As we’ve discussed, I’m tentatively excited about HIE’s plans, I think changing your name was a good idea, and I think this new name is good.
But I wanted to push back on / hopefully clarify one part of the reasoning (partly because I think I was a/the source for that bit of the reasoning, so maybe I didn’t express it clearly when we chatted):
To not monopolise funding for engineering-related EA organisations. This is significant consideration from a funder’s point of view as they may be hesitant to fund another organisation that may help to serve engineers in a different way to ours because they are under the impression that we are already fully serving this space.
I would instead phrase this more like:
To not monopolise the space of engineering-related EA organisations.
People in/around the EA community often put a lot of emphasis on neglectedness and cooperation.
This basically makes sense, but has the unfortunate consequence that often people are too quick to dismiss an area/idea as “covered” simply because one person/group is working on it or appears to be working on it.
This can lead to missed opportunities, given that the existing project may later fold, may not be highly effective, may only cover part of the space, may have limited capacity, or may take one specific approach to it even though experimentation and multiple approaches would be valuable.
This problem is probably exacerbated when a project/org is called something like “EA [x]”.
Because that may increase the chance that other people understandably but incorrect assume that that project/org is sufficiently covering the intersection of EA and [x].
And because then people may worry that that org/project is trying to stake a claim to the whole space, or would feel insulted / confused if another org stepped in to the space.
This seems like an argument in favor of names like 80,000 Hours and GiveWell rather than “EA Career Advice” or “Global Health & Development Charity Evaluators”.
(Another, unrelated way to mitigate this problem is to explicitly and repeatedly (a) mention that you think other projects in the same space could still be valuable, and (b) explain what your org/project expects to do and what people might guess you’d do that you don’t expect to do.)
...ok, that phrasing definitely seems too long for the post, but I guess I wanted to unpack the reasoning more fully while I was at it.
So a key thing I’m highlighting here is that I’m not really worried about funders overly assuming orgs called “EA [x]” will sufficiently cover everything at the intersection of EA and [x] and hence not fund other projects; rather, I’m worried that various potential entrepreneurs-or-similar will think that or will worry about what the existing org will think about them starting a new thing.
I think where funders come in is that they may be less likely to fund an org that is itself going to be called “EA [x]”, because that name probably somewhat increases the extent to which this org may crowd out other projects.
(Btw, I can’t “take credit” for spotting this consideration; I’ve seen/heard it discussed by others, and am essentially just a messenger.)
Thanks for the elaboration, Michael. Pleased to hear you like the new name—your feedback was significant in the decision to debate a name change, so thank you for providing it. Your phrasing generally describes the broader discussion we had on this argument for the name change during our deliberations—it’s a good reference for others who are considering this argument.
We had an interesting point come out of our deliberation on this topic of “apparent monopolisation”: we want to address a lack of community for physical engineers in EA so, in a way, we want to monopolise the space so as to collect as many engineers as possible in one place to maximise network effects. This initially updated us relatively strongly towards keeping “EA” in the name. However, a counterpoint is that having a name that is sufficiently recognisable to EAs—“High Impact [x]”, for example—hopefully derives a decent portion of the monopolisation benefit, while reducing the risk of “apparent monopolisation”. Therefore, we concluded that the “maximise network effects by monopolisation through using EA in the title” point only weakly updated us towards keeping “EA” in the name.
We would be very excited to see more organisations doing things for physical engineers in the future. We’ve been bouncing around quite a few ideas as we’ve been developing a strategy for the org, most of which will be out of our scope. So we would be interested in discussing ideas with anyone who is interested in starting an org in this space!
(I’ll note that we discussed this in some detail and that the use of ‘we’ and ‘us’ in this comment may not accurately reflect the views each team member but hopefully I’ve captured our average view relatively accurately)
As we’ve discussed, I’m tentatively excited about HIE’s plans, I think changing your name was a good idea, and I think this new name is good.
But I wanted to push back on / hopefully clarify one part of the reasoning (partly because I think I was a/the source for that bit of the reasoning, so maybe I didn’t express it clearly when we chatted):
I would instead phrase this more like:
...ok, that phrasing definitely seems too long for the post, but I guess I wanted to unpack the reasoning more fully while I was at it.
So a key thing I’m highlighting here is that I’m not really worried about funders overly assuming orgs called “EA [x]” will sufficiently cover everything at the intersection of EA and [x] and hence not fund other projects; rather, I’m worried that various potential entrepreneurs-or-similar will think that or will worry about what the existing org will think about them starting a new thing.
I think where funders come in is that they may be less likely to fund an org that is itself going to be called “EA [x]”, because that name probably somewhat increases the extent to which this org may crowd out other projects.
(Btw, I can’t “take credit” for spotting this consideration; I’ve seen/heard it discussed by others, and am essentially just a messenger.)
Thanks for the elaboration, Michael. Pleased to hear you like the new name—your feedback was significant in the decision to debate a name change, so thank you for providing it. Your phrasing generally describes the broader discussion we had on this argument for the name change during our deliberations—it’s a good reference for others who are considering this argument.
We had an interesting point come out of our deliberation on this topic of “apparent monopolisation”: we want to address a lack of community for physical engineers in EA so, in a way, we want to monopolise the space so as to collect as many engineers as possible in one place to maximise network effects. This initially updated us relatively strongly towards keeping “EA” in the name. However, a counterpoint is that having a name that is sufficiently recognisable to EAs—“High Impact [x]”, for example—hopefully derives a decent portion of the monopolisation benefit, while reducing the risk of “apparent monopolisation”. Therefore, we concluded that the “maximise network effects by monopolisation through using EA in the title” point only weakly updated us towards keeping “EA” in the name.
We would be very excited to see more organisations doing things for physical engineers in the future. We’ve been bouncing around quite a few ideas as we’ve been developing a strategy for the org, most of which will be out of our scope. So we would be interested in discussing ideas with anyone who is interested in starting an org in this space!
(I’ll note that we discussed this in some detail and that the use of ‘we’ and ‘us’ in this comment may not accurately reflect the views each team member but hopefully I’ve captured our average view relatively accurately)
That pretty accurately describes my thoughts on this :)