I do agree with all of this, but one important point wasn’t salient to me at the time of writing the post: that you want the resources returned to be under direction as sophisticated as your future self or they should get discounted, and that this might constitute a narrow target. I’m uncertain how narrow a target it is, but I think that getting clarity on that seems quite important as it could affect judgements about which opportunities are good investments.
Yes, though to be fair financial investments (and generally everything that won’t have most of its total effect soon) need to hit the same narrow target. But perhaps for those the mechanisms by which we might miss the target have been more prominent in recent discussions (value drift, expropriation, etc.).
Relevantly to this comment thread, Trammell says during his 80k interview:
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. 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.
With regards to the “mechanisms by which we might miss the target”, in that post on crucial questions, I highlighted and collected sources relevant to the following questions:
Thanks, I think this is really useful to unpack.
I do agree with all of this, but one important point wasn’t salient to me at the time of writing the post: that you want the resources returned to be under direction as sophisticated as your future self or they should get discounted, and that this might constitute a narrow target. I’m uncertain how narrow a target it is, but I think that getting clarity on that seems quite important as it could affect judgements about which opportunities are good investments.
Yes, though to be fair financial investments (and generally everything that won’t have most of its total effect soon) need to hit the same narrow target. But perhaps for those the mechanisms by which we might miss the target have been more prominent in recent discussions (value drift, expropriation, etc.).
Relevantly to this comment thread, Trammell says during his 80k interview:
I also collected some relevant discussion under the heading “Which “direct” actions might have compounding positive impacts?” in a post on Crucial questions about optimal timing of work and donations.
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With regards to the “mechanisms by which we might miss the target”, in that post on crucial questions, I highlighted and collected sources relevant to the following questions:
How effectively can we “punt to the future”?
What would be the long-term growth rate of financial investments?
What would be the long-term rate of expropriation of financial investments? How does this vary as investments grow larger?
What would be the long-term “growth rate” from other punting activities?
Would the people we’d be punting to act in ways we’d endorse?