1. You talk about value drift in several places, and also list as one of your “questions that merit future investigation:”
Research on historical movements and learn more about why they failed or succeeded
I share the view that those are important topics in general and in relation to the appropriate discount rate, and would also be excited to see work on that question.
It seems to me that the probability of value drift is mostly independent across individuals, although I can think of some exceptions (e.g., if ties weaken within the effective altruism community, this could increase the overall rate of value drift).
Wouldn’t one big exception be movement collapse? Or a shift in movement priorities towards something less effective, which then becomes ossified due to information cascades, worse epistemic norms, etc.? Both scenarios seem unpleasantly plausible to me. And they seem perhaps not far less likely than a given EA’s values drifting, conditional on EA remaining intact and effective (but I haven’t thought about those relative likelihoods much at all).
3.
On the bright side, one survey found that wealthier individuals tend to have a lower rate of value drift, which means the dollar-weighted value drift rate might not be quite as bad as 10%.
That’s interesting. Can you recall which survey that was?
Yeah, that’s basically an extreme form of “ties weaken within the effective altruism community”. I agree that this seems like an unpleasantly plausible outcome.
Thoughts on value drift and movement collapse
1. You talk about value drift in several places, and also list as one of your “questions that merit future investigation:”
I share the view that those are important topics in general and in relation to the appropriate discount rate, and would also be excited to see work on that question.
Given the importance and relevance of these topics, you or other readers may therefore find useful my collections of sources on value drift, and of EA analyses of how social social movements rise, fall, can be influential, etc. (The vast majority of these sources were written by other people; I primarily just collect them.)
2.
Wouldn’t one big exception be movement collapse? Or a shift in movement priorities towards something less effective, which then becomes ossified due to information cascades, worse epistemic norms, etc.? Both scenarios seem unpleasantly plausible to me. And they seem perhaps not far less likely than a given EA’s values drifting, conditional on EA remaining intact and effective (but I haven’t thought about those relative likelihoods much at all).
3.
That’s interesting. Can you recall which survey that was?
Yeah, that’s basically an extreme form of “ties weaken within the effective altruism community”. I agree that this seems like an unpleasantly plausible outcome.
It was the GWWC survey.