really do think effective altruism becomes the default option for a lot of people. Then they're kind of vaguely dissatisfied with it and they don't think about, “Well, what do I actually really care about in the world and how do I want to put that forward?” Yeah, there's also the fact that effective altruism has this very fit memeplex in the sense that it's a polytheistic religion where if you have a cause area, then you don't have your own movement. You just have a cause area within our broader movement. It just adopts your gods into our movement.…

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