Treating each new person as a separate investment and trying to optimize for their marginal utility for EA, instead of looking at the aggregate effect on the movement of all the community building efforts.
Specifically in your comment, justifying diversifying investment in groups by saying “high quality group members” are the goal but top universities have bottlenecks which can’t be easily solved by just pouring more money into them—instead of arguing that it’s better to have a new group in Chile than a new group in Harvard, even if hypothetically people there were less qualified for existing EA jobs.
Could you clarify what you mean by margin-based reasoning in this context?
Treating each new person as a separate investment and trying to optimize for their marginal utility for EA, instead of looking at the aggregate effect on the movement of all the community building efforts.
Specifically in your comment, justifying diversifying investment in groups by saying “high quality group members” are the goal but top universities have bottlenecks which can’t be easily solved by just pouring more money into them—instead of arguing that it’s better to have a new group in Chile than a new group in Harvard, even if hypothetically people there were less qualified for existing EA jobs.