Kelsey Piper’s “On ‘Fringe’ Ideas” makes a pro-risk argument in a certain sense (that we should be kind and tolerant to people whose ideas seem strange and wasteful).
I’m not sure if this is written up anywhere, but one simple argument you can make is that many current EA projects were risky when they were started. GiveWell featured two co-founders with no formal experience in global health evaluating global health charities, and nearly collapsed in scandal within its first year. 80,000 Hours took on an impossibly broad task with a small staff (I don’t know whether any had formal career advisement experience). And yet, despite various setbacks, both projects wound up prospering, without doing permanent damage to the EA brand (maybe a few scrapes in the case of 80K x Earning to Give, but that seems more about where the media’s attention was directed than what 80K really believed).
Kelsey Piper’s “On ‘Fringe’ Ideas” makes a pro-risk argument in a certain sense (that we should be kind and tolerant to people whose ideas seem strange and wasteful).
I’m not sure if this is written up anywhere, but one simple argument you can make is that many current EA projects were risky when they were started. GiveWell featured two co-founders with no formal experience in global health evaluating global health charities, and nearly collapsed in scandal within its first year. 80,000 Hours took on an impossibly broad task with a small staff (I don’t know whether any had formal career advisement experience). And yet, despite various setbacks, both projects wound up prospering, without doing permanent damage to the EA brand (maybe a few scrapes in the case of 80K x Earning to Give, but that seems more about where the media’s attention was directed than what 80K really believed).