I think this line of thinking has influenced a lot of community building efforts, mostly for better. But it feels a bit inside-baseball: I'm not sure how much I want meta pieces like this highlighted in "best of EA's first decade".

I mostly agree with this. No need to reinvent the wheel, and armchair theorizing is so tempting, while sorting through the literature can be painful. But I will say your reason #1 (the typical sociological research is of very poor quality) leads to a second effect: scouring the literature for the useful bits (of which I am sure there is plenty) is very difficult and time consuming.

If we were talking about ending global poverty, we would not be postulating new models of economic development. Why should we demand any less empirical/academic rigor in the context of movement building?

I can tell you that when financial quants want to make money, they spend some time reading the academic literature on the market, but they are often very critical of its quality and usefulness for real-life decisions.

So what we really need are people to say "this particular topic was already addressed by this particular reference". Too often, the criticism to reinventing the wheel is "you should just read this vaguely defined body of work, most of which is inapplicable".

Note that we're not planning for this to be a focus area for GPP. We saw an opportunity to do something fairly quickly as it was based on existing insights that have come up in a few areas (the natural length of the paper expanded as I wrote it, and it ended up taking probably one to two weeks).

The main aim of this work was to give people in this community better tools for thinking about the counterfactual value of marginal movement-growing efforts. It should be complementary to empirical work; it might both help to interpret data, and to identify valuable information to seek out. I've been in quite a few conversations where people were unsure about how to count the value of attracting someone to the movement, even in principle. (There is also quite a lot of speculation in Part 2 of the paper, clearly flagged as such -- this was expanded because readers of earlier drafts wanted more examples of how to interpret the concepts.)

I think it's plausible this is covered in existing research, and would be very happy to discover it if so. I did look, but not deeply; I also spoke to people at EAO who had looked into more of the literature on social movements and were still wondering about these questions. I wouldn't be shocked if it isn't, though. I think EAs are unusually consequentialist, so the question they want to answer is "what's the (expected) total long-run effect of a bit more of this today?". This is not an easy question to get data on. Most academic areas rightly spend time exploring under the streetlight, because we can actually learn there, and the lessons may be transferable to darker regions. The literature on movement building seems to focus on shorter-term effects, presumably because you can get better answers there. I think such work is very valuable and worth paying attention to for finding out the relationship between interventions and short-term effects. I was trying to fill a gap by talking about how short-term effects translate into long-term effects, and therefore which short term effects are worth targeting.

I am concerned that we are reinventing the wheel, and ignoring a substantial body of empirical and theoretical work that has already been done on the subject.

I share this concern, and believe that EAs are often guilty of ignoring existing fields of research from which they could learn a lot. I'm not sure whether this concern applies in this particular case, however. I spent several days looking into the sociological literature on social movements and didn't find much of value. Have you stumbled across any writings that you would recommend?

A key factor, which will vary between movements, will be how much the opposition cares and acts. Some thing elicit more hostile actions than others, not necessarily in proportion to the extent to which they elicit positive actions from other sectors of the population. Likewise, for some movements everyone starts with a tendency towards positive or neutral inclination.

Here are some 'polling data points' I gave Owen on various questions and claims he included (saying that I thought I should largely list areas where I have negative answers or disagree, leaving aside the many where I agree, and that he could more often than not take me as agreeing with what I haven't commented on). I'm curious as to other people's views - I imagine I could guess some!

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"the movement has a natural maximum size that we cannot change"

I wouldn't be surprised by this (within some bounds.)

"it is very hard to change inclination"

I wouldn't be surprised by this. On this point and some others, see https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/867500613306297/?qa_ref=qd and my comments under that. I think what Tyler asked about is an important fact.

"the views of people around them have a significant effect on the inclinations of people towards the movement"

This is complex, and there are different subquestions here, but I think people may overestimate this.

"building political consensus will be useful for the direct work"

I doubt this is an important factor for efficient global poverty charity, partly because there's a relatively uncontroversial global poverty movement anyway, which any lobbying could be presented (and will likely automatically be perceived) as part of.

"Increasing awareness of the movement is important, but increasing positive inclination may be even more important."

I disagree.

For EA: " It seems that it would be hard to run out of effective things to do, so Saturation is impossible."

However, the saturation chart isn't impossible - that could be a result of reaching all the efficiently reachable people who are ever going to be EAs, rather than of running out of effective things to do.

For EA: "the movement could get very large"

I'm sceptical. It'd help to indicate roughly what very large means though.

For Owen's very approximate numerical estimates for EA: "I’d be mildly surprised if they were wrong by much over an order of magnitude"

I wouldn't, especially for numbers you honestly say "are basically pulled out of my head".

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Anyway, there ends my laundry list of negative answers! I found it a very helpful paper which clarified my conceptual breakdown of the issues, and as Owen said helped identify and provide labels for disagreements.

Thoughts on how favorably or unfavorably pursuing movement-building compares to other EA career paths?

It's useful to think about the relative difficulty of changing inclination and awareness - and the size of the viable changes in each, and whether they will affect people's actions. These would affect the size of the horizontal vs. vertical arrows in Owen's charts.