Oh I thought you were talking about popularity contest dynamics for arguments, not causes.
Sounds like you are positing a Matthew Effect where causes which many people are already working on will tend to have greater awareness (due to greater visibility) and also greater credibility (so many people are working on this cause, they must be on to something! Newcomers to EA will probably be especially tempted by causes which many people are already working on, since they won’t feel they are in a position to evaluate causes for themselves.)
If true, an unfortunate side effect would be that neglected causes tend to remain neglected.
I think in practice how things work nowadays is that there are a few organizations in the community (OpenPhil, 80K) which have a lot of credibility and do their own in-depth evaluation of causes, and EA resources end up getting directed based on their evaluations. I’m not sure this is such a bad setup overall.
Oh I thought you were talking about popularity contest dynamics for arguments, not causes.
Sounds like you are positing a Matthew Effect where causes which many people are already working on will tend to have greater awareness (due to greater visibility) and also greater credibility (so many people are working on this cause, they must be on to something! Newcomers to EA will probably be especially tempted by causes which many people are already working on, since they won’t feel they are in a position to evaluate causes for themselves.)
If true, an unfortunate side effect would be that neglected causes tend to remain neglected.
I think in practice how things work nowadays is that there are a few organizations in the community (OpenPhil, 80K) which have a lot of credibility and do their own in-depth evaluation of causes, and EA resources end up getting directed based on their evaluations. I’m not sure this is such a bad setup overall.
Yeah it doesn’t seem terrible. It probably misses a lot of upside, though.