The primary value of Effective Altruism community comes from providing a social group where incentives on charity spending are better aligned with utilitarism. Information sharing is secondary. This also explains why people like to attend many EA events. Even though it doesn’t make much sense for actually doing good, it provides the social reward for it. This dynamic is undervalued in impact estimates, and organizing more community-building fun would be quite valuable.
(loosely held opinion)
(motivated reasoning warning: I mostly care about the fun stuff anyway)
Yes, social incentives are important. But it is also important that people donate to actually effective charities… otherwise they could get the same (maybe even better!) social rewards for locating to a local church.
Given that social rewards are usually only very loosely correlated with how good something is, it is great to have a community that aligns them better. But it easy to goodhart these things. (For example by visiting EA events, but actually not donating… maybe with the excuse that “I will donate later… much later...”.)
The primary value of Effective Altruism community comes from providing a social group where incentives on charity spending are better aligned with utilitarism. Information sharing is secondary. This also explains why people like to attend many EA events. Even though it doesn’t make much sense for actually doing good, it provides the social reward for it. This dynamic is undervalued in impact estimates, and organizing more community-building fun would be quite valuable.
(loosely held opinion) (motivated reasoning warning: I mostly care about the fun stuff anyway)
Yes, social incentives are important. But it is also important that people donate to actually effective charities… otherwise they could get the same (maybe even better!) social rewards for locating to a local church.
Given that social rewards are usually only very loosely correlated with how good something is, it is great to have a community that aligns them better. But it easy to goodhart these things. (For example by visiting EA events, but actually not donating… maybe with the excuse that “I will donate later… much later...”.)