I disagree with Crawford’s s take. It seems to me that effective altruists have managed to achieve great things using that mindset during the past years—which is empirical evidence against his thesis.
Yeah I second this. He argues that many great things have been achieved for civilisation without people trying to optimise for doing the best thing, or spending any time rationally examining what might be best. But then this is just because this is how nearly all human decisions have ever been made. Even if, by random chance, only 0.001% of projects happen to have been the optimal thing for that person to do, we would still be able to point to lots of example of extreme success stories. But this does almost nothing to undermine the case that the world would be a lot better if more people actually tried to do the best thing.
Just to add a bit more detail: I think that Jason Crawford saw a repeated pattern of beginning entrepreneurs spend a lot of time prioritizing and making models, and failing at this process.
I think I agree with him on the specific question of: ”Should small entrepreneur teams, with typical software ventures, spend several months prioritizing projects? Or should prioritization be a pretty short thing, and then they go off to experiment?”
That said, I think in the greater scheme of things, ecosystems can help with prioritization. For example: - VCs prioritize between fields - Think tanks writing reports about exciting industries (for people like entrepreneurs to read) - People starting megaprojects, that won’t have great feedback for 5+ years
I disagree with Crawford’s s take. It seems to me that effective altruists have managed to achieve great things using that mindset during the past years—which is empirical evidence against his thesis.
Yeah I second this. He argues that many great things have been achieved for civilisation without people trying to optimise for doing the best thing, or spending any time rationally examining what might be best. But then this is just because this is how nearly all human decisions have ever been made. Even if, by random chance, only 0.001% of projects happen to have been the optimal thing for that person to do, we would still be able to point to lots of example of extreme success stories. But this does almost nothing to undermine the case that the world would be a lot better if more people actually tried to do the best thing.
Just to add a bit more detail: I think that Jason Crawford saw a repeated pattern of beginning entrepreneurs spend a lot of time prioritizing and making models, and failing at this process.
I think I agree with him on the specific question of:
”Should small entrepreneur teams, with typical software ventures, spend several months prioritizing projects? Or should prioritization be a pretty short thing, and then they go off to experiment?”
That said, I think in the greater scheme of things, ecosystems can help with prioritization. For example:
- VCs prioritize between fields
- Think tanks writing reports about exciting industries (for people like entrepreneurs to read)
- People starting megaprojects, that won’t have great feedback for 5+ years