You mention opportunity cost, but I think it’s worth further emphasizing. To do this well, you’d need somebody who has been around a while (or at least a lot of time and cooperation from people who have). You’d need them to manage different perspectives and opinions about various things that happened. You’d need them to be a very good writer. And you’d need the writer to be someone people trust—my perspective is “Open Phil hired this person” would probably not be sufficient for trust.
There are people who could do this: Kelsey Piper is one as you suggest. But these are all pretty unusual characteristics and the opportunity costs for the sort of person who could do this well just seem really massive. I might be wrong about this, but that’s my first thought when reading your post.
I don’t know that I’m the kind of person OP is thinking of, but beyond opportunity cost there’s also a question of reportorial distance/objectivity. I’ve thought a lot about whether to do a project like this and one sticking point is (a) I identify as an EA (b) I donate to GiveWell and signed the GWWC pledge (c) many of my friends are EAs, so I’m not sure any book I produce would be perceived as having sufficient credibility among non-EA readers.
I’d encourage you to consider taking it on. Even if identifying as an EA would reduce the credibility for outsiders, I’m sure whatever you produced would be a wonderful starting point for anyone else tackling it down the line.
Definitely agree with Chris here! Worst case scenario, you create useful material for someone else who tackles it down the line, best case scenario, you write the whole thing yourself.
I wonder whether Larissa MacFarquhar would be interested? She wrote about the early EA community in her 2015 book Strangers Drowning (chapters “At Once Rational and Ardent” and “From the Point of View of the Universe”) and also wrote a 2011 profile of Derek Parfit.
A possible middle ground is to make efforts to ensure that important source material was preserved, to keep option value of doing this project later. That would presumably require significantly fewer resources, and wouldn’t require opportunity costs from “the sort of person who could do [the writing of a book] well.”
Great point! A historian or archivist could take on this role. Maybe CEA could hire one? I’d say it fits within their mission “to nurture a community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.”
I think opportunity cost is well worth mentioning, but I don’t know that I think it’s as high as you believe it to be.
Choosing someone who has been around a while is optional. The value of having an experienced community member do it is built-in trust, access, and understanding. The costs are the writer’s time (though that cost is decreasing as more people start writing about EA professionally) and the time of those being interviewed. I would also note that while there’s lots of work for technical people in EA, writers in the community may not have found such great opportunities for impact.
Having a relative outsider take on the project would add objectivity, as Dylan noted. Objectivity would both improve credibility to outsiders and increase that likelihood of robust criticism being made. I also think there are just a lot of pretty great writers in the world who might find EA interesting. Perhaps you just get different benefits from different types of writers.
There’s a cost to waiting as well. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that important parts of the story will be forgotten or deleted.
You mention opportunity cost, but I think it’s worth further emphasizing. To do this well, you’d need somebody who has been around a while (or at least a lot of time and cooperation from people who have). You’d need them to manage different perspectives and opinions about various things that happened. You’d need them to be a very good writer. And you’d need the writer to be someone people trust—my perspective is “Open Phil hired this person” would probably not be sufficient for trust.
There are people who could do this: Kelsey Piper is one as you suggest. But these are all pretty unusual characteristics and the opportunity costs for the sort of person who could do this well just seem really massive. I might be wrong about this, but that’s my first thought when reading your post.
I don’t know that I’m the kind of person OP is thinking of, but beyond opportunity cost there’s also a question of reportorial distance/objectivity. I’ve thought a lot about whether to do a project like this and one sticking point is (a) I identify as an EA (b) I donate to GiveWell and signed the GWWC pledge (c) many of my friends are EAs, so I’m not sure any book I produce would be perceived as having sufficient credibility among non-EA readers.
I’d encourage you to consider taking it on. Even if identifying as an EA would reduce the credibility for outsiders, I’m sure whatever you produced would be a wonderful starting point for anyone else tackling it down the line.
People enjoyed reading Winston Churchill’s history of the war and he was hardly a neutral observer! Pretty clear which side he wanted to win.
See also: Thomas Young’s history of abolitionism, Friedrich Engels’ history of Marxism.
I’d also say take it on. Someone objective can always rewrite it later, but if we don’t save it now we could lose a lot.
Definitely agree with Chris here! Worst case scenario, you create useful material for someone else who tackles it down the line, best case scenario, you write the whole thing yourself.
I wonder whether Larissa MacFarquhar would be interested? She wrote about the early EA community in her 2015 book Strangers Drowning (chapters “At Once Rational and Ardent” and “From the Point of View of the Universe”) and also wrote a 2011 profile of Derek Parfit.
That would certainly be great if she would. I actually first heard about EA when I read Strangers Drowning in 2016! It’s very well written.
A possible middle ground is to make efforts to ensure that important source material was preserved, to keep option value of doing this project later. That would presumably require significantly fewer resources, and wouldn’t require opportunity costs from “the sort of person who could do [the writing of a book] well.”
Great point! A historian or archivist could take on this role. Maybe CEA could hire one? I’d say it fits within their mission “to nurture a community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.”
I think opportunity cost is well worth mentioning, but I don’t know that I think it’s as high as you believe it to be.
Choosing someone who has been around a while is optional. The value of having an experienced community member do it is built-in trust, access, and understanding. The costs are the writer’s time (though that cost is decreasing as more people start writing about EA professionally) and the time of those being interviewed. I would also note that while there’s lots of work for technical people in EA, writers in the community may not have found such great opportunities for impact.
Having a relative outsider take on the project would add objectivity, as Dylan noted. Objectivity would both improve credibility to outsiders and increase that likelihood of robust criticism being made. I also think there are just a lot of pretty great writers in the world who might find EA interesting. Perhaps you just get different benefits from different types of writers.
There’s a cost to waiting as well. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that important parts of the story will be forgotten or deleted.