I think the other missing piece is “what will this money do to the community fabric, what are the trade-offs we can take to make the community fabric more resilient and robust, and are those trade-offs worth it?”
When it comes to funding effective charities, I agree that having more money is straightforwardly good. It’s the second-order effects on the community (the current people in it and what might make them leave, the kinds of people who are more likely to become new entrants) that I’m more concerned with.
I anticipate that the rationalists would have to face a similar problem but to a lesser degree, since the idea that well-kept gardens die by pacifism is more in the water there, and they are more ambivalent about scaling the community. But EA should scale, because its ideas are good, and this leaves it in a much more tricky situation.
I think the other missing piece is “what will this money do to the community fabric, what are the trade-offs we can take to make the community fabric more resilient and robust, and are those trade-offs worth it?”
When it comes to funding effective charities, I agree that having more money is straightforwardly good. It’s the second-order effects on the community (the current people in it and what might make them leave, the kinds of people who are more likely to become new entrants) that I’m more concerned with.
I anticipate that the rationalists would have to face a similar problem but to a lesser degree, since the idea that well-kept gardens die by pacifism is more in the water there, and they are more ambivalent about scaling the community. But EA should scale, because its ideas are good, and this leaves it in a much more tricky situation.
I’ll just note that when the original conversation started, I addressed this in a few parts.
To summarize, I think that yes, EA should be enormous, but it should not be a global community, and it needs to grapple with how the current community works, and figure out how to avoid ideological conformity.