I mostly agree with this. No need to reinvent the wheel, and armchair theorizing is so tempting, while sorting through the literature can be painful. But I will say your reason #1 (the typical sociological research is of very poor quality) leads to a second effect: scouring the literature for the useful bits (of which I am sure there is plenty) is very difficult and time consuming.
If we were talking about ending global poverty, we would not be postulating new models of economic development. Why should we demand any less empirical/academic rigor in the context of movement building?
I can tell you that when financial quants want to make money, they spend some time reading the academic literature on the market, but they are often very critical of its quality and usefulness for real-life decisions.
So what we really need are people to say “this particular topic was already addressed by this particular reference”. Too often, the criticism to reinventing the wheel is “you should just read this vaguely defined body of work, most of which is inapplicable”.
Note that we’re not planning for this to be a focus area for GPP. We saw an opportunity to do something fairly quickly as it was based on existing insights that have come up in a few areas (the natural length of the paper expanded as I wrote it, and it ended up taking probably one to two weeks).
The main aim of this work was to give people in this community better tools for thinking about the counterfactual value of marginal movement-growing efforts. It should be complementary to empirical work; it might both help to interpret data, and to identify valuable information to seek out. I’ve been in quite a few conversations where people were unsure about how to count the value of attracting someone to the movement, even in principle. (There is also quite a lot of speculation in Part 2 of the paper, clearly flagged as such—this was expanded because readers of earlier drafts wanted more examples of how to interpret the concepts.)
I think it’s plausible this is covered in existing research, and would be very happy to discover it if so. I did look, but not deeply; I also spoke to people at EAO who had looked into more of the literature on social movements and were still wondering about these questions. I wouldn’t be shocked if it isn’t, though. I think EAs are unusually consequentialist, so the question they want to answer is “what’s the (expected) total long-run effect of a bit more of this today?”. This is not an easy question to get data on. Most academic areas rightly spend time exploring under the streetlight, because we can actually learn there, and the lessons may be transferable to darker regions. The literature on movement building seems to focus on shorter-term effects, presumably because you can get better answers there. I think such work is very valuable and worth paying attention to for finding out the relationship between interventions and short-term effects. I was trying to fill a gap by talking about how short-term effects translate into long-term effects, and therefore which short term effects are worth targeting.
I am concerned that we are reinventing the wheel, and ignoring a substantial body of empirical and theoretical work that has already been done on the subject.
I share this concern, and believe that EAs are often guilty of ignoring existing fields of research from which they could learn a lot. I’m not sure whether this concern applies in this particular case, however. I spent several days looking into the sociological literature on social movements and didn’t find much of value. Have you stumbled across any writings that you would recommend?
I mostly agree with this. No need to reinvent the wheel, and armchair theorizing is so tempting, while sorting through the literature can be painful. But I will say your reason #1 (the typical sociological research is of very poor quality) leads to a second effect: scouring the literature for the useful bits (of which I am sure there is plenty) is very difficult and time consuming.
I can tell you that when financial quants want to make money, they spend some time reading the academic literature on the market, but they are often very critical of its quality and usefulness for real-life decisions.
So what we really need are people to say “this particular topic was already addressed by this particular reference”. Too often, the criticism to reinventing the wheel is “you should just read this vaguely defined body of work, most of which is inapplicable”.
Note that we’re not planning for this to be a focus area for GPP. We saw an opportunity to do something fairly quickly as it was based on existing insights that have come up in a few areas (the natural length of the paper expanded as I wrote it, and it ended up taking probably one to two weeks).
The main aim of this work was to give people in this community better tools for thinking about the counterfactual value of marginal movement-growing efforts. It should be complementary to empirical work; it might both help to interpret data, and to identify valuable information to seek out. I’ve been in quite a few conversations where people were unsure about how to count the value of attracting someone to the movement, even in principle. (There is also quite a lot of speculation in Part 2 of the paper, clearly flagged as such—this was expanded because readers of earlier drafts wanted more examples of how to interpret the concepts.)
I think it’s plausible this is covered in existing research, and would be very happy to discover it if so. I did look, but not deeply; I also spoke to people at EAO who had looked into more of the literature on social movements and were still wondering about these questions. I wouldn’t be shocked if it isn’t, though. I think EAs are unusually consequentialist, so the question they want to answer is “what’s the (expected) total long-run effect of a bit more of this today?”. This is not an easy question to get data on. Most academic areas rightly spend time exploring under the streetlight, because we can actually learn there, and the lessons may be transferable to darker regions. The literature on movement building seems to focus on shorter-term effects, presumably because you can get better answers there. I think such work is very valuable and worth paying attention to for finding out the relationship between interventions and short-term effects. I was trying to fill a gap by talking about how short-term effects translate into long-term effects, and therefore which short term effects are worth targeting.
I share this concern, and believe that EAs are often guilty of ignoring existing fields of research from which they could learn a lot. I’m not sure whether this concern applies in this particular case, however. I spent several days looking into the sociological literature on social movements and didn’t find much of value. Have you stumbled across any writings that you would recommend?