I feel that effective altruism has been growing more slowly than is ideal and has the capacity to grow faster. I also feel that faster growth has an extremely positive best-case scenario, and a worst-case scenario that is both highly unlikely and no worse than the status quo. Finally, I feel that rapid growth is highly impactful, highly tractable, and highly neglected, even when compared to other movement-building work, and I believe that rapid growth should be a focus of EA movement-building. For now, I would like to open a possible series on the subject by presenting a simple thought-experiment that gives my intuition in favor of rapid growth. Later, I plan to address potential criticisms at length.
A strong presumption in favor of growth
Let's imagine that the EA movement as a whole went for mass appeal back when it started, and continued that through to the present day. Newspaper columns, online ads, clubs at every major university in the world, etc. And as a result, EA has a hundred times as many people in it as it does now.
Also, for the sake of argument, let's imagine that the community as a whole screwed up massively at doing so. 99% of EAs, in this world, misunderstand at least one core EA principle. Many of them just wanted to get high-paying tech jobs, and think EA would help them with networking. Basically everyone thinks that earning to give is the be-all end-all of impact, and most of them thinks that just means "donating money."
And suppose that you are now the head of a major EA organization, tasked with solving this problem. What solutions would you go for?
Probably there are a lot of good answers. You could open more intro fellowships to teach core EA principles to new people. You could write more resources intended for new EAs to learn about different cause areas. You could adopt new procedures internally to ensure proper organization even in the face of many new hires who don't yet know the ropes.
At no stage in this process of proposing suggestions would you suggest kicking out the 99% of EAs who misunderstand core EA principles.
This makes it seem that status quo bias is a large factor in current decisions against rapid growth strategies, suggesting that rapid growth strategies are neglected compared to other movement-building approaches. In later posts, I plan to address the most common criticisms of rapid growth strategies, and show that they are not significant enough to override the intuitive presumption in favor of rapid growth.
Of course there are some theoretical reasons for growing fast. But theory only gets you so far, on this issue. Rather, this question depends on whether growing EA is promising currently (I lean against) compared to other projects one could grow. Even if EA looks like the right thing to build, you need to talk to people who have seen EA grow and contract at various rates over the last 15 years, to understand which modes of growth have been healthier, and have contributed to gained capacity, rather than just an increase in raw numbers. In my experience, one of the least healthy phases of EA was when there was the heaviest emphasis on growth, perhaps around 1.5-4 years ago, whereas it seemed to do better pretty-much all of the other times.