Nice post- good to see the discussion it’s generating.
While I find the first-order expected utility calcs useful, I think it’s also important to consider the direction and possible magnitude of second order effects. I think these point strongly in the favor of seeking more but less dedicated EAs due to reasons of scale.
We want the charitable marketplace to become more efficient- for more capital to flow to the highest impact projects, higher quality information, easier access to information, etc. We’re currently trapped in a negative feedback loop- donors don’t give based on impact, so charities aren’t incentivized to measure/report impact, so donors can’t find impact data, so it’s harder for donors to give based on impact, etc. The more people we have who buy into EA principles to some degree, the easier it’ll be to reverse this feedback loop. Take someone who gives 5% of their income to charity, half of it to EA causes and half to more traditional causes. If this person improves the impact of their traditional giving by doing more research or thinking about cause selection, it will barely show up in our expected utility calc but it will help propagate some of the key messages we care about.
There are also issues of optics. If every EA social media account magically gained 100x followers, the movement as a whole would appear a lot more credible.
So all else equal, if I knew that 1000 people were going to accomplish 1000 units of good, I’d much rather have that good distributed evenly rather than highly concentrated in a few people.
Good additional points for getting more value-aligned people engaged as typical EA members, and getting non-value aligned ones to behave like EA members.
I think the issue of optics is especially impactful. A movement that is perceived as having a large social impact would be more likely to draw traditional wealthy donors, as opposed to the newly-wealthy people like Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna.
Nice post- good to see the discussion it’s generating.
While I find the first-order expected utility calcs useful, I think it’s also important to consider the direction and possible magnitude of second order effects. I think these point strongly in the favor of seeking more but less dedicated EAs due to reasons of scale.
We want the charitable marketplace to become more efficient- for more capital to flow to the highest impact projects, higher quality information, easier access to information, etc. We’re currently trapped in a negative feedback loop- donors don’t give based on impact, so charities aren’t incentivized to measure/report impact, so donors can’t find impact data, so it’s harder for donors to give based on impact, etc. The more people we have who buy into EA principles to some degree, the easier it’ll be to reverse this feedback loop. Take someone who gives 5% of their income to charity, half of it to EA causes and half to more traditional causes. If this person improves the impact of their traditional giving by doing more research or thinking about cause selection, it will barely show up in our expected utility calc but it will help propagate some of the key messages we care about.
There are also issues of optics. If every EA social media account magically gained 100x followers, the movement as a whole would appear a lot more credible.
So all else equal, if I knew that 1000 people were going to accomplish 1000 units of good, I’d much rather have that good distributed evenly rather than highly concentrated in a few people.
Good additional points for getting more value-aligned people engaged as typical EA members, and getting non-value aligned ones to behave like EA members.
I think the issue of optics is especially impactful. A movement that is perceived as having a large social impact would be more likely to draw traditional wealthy donors, as opposed to the newly-wealthy people like Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna.