Build the EA movement by creating additional entry points, increasing its surface area, and/or increasing the chance that EA has done some substantive work on whatever topic a given person is already interested in.
E.g., if EA had done no substantive work on climate change, that may have reduced the number of people who heard about it, or increase the number who heard about it, looked for work on climate change, saw that there was none, and thus felt that the community wasn’t for them, had bad priorities, or similar.
This overlaps with path 3 and to some extent paths 2 and 4.
On the other hand, I’d be wary of aiming explicitly for this path to impact.
In the case of climate change, it probably does make sense to do substantive work on it anyway (ignoring this path to impact), and (relatedly) it seems reasonable for many (but not most) EAs to prioritise climate change.
But we don’t want everyone to just stick with whatever priorities they happened to have before learning about EA.
If there’s a topic that it wouldn’t make sense to substantive work on if not for this path to impact, then maybe this path to impact wouldn’t be a good thing anyway.
Perhaps either we’d end up with people working on low-priority areas under an EA banner, perhaps rather than switching to higher-priority areas, or we’d end up with people feeling there was a “bait and switch” where they were attracted to EA for one reason and then told that that area is low-priority.
In any case, this path might be better handled by people who are explicitly focused on movement building, rather than people doing research.
A possible fifth path:
Build the EA movement by creating additional entry points, increasing its surface area, and/or increasing the chance that EA has done some substantive work on whatever topic a given person is already interested in.
E.g., if EA had done no substantive work on climate change, that may have reduced the number of people who heard about it, or increase the number who heard about it, looked for work on climate change, saw that there was none, and thus felt that the community wasn’t for them, had bad priorities, or similar.
This overlaps with path 3 and to some extent paths 2 and 4.
On the other hand, I’d be wary of aiming explicitly for this path to impact.
In the case of climate change, it probably does make sense to do substantive work on it anyway (ignoring this path to impact), and (relatedly) it seems reasonable for many (but not most) EAs to prioritise climate change.
But we don’t want everyone to just stick with whatever priorities they happened to have before learning about EA.
If there’s a topic that it wouldn’t make sense to substantive work on if not for this path to impact, then maybe this path to impact wouldn’t be a good thing anyway.
Perhaps either we’d end up with people working on low-priority areas under an EA banner, perhaps rather than switching to higher-priority areas, or we’d end up with people feeling there was a “bait and switch” where they were attracted to EA for one reason and then told that that area is low-priority.
In any case, this path might be better handled by people who are explicitly focused on movement building, rather than people doing research.