Your central point is not that EA should found social movements, but rather that somebody should do research on whether EA should invest in spinning off social movements. Here are some of the questions I would want to see addressed as part of that research.
As you say:
Tractability
There are a relatively small number of people needed to launch an SMO successfully...
You don’t need many resources or specialist knowledge...
Neglectedness
Extinction Rebellion was started by quite a unique mix of people who I believe had the rare combination of skills needed to create a successful social movement organisation… This makes me think that XR was not very replaceable and that it would have been extremely challenging for another organisation to reach the same scale and impact XR did.
These claims stand in tension to each other. They suggest two hypotheses. One is that “if the time is right, a successful social movement will emerge without our help, because it’s not that hard to launch one.” The other is that “successful social movements may not emerge, even if there’s a lot of energy for change, because you need an extremely rare mix of skills in the founders.” Perhaps one of these applies for some issues, while the other applies for different issues?
It sounds like EA’s role would be to supply funding to existing founders, or to specialize in assembling teams who would then found protest movements. So it would focus on situations in which otherwise fertile ground for social change was inhibited by a funding/leadership/coordination gap. How would EA succeed in identifying competent founders?
A deeper issue is that you seem to have focused on successful movements for this analysis. For an estimate of tractability, we need to get a sense of the rate of success of social movements.
The most serious issue is that, as you say,
What I am proposing is that EAs should consider further researching and/or funding early stage (younger than 1-2 years old) SMOs through their incubation phase. Specifically, SMOs that are incubated with EA values and have a strong commitment to impact, evidence and effectiveness, which may be hard to imagine given the state of social movements currently.
If current successful SMOs are so non-EA-aligned that it “may be hard to imagine” one that is EA aligned, is this likely to be a coincidence? One explanation for this observation is that the causal mechanisms that allow a social movement to succeed also tend to work against EA values.
Some mechanisms of this kind might include:
A willingness to motivate participation with exaggerated claims and inflammatory pseudo-evidence
A focus on driving participation rather than accomplishing high-impact outcomes
In other words, social movements may succeed by Goodharting on “take actions that will sustain this social movement.”
To take that a step further, it may not be best to think of social movements as succeeding because their leaders or participants had a correct theory of movement-building and acted upon it. It might be that movements survive and replicate for obscure natural-selection reasons that can’t be analyzed and replicated by a movement-founding flagship organization. This ties back into the tractability concerns noted earlier.
In general, I’m not sure what a protest movement with a “strong commitment to impact, evidence and effectiveness” would look like. Take XR. They’re a climate change protest group, and climate change has plenty of evidence in support of it. As you note, they seem to be impactful/effective. Fleshing out what a protest movement with stronger commitment to these values would look like, and what it would do, or not do, that stands in contrast to the groups you’ve used as examples, would help.
Or is your point less that we need a new method of running protest groups, but rather that we should explore founding protest groups on new issues that are the most central to EA, such as pandemic prevention or AI risk?
Your central point is not that EA should found social movements, but rather that somebody should do research on whether EA should invest in spinning off social movements. Here are some of the questions I would want to see addressed as part of that research.
As you say:
Tractability
Neglectedness
These claims stand in tension to each other. They suggest two hypotheses. One is that “if the time is right, a successful social movement will emerge without our help, because it’s not that hard to launch one.” The other is that “successful social movements may not emerge, even if there’s a lot of energy for change, because you need an extremely rare mix of skills in the founders.” Perhaps one of these applies for some issues, while the other applies for different issues?
It sounds like EA’s role would be to supply funding to existing founders, or to specialize in assembling teams who would then found protest movements. So it would focus on situations in which otherwise fertile ground for social change was inhibited by a funding/leadership/coordination gap. How would EA succeed in identifying competent founders?
A deeper issue is that you seem to have focused on successful movements for this analysis. For an estimate of tractability, we need to get a sense of the rate of success of social movements.
The most serious issue is that, as you say,
If current successful SMOs are so non-EA-aligned that it “may be hard to imagine” one that is EA aligned, is this likely to be a coincidence? One explanation for this observation is that the causal mechanisms that allow a social movement to succeed also tend to work against EA values.
Some mechanisms of this kind might include:
A willingness to motivate participation with exaggerated claims and inflammatory pseudo-evidence
A focus on driving participation rather than accomplishing high-impact outcomes
In other words, social movements may succeed by Goodharting on “take actions that will sustain this social movement.”
To take that a step further, it may not be best to think of social movements as succeeding because their leaders or participants had a correct theory of movement-building and acted upon it. It might be that movements survive and replicate for obscure natural-selection reasons that can’t be analyzed and replicated by a movement-founding flagship organization. This ties back into the tractability concerns noted earlier.
In general, I’m not sure what a protest movement with a “strong commitment to impact, evidence and effectiveness” would look like. Take XR. They’re a climate change protest group, and climate change has plenty of evidence in support of it. As you note, they seem to be impactful/effective. Fleshing out what a protest movement with stronger commitment to these values would look like, and what it would do, or not do, that stands in contrast to the groups you’ve used as examples, would help.
Or is your point less that we need a new method of running protest groups, but rather that we should explore founding protest groups on new issues that are the most central to EA, such as pandemic prevention or AI risk?