I love the framing of “structural capital”, and would tentatively state that EA as a movement has much less structural capital than I would expect, relative to its amount of financial/human/network capital. In fact, I would argue that EA is bottlenecked on structural capital.
It seems to me like EA has a ton of money, a bunch of really smart people, and the ear of decisionmakers… but has had at best mixed results converting this into effective organizations, good ops, or good code. This is relative to my experience in the Silicon Valley tech scene, which feels like the best point of comparison. (You may draw different conclusions compared to e.g. academia)
One question I would be very interested in: how much of the money & people are being spent acquiring more money & people, vs being converted into structural capital?
Setting up an information markets for these questions here:
“Structural capital is the ability of the holder to absorb resources (e.g. people or money) and turn them into useful things”. What useful things has EA produced (exclusive of fundraising and converting more EAs)? I think e.g. the outcomes around developing world health interventions are really great, but it’s not clear to me how much of that is counterfactually attributable to EA; would the Gates foundation or somebody else have picked it up anyways?
Competent management: it feels like excellent management and managers are in short supply; there are a lot of people who do direct work (research, community work), but few managers and even fewer execs on the level of “VP or director at top series-A Silicon Valley startup”
Well written code: maybe the comparison to SV is especially harsh here, but I’ve been thinking that EA needs better software (still WIP). Software is an incredibly high-leverage activity, and I’d claim that eg most of the world’s productivity gains in the last two decades can be attributed to software; but EA draws from an philosophical/academic tradition and thus wayyy overvalues “blogging” over “coding”
I love the framing of “structural capital”, and would tentatively state that EA as a movement has much less structural capital than I would expect, relative to its amount of financial/human/network capital. In fact, I would argue that EA is bottlenecked on structural capital.
It seems to me like EA has a ton of money, a bunch of really smart people, and the ear of decisionmakers… but has had at best mixed results converting this into effective organizations, good ops, or good code. This is relative to my experience in the Silicon Valley tech scene, which feels like the best point of comparison. (You may draw different conclusions compared to e.g. academia)
One question I would be very interested in: how much of the money & people are being spent acquiring more money & people, vs being converted into structural capital?
Setting up an information markets for these questions here:
https://manifold.markets/Austin/what-of-ea-money-was-spent-on-struc
https://manifold.markets/Austin/what-of-ea-fulltime-employees-were
Then the follow up question would be: What % of EA money/FTE SHOULD be spent on gaining structural capital?
https://manifold.markets/Austin/what-of-ea-money-should-be-spent-on
https://manifold.markets/Austin/what-of-ea-fulltime-employees-shoul
Fleshing out the argument more:
“Structural capital is the ability of the holder to absorb resources (e.g. people or money) and turn them into useful things”. What useful things has EA produced (exclusive of fundraising and converting more EAs)? I think e.g. the outcomes around developing world health interventions are really great, but it’s not clear to me how much of that is counterfactually attributable to EA; would the Gates foundation or somebody else have picked it up anyways?
Competent management: it feels like excellent management and managers are in short supply; there are a lot of people who do direct work (research, community work), but few managers and even fewer execs on the level of “VP or director at top series-A Silicon Valley startup”
Well written code: maybe the comparison to SV is especially harsh here, but I’ve been thinking that EA needs better software (still WIP). Software is an incredibly high-leverage activity, and I’d claim that eg most of the world’s productivity gains in the last two decades can be attributed to software; but EA draws from an philosophical/academic tradition and thus wayyy overvalues “blogging” over “coding”