Are we giving away our steering wheel?
EA tries to identify and trains the people most serious about doing good. Yet the culture is, AFAIK, one of continuous altruistic expenditure. Each cycle transfers away control to others, even if those others are aligned with EA goals.
But if this is really a community of those maximizing their impact, shouldn’t we want to empower them to have lasting and compounding influence, lest the direction be abdicated away?
If you believe reasoned compassion should guide large parts of the future, shouldn’t that be by the same institutions, talent, and coordinated network that is dedicated to that, at accumulating scale?
TL;DR: If we believe rational benevolence should steer the world, then a movement permanently spending itself down is making a mistake.
Disclaimer: It’s possible i’m missing key trade-offs or unseen dynamics inside EA’s current structure. This is just my attempt to name a pattern I see.
Can you clarify what you mean by this? I don’t understand what you mean by “continuous altruistic expenditure”, “each cycle transfers away control to others”, or “a movement permanently spending itself down”. What do these phrases mean?
I think this post needs to be re-stated in plain English, in words that like an average high school student who has never heard of effective altruism could understand.
A good rule of thumb I try to follow is to try to write so that what I’m saying could be understood by a broader and less knowledgeable audience than the main audience I actually have in mind when I’m writing. So, if I’m writing a post that I think will mainly read by people who read a lot of posts on the EA Forum, I’ll try to write it so that if it’s the first post someone has ever read on the EA Forum, and they’re not very familiar with EA, that person will have a better chance of understanding it too.
This has two benefits: 1) it broadens the audience who can understand what I write and 2) it makes my writing clearer and easier to understand for everyone, including my main audience of frequent EA Forum users.
Hope that all makes sense, and helps.