How can we foster longterm global trust and status as a social movement? In order to foster global backing for some of the movement’s non-normative or ‘creative’ ideas (e.g., build post-apocalyptic bunkers to help re-build society in case of nuclear war) that may actually be highly impactful in the longterm future, we likely need to first prove ourselves as a movement that can actually create large-scale global impact.
Here’s one idea for a megaproject that could help to foster global trust/status by proving our ability to use evidence and reason to make a positive impact on the world:
Part 1: Survey representative samples of most (or all) countries and ask them “if you had 100 million dollars and wanted to use this money to make the world a better place, how would you spend it?”, giving open-ended text and a rank order option of some of the things we’re considering
Getting cross-cultural responses to this question could produce the most amount of global backing for EA, and it could look *very good* if we made the movement more democratic! But the latter is an empirical question (I.e., perceived trust in a social movement when the movement relies on experts only, the masses only, or a mix of experts and the masses, vs. a no-mention control)
Part 2: Create a list of top 10 or so most cared about global issues, and have EA researchers rank each of them in terms of total impact and effectiveness
Part 3: run a RCT again on nationally representative samples globally and compare the globally top ranked cause area to the EA most effective cause within the top 10 (if these two aren’t the same) to look at trade offs between indirect movement building impact and direct cause area impact --> after this RCT, choose which cause area will produce the most total impact as the “winner” of the $100 million grant.
Part 4: run a large grant competition to find the best approaches to solving whatever cause area is selected globally (note: I’d hypothesize that it’s very important to solve big issue *globally* to facilitate a new norm of collective global action and foster obligation perceptions towards EA from all countries), and aim to R&D for about 5-10 years (rough estimate), and then roll out the most effective intervention(s) based on these findings
(Repeat this every X years to maintain longterm support of EA)
How can we foster longterm global trust and status as a social movement? In order to foster global backing for some of the movement’s non-normative or ‘creative’ ideas (e.g., build post-apocalyptic bunkers to help re-build society in case of nuclear war) that may actually be highly impactful in the longterm future, we likely need to first prove ourselves as a movement that can actually create large-scale global impact.
Here’s one idea for a megaproject that could help to foster global trust/status by proving our ability to use evidence and reason to make a positive impact on the world:
Part 1: Survey representative samples of most (or all) countries and ask them “if you had 100 million dollars and wanted to use this money to make the world a better place, how would you spend it?”, giving open-ended text and a rank order option of some of the things we’re considering
Getting cross-cultural responses to this question could produce the most amount of global backing for EA, and it could look *very good* if we made the movement more democratic! But the latter is an empirical question (I.e., perceived trust in a social movement when the movement relies on experts only, the masses only, or a mix of experts and the masses, vs. a no-mention control)
Part 2: Create a list of top 10 or so most cared about global issues, and have EA researchers rank each of them in terms of total impact and effectiveness
Part 3: run a RCT again on nationally representative samples globally and compare the globally top ranked cause area to the EA most effective cause within the top 10 (if these two aren’t the same) to look at trade offs between indirect movement building impact and direct cause area impact --> after this RCT, choose which cause area will produce the most total impact as the “winner” of the $100 million grant.
Part 4: run a large grant competition to find the best approaches to solving whatever cause area is selected globally (note: I’d hypothesize that it’s very important to solve big issue *globally* to facilitate a new norm of collective global action and foster obligation perceptions towards EA from all countries), and aim to R&D for about 5-10 years (rough estimate), and then roll out the most effective intervention(s) based on these findings
(Repeat this every X years to maintain longterm support of EA)