Thank you for this post, I was thinking along similar lines and am grateful that you wrote this down. I would like to see the number of people grow that make decisions around career, donations and volunteering based on the central EA question regardless of whether they call themselves EA.
More than a billion people live in high income countries alone and I find it conceivable that 1-10% would be open to making changes in their lives depending on the action they can take. But for EA to accommodate 10-100 million people I also assume different shopfronts in addition to the backend capabilities (having enough charities that can handle vast amounts of donations, having pipelines for charity entrepreneurship that can help these charities grow, consulting capacity to help existing organizations to switch to effectiveness metrics etc).
If we look at the movement from the perspective of scaling to these numbers I assume we will see a relatively short term saturation in longtermist cause areas. Currently we don’t seem to be funding restricted in that area and I don’t see a world where millions working on these problems will be better than thousands.
So from this perspective I would like us to think about longer view and build the capacity now for a big EA movement that will be less effective on the margin while advocating for the most effective choices now in parallel.
Thank you for this post, I was thinking along similar lines and am grateful that you wrote this down. I would like to see the number of people grow that make decisions around career, donations and volunteering based on the central EA question regardless of whether they call themselves EA. More than a billion people live in high income countries alone and I find it conceivable that 1-10% would be open to making changes in their lives depending on the action they can take. But for EA to accommodate 10-100 million people I also assume different shopfronts in addition to the backend capabilities (having enough charities that can handle vast amounts of donations, having pipelines for charity entrepreneurship that can help these charities grow, consulting capacity to help existing organizations to switch to effectiveness metrics etc). If we look at the movement from the perspective of scaling to these numbers I assume we will see a relatively short term saturation in longtermist cause areas. Currently we don’t seem to be funding restricted in that area and I don’t see a world where millions working on these problems will be better than thousands. So from this perspective I would like us to think about longer view and build the capacity now for a big EA movement that will be less effective on the margin while advocating for the most effective choices now in parallel.