Thanks for writing this and contributing to the conversation :)

Relatedly, an “efficient market for ideas” hypothesis would suggest that if MB really was important, neglected, and tractable, then other more experienced and influential EAs would have already raised its salience.

I do think the salience of movement building has been raised elsewhere eg:

• 80,000 Hours do have a problem profile on it and consider it one of the most pressing problems to work on
• The work around patient philanthropy has analogues to movement building (see Nuno Sempere’s in-progress paper extending this thinking to movement growth explicitly)
• A bunch of other places eg. I really like this piece on movement growth 

Having said that, I share the feeling that movement building seems underrated. Given how impactful it seems, I would expect more EAs to want to use their careers to work on movement building.

One resolution to this apparent conflict is that the fraction of people who can be good at movement building long-term might be smaller than it first seems. For lots of the interventions that you suggest, strong social skills and a strong understanding of EA concepts seem important, as well as some general executional or project management ability. Though movement builders don’t necessarily have to be excellent in any of these domains, they have to be at least pretty good at all of them. They also have to be interested enough in all of them to do movement building. This narrows down the pool of people who can work in movement building. 

Another possible reason is that  within the EA community movement building careers are generally seen as less prestigious than more ‘direct’ kinds of work and social incentives play a large role in career choice. For example, some people would be more impressed by someone doing technical AI safety research than by someone building talent pipelines into AI safety, even if the second one has more impact.

Also, as Aaron says, a lot of direct work has helpful movement building effects. 

I also agree with Aaron that looking at funding is a bit complicated with movement building, partly because movement building is probably cheaper than other things, but also that it can be hard to tease apart what's movement building and what's not. 

You really don't seem like a troll! I think the discussion in the comments on this post is a very valuable conversation and I've been following it closely. I think it would be helpful for quite a few people for you to keep responding to comments

Of course, it's probably a lot of effort to keep replying carefully to things, so understandable if you don't have time :)

Thanks! I appreciate it :)

It makes me feel anxious to get a lot of downvotes with no explanation so I really appreciate your comment.

Just to clarify when you say "if that is a real tradeoff that a founder faces in practice, it is nearly always an indication the founder just hasn't bothered to put much time or effort into cultivating a diverse professional network" I think I agree, but that this isn't always something the founder could have predicted ahead of time, and the founder isn't necessarily to blame. I think it can be very easy to 'accidentally' end up with a fairly homogeneous network eg. because your profession or university is homogenous. Sounds like Marcus is in this category himself (if tennis is mainly white, and his network is mainly tennis players).

Was this meant as a reply to my comment or a reply to Ben's comment?

I was just asking what the position was and made explicit I wasn't suggesting Marcus change the website.

Yep! I assumed this kind of thing was the case (and obviously was just flagging it as something to be aware of, not trying to finger-wag)

I don't find anything wrong at all with 'saintly' personally, and took it as a joke. But I could imagine someone taking it the wrong way. Maybe I'd see what others on the forum think

It looks like all the founders, advisory team, and athletes are white or white-passing. I guess you're already aware of this as something to consider, but it seems worth flagging (particularly given the use of 'Saintly' for those donating 10% :/).

Some discussion of why this might matter here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YCPc4qTSoyuj54ZZK/why-and-how-to-make-progress-on-diversity-and-inclusion-in

Edit: In fact, while I think appearing all-white and implicitly describing some of your athletes as 'Saintly' are both acceptable PR risks, having the combination of them both is pretty worrying and I'd personally be in favour of changing it.

Edited to address downvotes: Obviously, it is not bad in itself that the team if the team is all white, and I'm not implying that any deliberate filtering for white people has gone on. I just think it's something to be aware of - both for PR reasons (avoiding look like white saviours) and for more substantive reasons (eg. building a movement and sub-movements that can draw on a range of experiences)

Some of the wording on the 'Take the Pledge' section seems a little bit off (to me at least!). Eg. saying a 1-10% pledge will 'likely have zero noticeable impact on your standard of living' seems misleading, and could give off the impression that the pledge is only for the very wealthy (for whom the statement is more likely to be true). I'm also not sure about the 'Saintly' categorisation of the highest giving level (10%). It could come across as a bit smug or saviour-ish. I'm not sure about the tradeoffs here though and obviously you have much more context than me.

Maybe you've done this already, but it could be good to ask Luke from GWWC for advice on tone here.

I see you mention that HIA's recommendations are based on a suffering-focused perspective. It's great that you're clear about where you're coming from/what you're optimising for. To explore the ethical perspective of HIA further - what is HIA's position on longtermism?

(I'm not saying you should mention your take on longtermism on the website.)