*Rohin Shah (don’t worry about it, it’s a ridiculously common mistake)
I also find Ben Todd’s post on focusing on growth rather than upfront provable marginal impact to be promising and convincing
While I generally agree with the argument that you should focus on growth rather than upfront provable marginal impact, I think you should take the specific argument comparing with vegetarians with many grains of salt. That’s speculative enough that there are lots of similarly plausible arguments in both directions, and I don’t see strong reasons to prefer any specific one.
For example: Perhaps high growth is bad because people don’t have deep engagement and it waters down the EA movement. Perhaps vegetarianism is about as demanding as GWWC, but vegetarianism fits more peoples values than GWWC (environmentalism, animal suffering, health vs. caring about everyone equally). Perhaps GWWC is as demanding and as broadly applicable as vegetarianism, but actually it took hundreds of years to get 1% of the developed world to be vegetarian and it will take similar amounts of effort here. And so on.
I think looking at specifically how a metacharity plans to grow, and how well their plans to grow have worked in the past, is a much better indicator than these sorts of speculative arguments. (The speculative arguments are a good way to argue against “we have reached capacity”, which I think was how Ben intended them, but they’re not a great argument for the meta charity.)
*Rohin Shah (don’t worry about it, it’s a ridiculously common mistake)
While I generally agree with the argument that you should focus on growth rather than upfront provable marginal impact, I think you should take the specific argument comparing with vegetarians with many grains of salt. That’s speculative enough that there are lots of similarly plausible arguments in both directions, and I don’t see strong reasons to prefer any specific one.
For example: Perhaps high growth is bad because people don’t have deep engagement and it waters down the EA movement. Perhaps vegetarianism is about as demanding as GWWC, but vegetarianism fits more peoples values than GWWC (environmentalism, animal suffering, health vs. caring about everyone equally). Perhaps GWWC is as demanding and as broadly applicable as vegetarianism, but actually it took hundreds of years to get 1% of the developed world to be vegetarian and it will take similar amounts of effort here. And so on.
I think looking at specifically how a metacharity plans to grow, and how well their plans to grow have worked in the past, is a much better indicator than these sorts of speculative arguments. (The speculative arguments are a good way to argue against “we have reached capacity”, which I think was how Ben intended them, but they’re not a great argument for the meta charity.)