A core part of the differing intuitions might be because we’re thinking about two different timescales.
It seems intuitively right to me that the “dedicated to a particular set of conclusions about the world” version of effective altruism will grow faster in the short term. I think this might be because conclusions require less nuanced communication, and being more concrete there are more concrete actions to take that can get people on board faster.
I also have the intuition that a “commitment to using reason and evidence to do the most good we can” (I’d maybe add, “with some proportion of our resources”) has the potential to have a larger backing in the long-term.
I have done a terrible “paint” job (literally used paint) in purple on one of the diagrams in this post to illustrate what I mean:
There are movement building strategies that end us up on the grey line, which gives us faster growth in the short term (so a bigger tent for a while), but doesn’t change our saturation point (we’re still at saturation point 1).
I think that a “broad spectrum of ideas” might mean our end saturation point is higher even if this might require slower growth in the near term. I’ve illustrated this as the purple line which ends up being bigger in the end, at saturation point 2, even if in the short term, growth is slower. In this sense, we will be smaller tent for a while, but we have the potential to end up as a bigger tent in some terminal equilibrium.
An example of a “movement” that had a vaguer, bigger picture idea that got so big it was too commonplace to be a movement might be “the scientific method”?
A core part of the differing intuitions might be because we’re thinking about two different timescales.
It seems intuitively right to me that the “dedicated to a particular set of conclusions about the world” version of effective altruism will grow faster in the short term. I think this might be because conclusions require less nuanced communication, and being more concrete there are more concrete actions to take that can get people on board faster.
I also have the intuition that a “commitment to using reason and evidence to do the most good we can” (I’d maybe add, “with some proportion of our resources”) has the potential to have a larger backing in the long-term.
I have done a terrible “paint” job (literally used paint) in purple on one of the diagrams in this post to illustrate what I mean:
There are movement building strategies that end us up on the grey line, which gives us faster growth in the short term (so a bigger tent for a while), but doesn’t change our saturation point (we’re still at saturation point 1).
I think that a “broad spectrum of ideas” might mean our end saturation point is higher even if this might require slower growth in the near term. I’ve illustrated this as the purple line which ends up being bigger in the end, at saturation point 2, even if in the short term, growth is slower. In this sense, we will be smaller tent for a while, but we have the potential to end up as a bigger tent in some terminal equilibrium.
An example of a “movement” that had a vaguer, bigger picture idea that got so big it was too commonplace to be a movement might be “the scientific method”?