I’m getting funny vibes from this post.
First thought was that it’s something like applause lights. Upvoting your post feels like a really easy thing to do. Yay doing things that are real rather than fake! If you’re trying to challenge the fundamental way a bunch of people around you are approaching things, and the main reaction is people nodding along, that suggests that maybe you didn’t manage to articulate the core critique.
After sleeping on it: Something feels slippery about the relationship between the different parts of your post. Picking out a few particulars:
The things you’ve listed as alternatives aren’t the alternatives that EAs would be doing. They’re things you picked out to optimize for the best degree/flavor of dauntingness, for a subset of people who could do them
Some actual EA alternatives, like donating to AMF, feel very psychologically easy
Making progress on AI x-risk does feel very daunting to many people who consider it. Perhaps overly daunting?
Most EAs who are doing EA-related work are focused on something more specific than “the most good you can do”.
The one specific set of EAs you mention—“EA student group[s]”—are more in learning mode than in doing mode
People doing things in part so they can “feel cool and important” seems like a generic feature of any social group where people can be excited about what other people do. If founding new projects was the path that others saw as good & impressive, then people would be drawn to that to feel cool and important. (Perhaps that couldn’t last if the project didn’t work, at least locally, but the clout from doing vague big important things doesn’t last either, and people could be drawn to projects that do seem like they’re making some kind of local progress.)
The pattern of actions you recommend—choosing a narrower, more tractable target rather than the big ambitious one—resembles a common motivational pitfall that leads to doing faker things. Slipping off the ambitious aim that you really care about because it’s hard to think of what progress would even look like, and instead picking something that is locally easier to track. Perhaps that’s something kinda related to the original goal or it could be something completely different
So maybe the central complaint is more like Bulverism than applause lights. For any specific thing that people might do, there are some ways in which the motivations and social dynamics around it might be screwy.
If you’re just trying to say “here’s one of the ways that sus motivations can manifest when doing thing1” that seems potentially valuable. But if you’re trying to argue for doing thing2 instead of thing1, then it feels like you this post doesn’t show the cognitive work to think through that. Instead it picks out some of the sus motives for thing1 and papers together a narrative around them without thinking through most of the substance of the argument (possible sus motives for thing2, what thing2 might actually wind up looking like, for which specific set of people, other ways of approaching things like thing1 or thing2, the core reasons in favor of thing1 & thing2, etc.).
The closing “(This is mostly advice to myself.)” felt like the most grounding part of it, because it suggests that it’s pointed at a specific larger process of thinking things through.
The obvious counterargument to me is: Trying to get diffuse power distribution to work in this context also involves inventing a new thing from scratch on the first try.
I take the “diffuse power distribution” vision to be: We are going to transition from the current era where humanity is the dominant power (or where all great powers are groups of humans) to an era where the great powers are AIs and humans are lesser powers which are still useful for great powers to have as allies, and then to an era where humans are basically irrelevant to the great AI powers. And during this current era of human power, we are going to set up the balance & terms of power in ways that will get things to play out in a way that is favorable to humanity / human values even during these later eras where humans are increasingly disempowered.
My reaction to that is not we’ve seen things like this work, this is the one solution that doesn’t require inventing a new thing from scratch on the first try.