Any ideas of what projects would work better when separated from the EA brand? Perhaps, EA policy for one because of the difficulties posed by political interests.
There are already several projects/organisations associated with EA under different names such as: Givewell (pre-dated EA), Founder's pledge, Giving What We Can Pledge, Effective Giving. Even LessWrong is an excellent source of people to join EA and it wouldn't work as well if it were EA rationality.
Definitely would like to see more projects developing out of EA. I'm curious if you have any thoughts for what else could be split out of EA.
The question of tradeoffs between X and Y and winners' curses reminds me of Bostrom's paper, The Unilateralist's Curse.
From the abstract:
In some situations a number of agents each have the ability to
undertake an initiative that would have significant effects on the others. Suppose
that each of these agents is purely motivated by an altruistic concern for the
common good. We show that if each agent acts on her own personal judgment as to
whether the initiative should be undertaken, then the initiative will move forward
more often than is optimal. We suggest that this phenomenon, which we call the
unilateralist’s curse, arises in many contexts, including some that are important for
public policy. To lift the curse, we propose a principle of conformity, which would
discourage unilateralist action. We consider three different models for how this
principle could be implemented, and respond to some objections that could be raised
against it.
Is the idea that a single organization should pursue X or Y and not worry about the fact that any given donors will value both X and Y to varying degrees?
(If so I might have called this organization-independence, or single-focus.)
I got the idea from someone who suggested that if donors would fund some organization-leaders to do task A, and those leaders think B is more valuable, then the donors should usually fund them to do B. In one version of the claim, the donors' role then is to make some global assessment of how worthy they are of funds, and not to argue much about strategy. This kind of thing could apply if the organization is focused on X only, half X and half Y et cetera.
I'm not sure what you mean about an exchange rate. Isn't a Pareto improvement something that makes everyone better off (or rather: someone better off and no one worse off)?
Say we value article views and user signups. If I'm taking actions that achieve n views for each lost signup and you're taking actions that achieve m signups per lost view, where m < 1/n, then we could get a pareto improvement by doing less of both of these things.
Each leader takes small steps to avoid trading off others' goals too aggressively.
This seems hard, especially depending on what kind of project you are doing. Startups, for example, are often pretty extreme in their trade-offs. Compromising would lead to a sub-par solution.
On the other hand, for a startup-style outreach-focused project, substantial value comes from the case where the project outgrows the EA movement.
Yup, this is the classic "build your own market" vs "take over existing market." Companies that do really well usually end up expanding or creating a market. (For example, AirBnB allowed a lot more people than before to easily rent out their homes.) However, it's often easier to start by capturing / competing in a small market. So it seems best to me to start with a relatively small market, like EA, but have the brand and product aimed at a broader market. (Which is what I think you are saying.)
Any ideas of what projects would work better when separated from the EA brand? Perhaps, EA policy for one because of the difficulties posed by political interests.
There are already several projects/organisations associated with EA under different names such as: Givewell (pre-dated EA), Founder's pledge, Giving What We Can Pledge, Effective Giving. Even LessWrong is an excellent source of people to join EA and it wouldn't work as well if it were EA rationality.
Definitely would like to see more projects developing out of EA. I'm curious if you have any thoughts for what else could be split out of EA.
The question of tradeoffs between X and Y and winners' curses reminds me of Bostrom's paper, The Unilateralist's Curse.
From the abstract:
Nice! That's exactly what I have in mind. The hope is to flesh out how this would and should be addressed in practice.
Is the idea that a single organization should pursue X or Y and not worry about the fact that any given donors will value both X and Y to varying degrees?
(If so I might have called this organization-independence, or single-focus.)
Fair to paraphrase as: donor-as-silent-partner?
I got the idea from someone who suggested that if donors would fund some organization-leaders to do task A, and those leaders think B is more valuable, then the donors should usually fund them to do B. In one version of the claim, the donors' role then is to make some global assessment of how worthy they are of funds, and not to argue much about strategy. This kind of thing could apply if the organization is focused on X only, half X and half Y et cetera.
I'm not sure what you mean about an exchange rate. Isn't a Pareto improvement something that makes everyone better off (or rather: someone better off and no one worse off)?
Say we value article views and user signups. If I'm taking actions that achieve n views for each lost signup and you're taking actions that achieve m signups per lost view, where m < 1/n, then we could get a pareto improvement by doing less of both of these things.
This seems hard, especially depending on what kind of project you are doing. Startups, for example, are often pretty extreme in their trade-offs. Compromising would lead to a sub-par solution.
Yup, this is the classic "build your own market" vs "take over existing market." Companies that do really well usually end up expanding or creating a market. (For example, AirBnB allowed a lot more people than before to easily rent out their homes.) However, it's often easier to start by capturing / competing in a small market. So it seems best to me to start with a relatively small market, like EA, but have the brand and product aimed at a broader market. (Which is what I think you are saying.)