This is an excellent example of a powerful advantage EA/Non-profit has over non-EA/for-profit in that we all (in theory) have the same goal—to make the world a better place thus we can play a positive sum game, leveraging collaboration, coordination and reducing duplicating work.
Zero or negative-sum games are also IMO a broader societal problem that we need to put effort and work into fixing, so we should at least be cooperating with EA.
There is also something to be said for growing the pie or that the pie is already big enough to be shared with all, defo in the camp that EA should be a lot bigger and less elitist.
Great post, should have more upvotes IMO, don’t see many people thinking too much about this.
Thoughts on Correlations:
Too much money comes from Tech and Crypto—We should diversify EA funding into pharma, energy, healthcare, transport etc (We could do this by encouraging E2Gers to go in this direction, there are also direct impact opportunities here).
Too much focus on non-profits and not enough focus on for-profits and entrepreneurship—I’ve gotten more sold on for-profits recently, why? The self-reinforcing mechanism of your product funding itself can create a flywheel effect allowing for scale as fast as the possible and pushing impact that is uncapped by funders. It’s worth noting SBF was EA from the start—we should seed the next 5 SBF’s to cover the other 5 (and growing) cause areas of EA.
Too Much Risk Aversion—We play by the rules too much and play it safe often, I think the iterative and empirical approach is great, we have a lot of that stock in our Portfolio as EA, what I think we do not have is that ~10% of our portfolio allocated to high-risk high reward projects. I’d like to see a culture shift into larger risk-taking and more status, money and awards for failures.
Too much stock is put into specific individuals and entities’ opinions and takes—at the end of the day one person’s opinion is just that, in EA as has been previously written about there is a large culture of deference and referencing. Individuals should be encouraged to think for themselves and reduce their level of deference—IMO EA has a bad culture on this front, what are the real chances 80+% of people would come to a specific conclusion on their own (which often happens in EA).