I wanted to add that Givewell, in their recent board meeting mentioned that they moved more than $20 Million to top charities excluding GoodVentures money in 2015. They said that Effective Altruism becoming more popular was the primary driver of increased web traffic this year based on analytics (note that this a non-verbatim summary).
source: http://www.givewell.org/about/official-records/board-meeting-31
Thus, I think there’s a very good case to be made for EA outreach being very valuable.
There should however be significant question, that the EA Outreach team should answer, as to counterfactual growth, as well as whether the growth activities are putting EA in a better or worse position reputationally (and thus adding to or detracting from long-term growth potential).
We should distinguish between EA Outreach the organization and EA outreach the activity. I agree that the activity of EA outreach is very likely to be valuable, but I agree with Josh that EA Outreach the organization may not be effective despite this.
Unfortunately we’re not in a great position to know the counterfactuals on people added to the movement from our activity. Upper bound on new EAs added through EA Global is 110 people. I expect the actual number to be lower but I’m not sure by how much.
We also sold 17,000 books so far, but we don’t know the conversion rate from books to becoming involved in the EA community and we don’t know how many counterfactual sales we were responsible for.
In terms of the long-term potential of the movement, I feel quite confident defending that our 2016 plan will put the EA movement in a much better position in the future.
I wanted to add that Givewell, in their recent board meeting mentioned that they moved more than $20 Million to top charities excluding GoodVentures money in 2015. They said that Effective Altruism becoming more popular was the primary driver of increased web traffic this year based on analytics (note that this a non-verbatim summary). source: http://www.givewell.org/about/official-records/board-meeting-31
Thus, I think there’s a very good case to be made for EA outreach being very valuable.
The concept of EA Outreach is surely valuable.
There should however be significant question, that the EA Outreach team should answer, as to counterfactual growth, as well as whether the growth activities are putting EA in a better or worse position reputationally (and thus adding to or detracting from long-term growth potential).
We should distinguish between EA Outreach the organization and EA outreach the activity. I agree that the activity of EA outreach is very likely to be valuable, but I agree with Josh that EA Outreach the organization may not be effective despite this.
Unfortunately we’re not in a great position to know the counterfactuals on people added to the movement from our activity. Upper bound on new EAs added through EA Global is 110 people. I expect the actual number to be lower but I’m not sure by how much.
We also sold 17,000 books so far, but we don’t know the conversion rate from books to becoming involved in the EA community and we don’t know how many counterfactual sales we were responsible for.
In terms of the long-term potential of the movement, I feel quite confident defending that our 2016 plan will put the EA movement in a much better position in the future.