This seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we never put effort into building a community around ways to reduce global poverty, we’ll never know what value they could have generated.
Also it seems a priori really implausible that longtermists could usefully do more things in their sphere alone than that EAs focusing on the whole of the rest of EA-concern-space could.
The flipside argument would be that funding is a greater bottleneck for global poverty than longtermism, and one might convince university students focused on global poverty to go into earning-to-give (including entrepreneurship-to-give). So the goals of community building may well be different between fields, and community building in each cause area should be primarily judged on its contribution to that cause area’s bottleneck.
I could see a world in which the maths works out for that.
I guess the tricky thing there is that you need the amount raised with discount factor applied to exceed the cost, incl. the opportunity cost of community builders potentially earning to give themselves.
And this seems to be a much tighter constraint than that imposed by longtermist theories of change.
True—although I think the costs would be much lower for university groups run by (e.g.) undergraduate student organizers who were paid typical student-worker wages (at most). The opportunity costs would seem much stronger for community organizing by college graduates than by students working a few hours a week.
This seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we never put effort into building a community around ways to reduce global poverty, we’ll never know what value they could have generated.
Also it seems a priori really implausible that longtermists could usefully do more things in their sphere alone than that EAs focusing on the whole of the rest of EA-concern-space could.
Well EA did build a community around it and we’ve seen that talent is a greater bottleneck for longtermism than it is for global poverty.
The flipside argument would be that funding is a greater bottleneck for global poverty than longtermism, and one might convince university students focused on global poverty to go into earning-to-give (including entrepreneurship-to-give). So the goals of community building may well be different between fields, and community building in each cause area should be primarily judged on its contribution to that cause area’s bottleneck.
I could see a world in which the maths works out for that.
I guess the tricky thing there is that you need the amount raised with discount factor applied to exceed the cost, incl. the opportunity cost of community builders potentially earning to give themselves.
And this seems to be a much tighter constraint than that imposed by longtermist theories of change.
True—although I think the costs would be much lower for university groups run by (e.g.) undergraduate student organizers who were paid typical student-worker wages (at most). The opportunity costs would seem much stronger for community organizing by college graduates than by students working a few hours a week.