Suppose you have discovered a great way to help the world. Now you face a trade-off: how should you balance pursuing this directly against spreading the word and convincing others to help pursue it?

While direct work has some movement growth effects, it is usually not a very effective way of movement building, so there is a meaningful choice between direct work and (effective) movement growth.

In order to make the best decisions, it’s useful to think about how valuable growing the movement is compared to the direct work. This is very hard to know for sure, since we never get to see how all the counterfactuals play out.

The effective altruism movement is concerned with using evidence and reason to do the most good it can in the world. It is currently quite small (in the thousands of people, probably the low thousands) and growing rapidly (for example membership of Giving What We Can has roughly doubled each year).

My impressions are that it is possible the movement could get very large – millions of people within twenty to fifty years. Until we have ruled this out, it is important to keep movement growth a priority and to weight improving inclinations more than increasing awareness in many trade-offs.

 

Read the full article on movement growth by Owen Cotton-Barratt at Effective Altruism