Ah, thank you for clarifying! That is a much stronger sense of “doing a good job” than I was going for. I was trying to point at something like, successfully writing up my views in a way that felt like a solid contribution to the discourse. Explaining what I thought, why I thought it, and why I didn’t find the standard counter arguments convincing. I think this would probably take me about two months of full-time work, so a pretty substantial opportunity cost.
I think I could do this well enough to become the main person people pointed at when they wanted to give an example of a “don’t value animals” EA (which would probably be negative for my other work), but even major success here would probably only result in convincing <5% of animal-focused EAs to change what they were working on. And much less than that for money, since most of the EA money is from OP, which funds animal work as part of an explicit process of worldview diversification.
Ah, thank you for clarifying! That is a much stronger sense of “doing a good job” than I was going for. I was trying to point at something like, successfully writing up my views in a way that felt like a solid contribution to the discourse. Explaining what I thought, why I thought it, and why I didn’t find the standard counter arguments convincing. I think this would probably take me about two months of full-time work, so a pretty substantial opportunity cost.
I think I could do this well enough to become the main person people pointed at when they wanted to give an example of a “don’t value animals” EA (which would probably be negative for my other work), but even major success here would probably only result in convincing <5% of animal-focused EAs to change what they were working on. And much less than that for money, since most of the EA money is from OP, which funds animal work as part of an explicit process of worldview diversification.