Overall, yes—I think it’s truly incredible. I still have trouble believing how it went from an idea between students in a college common room to global movement with thousands of people acting on it in countries around the world.
How I’d nudge it feels like a really difficult question, because for any change I’d make it’s hard to know how it would actually end up cashing out. One simple thing I’d say though is that it would have been good if different parts of the movement had coordinated more early on. Nowadays it feels like people travel between different hubs pretty often, and EAG and the leaders forum brings people together at least annually. In the early days it didn’t seem like people travelled as much, partly because everyone was trying hard to live frugally. I think that was likely a mistake, because it meant much less communication and coordination between people in the US and UK.
Things I’m less sure about are ones around taking into account what has actually happened sooner. For example, I mentioned above that we’ve become more ambitious, for example that the broader idea of effective altruism was more appealing to people than we thought. If we had known that earlier, I think we could have focused more on discussing the broader ideas rather than starting with narrower ones. Another way in which we could have been more ambitious is discussing longtermism more earlier on. I think longtermism is a hugely important part of effective altruism. People who haven’t been born yet are in an even worse position to claim our attention than those the other side of the world and non-human animals, and there are so many more of them than of the former two groups. Our initial assumption that we wouldn’t be able to get others to care about people in the future seems to have been proven wrong by the way the movement is going, and it would have been great if we had realised that sooner.
Also in the spirit of being more ambitious, it might have been good if there had been more concentration on thoroughly and carefully building out the ideas of effective altruism before doing as much mass outreach as we did. Even around 2010, Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours got quite a bit of press attention. I think in a way, our pushing for growing quickly was down to some lack of ambition—it was a great way to grow to having a community of 1000 or so, but if we had realised how big the movement could grow, maybe we’d have done so more slowly and carefully. It’s really difficult to know though—that media attention got some great people involved who otherwise wouldn’t have known about it, so maybe in the world with less media attention at an earlier point it wouldn’t have been possible to grow this much.
A final thing I might have tried to push is consistency. By virtue of trying to do the most effective thing, as a community we’re always reassessing what we’re doing, thinking of better things to try, setting up new organisations etc. It seems like there’s huge value in having a specific mission and just spending years getting great at carrying that out (as evidenced by GiveWell and OpenPhil’s success).
Overall, yes—I think it’s truly incredible. I still have trouble believing how it went from an idea between students in a college common room to global movement with thousands of people acting on it in countries around the world.
How I’d nudge it feels like a really difficult question, because for any change I’d make it’s hard to know how it would actually end up cashing out. One simple thing I’d say though is that it would have been good if different parts of the movement had coordinated more early on. Nowadays it feels like people travel between different hubs pretty often, and EAG and the leaders forum brings people together at least annually. In the early days it didn’t seem like people travelled as much, partly because everyone was trying hard to live frugally. I think that was likely a mistake, because it meant much less communication and coordination between people in the US and UK.
Things I’m less sure about are ones around taking into account what has actually happened sooner. For example, I mentioned above that we’ve become more ambitious, for example that the broader idea of effective altruism was more appealing to people than we thought. If we had known that earlier, I think we could have focused more on discussing the broader ideas rather than starting with narrower ones. Another way in which we could have been more ambitious is discussing longtermism more earlier on. I think longtermism is a hugely important part of effective altruism. People who haven’t been born yet are in an even worse position to claim our attention than those the other side of the world and non-human animals, and there are so many more of them than of the former two groups. Our initial assumption that we wouldn’t be able to get others to care about people in the future seems to have been proven wrong by the way the movement is going, and it would have been great if we had realised that sooner.
Also in the spirit of being more ambitious, it might have been good if there had been more concentration on thoroughly and carefully building out the ideas of effective altruism before doing as much mass outreach as we did. Even around 2010, Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours got quite a bit of press attention. I think in a way, our pushing for growing quickly was down to some lack of ambition—it was a great way to grow to having a community of 1000 or so, but if we had realised how big the movement could grow, maybe we’d have done so more slowly and carefully. It’s really difficult to know though—that media attention got some great people involved who otherwise wouldn’t have known about it, so maybe in the world with less media attention at an earlier point it wouldn’t have been possible to grow this much.
A final thing I might have tried to push is consistency. By virtue of trying to do the most effective thing, as a community we’re always reassessing what we’re doing, thinking of better things to try, setting up new organisations etc. It seems like there’s huge value in having a specific mission and just spending years getting great at carrying that out (as evidenced by GiveWell and OpenPhil’s success).