This surprised me—wouldn’t you expect 1 and 2 to directly slow growth somewhat, e.g. by putting people off or causing growth projects to fail to meet their goals? (Maybe you just don’t think these were very significant?)
“fundamentally, why has growth not sped up?”
I think it’s good to ask “what was the relative importance of these factors?”, but the framing of “fundamentally, why has growth not sped up?” seems to be implicitly pushing towards there being a single explanation. I think there were probably multiple significant factors.
Re your last para, I hope that CEA’s plans are part of the answer, although I think it’s good for us to pursue a variety of approaches—e.g. I also think it’s good for GWWC to spread its message somewhat more quickly/widely.
I’d agree that on the current margin, “EAs getting harder to find” could be a factor, as well as some combination of things like (#2-4).
Having said that, what seems like an underrated fact is that although EA outreach (CEA/80k/CFAR) deploys less funds than EA research (FHI/MIRI/CSER/...), a priori, I’d expect outreach to scale better—since research has to be more varied, and requires more specific skills. This leads to the question: why we don’t we yet have a proof of concept for turning ~$100M into high quality movement growth? Maybe this is the biggest issue. (#2) can explain why CEA hasn’t offered this. (#4) is more comprehensive, because it explain why 80k and others haven’t.
This surprised me—wouldn’t you expect 1 and 2 to directly slow growth somewhat, e.g. by putting people off or causing growth projects to fail to meet their goals? (Maybe you just don’t think these were very significant?)
I think it’s good to ask “what was the relative importance of these factors?”, but the framing of “fundamentally, why has growth not sped up?” seems to be implicitly pushing towards there being a single explanation. I think there were probably multiple significant factors.
Re your last para, I hope that CEA’s plans are part of the answer, although I think it’s good for us to pursue a variety of approaches—e.g. I also think it’s good for GWWC to spread its message somewhat more quickly/widely.
I’d agree that on the current margin, “EAs getting harder to find” could be a factor, as well as some combination of things like (#2-4).
Having said that, what seems like an underrated fact is that although EA outreach (CEA/80k/CFAR) deploys less funds than EA research (FHI/MIRI/CSER/...), a priori, I’d expect outreach to scale better—since research has to be more varied, and requires more specific skills. This leads to the question: why we don’t we yet have a proof of concept for turning ~$100M into high quality movement growth? Maybe this is the biggest issue. (#2) can explain why CEA hasn’t offered this. (#4) is more comprehensive, because it explain why 80k and others haven’t.