Inspiring

I saw so many people who wanted a “job in EA”. They wanted to directly do the good. Have they really thought through the bitter truth? Why do you believe you are uniquely good at an EA job, why ignore the simple premise of earning to give?

I think there's a large number of EAs who earn to give and spend their time focusing on their career rather than spending time reading another 5,000 word forum article on shrimp or going to EA meetups. This is probably the right move if the goal is to earn as much as possible.

People who want "EA jobs" are more likely to be involved in the forum and in community events.

Then it should be quite easy to show this benefit in clinical trials and it's suspicious that it hasn't happened

I think the fact that the term didn't add anything new is very bad because it came with a great cost. When you create a new set of jargon for an old idea you look naive and self-important. The EA community could have simply used framing that people already agreed with, instead they created a new term and field that we had to sell people on.

Discussions of "the loss of potential human lives in our own galactic supercluster is at least ~10⁴⁶ per century of delayed colonization" were elaborate and off-putting, when their only conclusions were the same old obvious idea that we should prevent pandemics, nuclear war and SkyNet (The idea of humans not becoming extinct goes back at least to discussions of nuclear apocalypse in the 40s, Terminator came out in 1984).

From a medical perspective this seems a bit daft

"Patients have reported anecdotally that vaporized DMT, another psychedelic drug, aborts attacks seconds after they begin (there are no published studies of this effect)".

In medicine you quickly learn that anectode is extremely unreliable and the average person is positively busting to attribute cause and effect to whatever they just experienced. Every homeopathic remedy/energy healer/prayer/crystal/snake oil has its die-hards who will give you convincing anectodes of immediate success, so doctors become rightly extremely skeptical about these stories.

The actual evidence he provides is this review of some case studies and surveys and 4 clinical trials but which have pretty low numbers. The review itself says:

"The small number of participants in each study limits reliability and generalizability of the findings. Even with ongoing work, differences in dosing regimens and outcomes among studies will limit the consolidation of findings"

Combined with the small risk of psychosis from psilocybin I understand why health systems wouldn't want to rush into mainstreaming them as treatment.

Great question

Based on conversations I've had, I believe the focus in EA on longtermism has been off-putting for a lot of people and has probably cost a lot of support and donations for other EA causes.

Was it all a terrible waste?

Environment is an interesting example because you go from complete poverty (no environmental impact) to middle income (rampant growth, environment not a priority, think Brazil/Indonesia and their rainforests, or manifest destiny USA and their forests) so impact worsens, then at high income concerns about environment become more of a priority so you get  environmental protections.

Unless the goal is to prevent people rising out of poverty entirely (it shouldn’t be) the best outcome comes from faster development

I think it serves 2 purposes:

1. Most people want to feel like they are good, kind. Preventing harm to something much smaller/weaker than themselves reinforces this. Even better if it requires very little effort.
2. Social signal. I personally immediately trust people more if they take their spiders outside rather than kill them. I think they're more likely to have good intentions in whatever else they do. I think many people feel the same way and are vaguely aware that carrying themselves like this sends a useful signal to others.

You're preaching to the choir here on the EA forum but I think most people outside this community will intuit the slippery slope that this takes you down:

0.1% x 5 million lives saved is the same EV as 0.0000001% chance of 5 trillion lives saved

Somewhere between those two this becomes a Pascal's Mugging that we seem to generally agree is a bad reason to do something.

Where's the line?