I think there are two ways to frame an expansion of the group of people who are engaged with EA through more than donations.
The first, which sits well with your disagreements: we’re doing extremely important things which we got into by careful reasoning about our values and impact. More people may cause value drift or dilute the more impactful efforts to make way on the most important problems.
But I think a second one is much more plausible: we’re almost surely wrong about some important things. We have biases that stem from who the typical EAs are, where they live, or just the very noisy path that EA has taken so far. While our current work is important, it’s also crucial that our ideas are exposed to, and processed by, more people. What’s “value drift” in one person’s eyes might really be an important correction in another’s. What’s “dilution” may actually prove to mean a host of new useful perspectives and ideas (among other less useful ones).
I think there are two ways to frame an expansion of the group of people who are engaged with EA through more than donations.
The first, which sits well with your disagreements: we’re doing extremely important things which we got into by careful reasoning about our values and impact. More people may cause value drift or dilute the more impactful efforts to make way on the most important problems.
But I think a second one is much more plausible: we’re almost surely wrong about some important things. We have biases that stem from who the typical EAs are, where they live, or just the very noisy path that EA has taken so far. While our current work is important, it’s also crucial that our ideas are exposed to, and processed by, more people. What’s “value drift” in one person’s eyes might really be an important correction in another’s. What’s “dilution” may actually prove to mean a host of new useful perspectives and ideas (among other less useful ones).