One thing I’ve wondered about is what the optimal rate at which new EA organizations should be founded, and whether that’s an effective way around growth bottlenecks. For example, Rethink Priorities has grown rapidly this year, and it doesn’t seem likely that that growth would have happened anyway within previously existing organizations had Rethink Priorities not been founded.
It’s very likely that more organizations help, up to a point. The limit, as I think I failed to make clear, but is implicit, is that coordination pressure/failure always exist. They are either between organizations, or within them. Large organizations have scaling efficiencies because they can coordinate at lower cost than markets. (This is what a couple economists won nobels for recently, for work now referred to as the theory of the firm.) Those efficiencies are greatly reduced when multiple organizations are involved, but I think a few of my suggestions—specialization, referral of promising work, and coordinating bodies—might help somewhat with that.
I would (a bit weakly) agree that as of three years ago, growth of new EA organizations was probably a bit below optimal. I’m not following all of the threads of organizations closely, but from what I have seen, I would (even more weakly) guess that the rate of new organizations forming now is probably at or above the point of effective returns, at least for existential risk organizations. That’s why I think coordination is particularly useful now. Still, attempts to find anything like an optimal rate seem like a waste of time. We simply don’t understand the questions or the domain well enough to conclusively answer the question, except perhaps approximately and in retrospect. (Even if we did have such understanding or insight, I don’t think we would be able to convince anyone to follow the guidelines, given that the optimum rate is almost certainly not a Nash equilibrium.)
One thing I’ve wondered about is what the optimal rate at which new EA organizations should be founded, and whether that’s an effective way around growth bottlenecks. For example, Rethink Priorities has grown rapidly this year, and it doesn’t seem likely that that growth would have happened anyway within previously existing organizations had Rethink Priorities not been founded.
It’s very likely that more organizations help, up to a point. The limit, as I think I failed to make clear, but is implicit, is that coordination pressure/failure always exist. They are either between organizations, or within them. Large organizations have scaling efficiencies because they can coordinate at lower cost than markets. (This is what a couple economists won nobels for recently, for work now referred to as the theory of the firm.) Those efficiencies are greatly reduced when multiple organizations are involved, but I think a few of my suggestions—specialization, referral of promising work, and coordinating bodies—might help somewhat with that.
I would (a bit weakly) agree that as of three years ago, growth of new EA organizations was probably a bit below optimal. I’m not following all of the threads of organizations closely, but from what I have seen, I would (even more weakly) guess that the rate of new organizations forming now is probably at or above the point of effective returns, at least for existential risk organizations. That’s why I think coordination is particularly useful now. Still, attempts to find anything like an optimal rate seem like a waste of time. We simply don’t understand the questions or the domain well enough to conclusively answer the question, except perhaps approximately and in retrospect. (Even if we did have such understanding or insight, I don’t think we would be able to convince anyone to follow the guidelines, given that the optimum rate is almost certainly not a Nash equilibrium.)