AppliedDivinityStudies

Follow up to Monday's post Why Hasn't Effective Altruism Grown Since 2015?. See discussions on r/scc, LessWrong and EA Forum. I'm honored to have received responses from Scott Alexander, Katja Grace (AI Impacts), Peter Hurford (Rethink Priorities), and Rob Bensinger (MIRI), among many other insightful replies. This is a long post, so I'm going to put the summary first: * EA has shifted from "earning to give" to "talent-focus", leading to less of as mass movement. * By some metrics, EA is continuing to grow. Most notably, non-Open Phil donations to Give Well causes are way up the last few years. * Good Ventures is intentionally holding off increased giving while Give Well and Open Philanthropy build capacity. In short: EA is stagnating in some ways, and not in others. Overall, this seems to be according to plan, and is not a failure of growth funding to achieve its stated cause. EA has shifted from "money-focus" to "talent-focus", and is bottlenecked by research debt Scott Alexander provides a useful history: Around 2014, Good Ventures stepped in and started providing a huge amount of money. For comparison, Giving What We Can has recorded $222 million in donations ever, Good Ventures gives around that much every year. This made "earning to give" much less compelling. [1] Second, as EA has grown, it's become harder and harder to rise quickly and get a "good" job at a top institution: > there's a general sense that most things have been explored, there are rules and institutions, and it's more of a problem of learning an existing field and breaking into an existing social network rather than being part of a project of building something new. These are both compelling to me, but we shouldn't be fatalistic about the latter and just accept that intellectual movements have limited capacity. Effective altruism is aware of the problem, or at least of something similar From MIRI: > Imagine that you have been tasked with moving a cube of solid iron that is one met