I agree something about influence is important. As a counterpoint, I think many manifestations of “having influence” don’t store well (e.g. the fact that at a given time, a relatively large number of EAs have an “influential role” (whatever that means exactly) is only weakly related to how many EAs will have an influential role in t+1 (say a generation later).
Wrt accumulation, influence also seems less straightforward to grow when you compare it to e.g. money (and to a lesser extent to knowledge) which, thanks to interest rates, accumulates at a certain rate basically for free (without you having to do anything) and fairly robustly. I’m not saying that influence is clearly a worse investment than money when it comes to future impact potenital, but that money is a pretty good and stable baseline that might not be as easy to beat as one might think at first sight. Also I think approaches of using “influence” to store and accumulate impact potential will vary a lot on these dimensions, so we’d probably want to talk about such approaches in the concrete rather than the abstract
> under your framework, community building is also an intervention for patient longtermism
+1 and also worth flagging that e.g. Philip Trammel explicitly says so too in his work on patient longtermism (though he clarifies that this is only true for specific types of community building)
I agree something about influence is important. As a counterpoint, I think many manifestations of “having influence” don’t store well (e.g. the fact that at a given time, a relatively large number of EAs have an “influential role” (whatever that means exactly) is only weakly related to how many EAs will have an influential role in t+1 (say a generation later).
Wrt accumulation, influence also seems less straightforward to grow when you compare it to e.g. money (and to a lesser extent to knowledge) which, thanks to interest rates, accumulates at a certain rate basically for free (without you having to do anything) and fairly robustly. I’m not saying that influence is clearly a worse investment than money when it comes to future impact potenital, but that money is a pretty good and stable baseline that might not be as easy to beat as one might think at first sight. Also I think approaches of using “influence” to store and accumulate impact potential will vary a lot on these dimensions, so we’d probably want to talk about such approaches in the concrete rather than the abstract
> under your framework, community building is also an intervention for patient longtermism
+1 and also worth flagging that e.g. Philip Trammel explicitly says so too in his work on patient longtermism (though he clarifies that this is only true for specific types of community building)