I mean I’m not sure how convinced I am by my points either. :) I think I mainly have a reaction of “some discussions I’ve seen seem kind of off, rely on flawed assumptions or false dichotomies, etc.”—but even if that’s right, I feel way less sure what the best conclusion is.
One quick reply:
I think we currently have a quite remarkable degree of trust, helpfulness, and coordination. I think that that becomes harder as a movement grows, and particularly if it grows in certain ways
I think the “particularly if it grows in certain ways” is the key part here, and that basically we should talk 90% about how to grow and 10% about how much to grow.
I think one of my complaints is precisely that some discussions seem to construe suggestions of growing faster, or aiming for a larger community, as implying “adding 2,000 random people to EAG”. But to me this seems to be a bizarre strawman. If you add 2,000 random people to a maths conference, or drop them into a maths lecture, it will be a disaster as well!
I think the key question is not “what if we make everything we have bigger?” but “can we build a structure that allows separation between, and controlled flow of talent and other resources, different subcommunities?”.
A somewhat grandiose analogy: Suppose that at the dawn of the agricultural revolution you’re a central planner tasked with maximizing the human population. You realize that by introducing agriculture, much larger populations could be supported as far as the food supply goes. But then you realize that if you imagine larger population densities and group sizes while leaving everything else fixed, various things will break—e.g., kinship-based conflict resolution mechanisms will become infeasible. What should you do? You shouldn’t conclude that, unfortunately, the population can’t grow. You should think about division of labor, institutions, laws, taxes, cities, and the state.
FWIW, I used “if we threw 2000 additional randomly chosen people into an EA conference” as an example precisely because it’s particularly easy to explain/see the issue in that case. I agree that many other cases wouldn’t just be clearly problematic, and thus I avoided them when wanting a quick example. And I can now see how that example therefore seems straw-man-y.)
I mean I’m not sure how convinced I am by my points either. :) I think I mainly have a reaction of “some discussions I’ve seen seem kind of off, rely on flawed assumptions or false dichotomies, etc.”—but even if that’s right, I feel way less sure what the best conclusion is.
One quick reply:
I think the “particularly if it grows in certain ways” is the key part here, and that basically we should talk 90% about how to grow and 10% about how much to grow.
I think one of my complaints is precisely that some discussions seem to construe suggestions of growing faster, or aiming for a larger community, as implying “adding 2,000 random people to EAG”. But to me this seems to be a bizarre strawman. If you add 2,000 random people to a maths conference, or drop them into a maths lecture, it will be a disaster as well!
I think the key question is not “what if we make everything we have bigger?” but “can we build a structure that allows separation between, and controlled flow of talent and other resources, different subcommunities?”.
A somewhat grandiose analogy: Suppose that at the dawn of the agricultural revolution you’re a central planner tasked with maximizing the human population. You realize that by introducing agriculture, much larger populations could be supported as far as the food supply goes. But then you realize that if you imagine larger population densities and group sizes while leaving everything else fixed, various things will break—e.g., kinship-based conflict resolution mechanisms will become infeasible. What should you do? You shouldn’t conclude that, unfortunately, the population can’t grow. You should think about division of labor, institutions, laws, taxes, cities, and the state.
(Yeah, this seems reasonable.
FWIW, I used “if we threw 2000 additional randomly chosen people into an EA conference” as an example precisely because it’s particularly easy to explain/see the issue in that case. I agree that many other cases wouldn’t just be clearly problematic, and thus I avoided them when wanting a quick example. And I can now see how that example therefore seems straw-man-y.)
Interesting discussion. What if there was a separate brand for a mass movement version of EA?