Today, a few Bay Area EAs and myself are asking the question, "How can we measure whether the EA movement is winning?"
Intutively, deciding on a win condition seems important for answering this question. Most social movements appear to have win conditions. These win conditions refer to a state of the world that looks different from the world's present state, and they are often even implicit within the movement's name (e.g., abolishionism, animal rights).
What does winning look like for EA? And how do we know if we're winning?
Discuss!
I was reading Lifeblood by Alex Perry (it details the story of malaria bed nets). The book initially criticizes a lot of aid organizations because Perry claims that the aim of aid should be "for the day it's no longer needed". E.g., the goal of the Canadian Cancer Society should be to aim for the day when cancer research is unnecessary because we've already figured out how to beat it. However, what aid organizations actually do is expand to fill a whole range of other needs, which is somewhat suboptimal.
In this case, EA is really no exception. Suppose that in the future, we've tackled global poverty, animal welfare, and climate change/AI risk/etc. We would just move on to the next most important thing in EA. Of course, EA is separate from classical aid organizations, because it's closer to a movement/philosophy than a single aid effort. Nevertheless, I still think it might be useful to define "winning" as "alleviating a need for something". This could be something like "to reach a day when we no longer need to support GiveDirectly [because we've already eliminated poverty/destitution/because we've reached a quality of wealth redistribution such that nobody is living below X dollars a year]."
On that note, for Effective Altruist organizations, I imagine that 'not being needed' means 'not continuing to be the best use of our resources', or, 'have faced significant diminishing marginal returns to additional work'. That said, the condition for an organization to rationally end is different than their success condition.
On obvious point: Most organizations/causes have multiple increasingly-large success conditions. There's not one 'success condition', but a progressive set of improvements. We won't 'win' as an abstract term. I mean, I don't thin... (read more)