I am worried that investing precludes compounding effects from spending on movement building now that don’t have to do with investment. In particular:
Maybe we should care more about the fraction of the world’s population that’s longtermist than the fraction of the world’s wealth that we control.
Maybe a substantial fraction of the world population can become susceptible to longtermism only via slow diffusion from other longtermists, and cannot be converted through money alone.
That is to say: if there’s a sufficient compounding effect from movement building that we can’t replace with money, then maybe we should spend a lot now on movement building.
I haven’t thought through how much of an effect this is, but something with this flavor feels intuitively compelling to me because we’re in a situation now where it would be nice if e.g. key political figures were longtermists, but there’s no obvious way to spend money to make that happen.
That is to say: if there’s a sufficient compounding effect from movement building that we can’t replace with money, then maybe we should spend a lot now on movement building.
I agree in principle, though it seems harder to ensure for other categories of movement-building that they will lead to prolonged compounding: encouraging investment seems the most straightforward way to make that happen, but not necessarily the only way.
Philip Trammell: [...] in this write-up, I do try to make it clear that by investment, I really am explicitly including things like fundraising and at least certain kinds of movement building which have the same effect of turning resources now, not into good done now, but into more resources next year with which good will be done. I would be just a little careful to note that this has to be the sort of movement building advocacy work that really does look like fundraising in the sense that you’re not just putting more resources toward the cause next year, but toward the whole mindset of either giving to the cause or investing to give more in two years’ time to the cause. You might spend all your money and get all these recruits who are passionate about the cause that you’re trying to fund, but then they just do it all next year.
Robert Wiblin: The fools!
Philip Trammell: Right. And I don’t know exactly how high fidelity in this respect movement building tends to be or EA movement building in particular has been. So that’s one caveat. [Michael’s note: Somewhat less relevant from here onwards.] I guess another one is that when you’re actually investing, you’re generally creating new resources. You’re actually building the factories or whatever. Whereas when you’re just doing fundraising, you’re movement building, you’re just diverting resources from where they otherwise would have gone.
Robert Wiblin: You’re redistributing from some efforts to others.
Philip Trammell: Yeah. And so you have to think that what people otherwise would have done with the resources in question is of negligible value compared to what they’ll do after the funds had been put in your pot. And you might think that if you just look at what people are spending their money on, the world as a whole… I mean you might not, but you might. And if you do, it might seem like this is a safe assumption to make, but the sorts of people you’re most likely to recruit are the ones who probably were most inclined to do the sort of thing that you wanted anyway on their own. My intuition is that it’s easy to overestimate the real real returns to advocacy and movement building in this respect. But I haven’t actually looked through any detailed numbers on this. It’s just a caveat I would raise.
(I think he also discusses similar matters in his write-up, but I can’t remember for sure.)
I am worried that investing precludes compounding effects from spending on movement building now that don’t have to do with investment. In particular:
Maybe we should care more about the fraction of the world’s population that’s longtermist than the fraction of the world’s wealth that we control.
Maybe a substantial fraction of the world population can become susceptible to longtermism only via slow diffusion from other longtermists, and cannot be converted through money alone.
That is to say: if there’s a sufficient compounding effect from movement building that we can’t replace with money, then maybe we should spend a lot now on movement building.
I haven’t thought through how much of an effect this is, but something with this flavor feels intuitively compelling to me because we’re in a situation now where it would be nice if e.g. key political figures were longtermists, but there’s no obvious way to spend money to make that happen.
I agree in principle, though it seems harder to ensure for other categories of movement-building that they will lead to prolonged compounding: encouraging investment seems the most straightforward way to make that happen, but not necessarily the only way.
Relevant quote from Philip Trammell’s interview on the 80,000 Hours podcast:
(I think he also discusses similar matters in his write-up, but I can’t remember for sure.)