Good insight, thank you for writing this post! I agree with it. Now that you point it out, I find striking how knowlege has compounded, even more impressively than money.
I would like to add another contestant: influence, within or out of mainstream institutions. As a movement, social capital and influence on other people (especially politicians) could prove very useful to be able to have a large impact when the time is right. I’m thinking especially of the Mont Pelerin society: how they spread in economics academia by convincing people and placing people in positions of (mostly academic) influence; and how they eventually became orthodox economic policy.
The EA community also seems to be very aware of the MPS. What I’m pointing out is that, under your framework, community building is also an intervention for patient longtermism.
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)
Good insight, thank you for writing this post! I agree with it. Now that you point it out, I find striking how knowlege has compounded, even more impressively than money.
I would like to add another contestant: influence, within or out of mainstream institutions. As a movement, social capital and influence on other people (especially politicians) could prove very useful to be able to have a large impact when the time is right. I’m thinking especially of the Mont Pelerin society: how they spread in economics academia by convincing people and placing people in positions of (mostly academic) influence; and how they eventually became orthodox economic policy.
The EA community also seems to be very aware of the MPS. What I’m pointing out is that, under your framework, community building is also an intervention for patient longtermism.
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)