Many people within the Boston EA community seem to have come to it post college and through in-person discussions.
Hmm. I haven't spent much time in the area, but I went to the Cambridge, MA LessWrong/Rationality "MegaMeetup" and it was almost exclusively students. Is there a Boston EA community substantially disjoint from this LW/Rationality group that you're talking about?
More generally, are there many historical examples of movements that experience rapid growth on college campuses but then were able to grow strongly elsewhere? Civil rights and animal welfare are candidates, but I think they mostly fail this test for different reasons.
If you can convince one new person to be an EA for $100k you're more efficient than successfully raising your kid to be one, and that's ignoring time-discounting.
I honestly do not think this is possible, and again I look to religious organizations as examples where (my impression is that) finding effective missionaries is much harder than getting the minimal funding they need to operate at near-maximum efficiency. This is something we need more data on, but I expect a lot of the rosy pictures people have of translating money or other fungibles into EA converts will not stand up to scrutiny, in much the same way that GiveWell has raised by an order of magnitude its estimates of the cost of saving a life in the developing world. I especially think that the initial enthusiasm of new EAers converted through repeatable methods (like 80k hours) will fade more quickly in time than "organic" converts and children raised in EA households (to an even greater extent than for religions).
I think religions mostly expand at first through conversion and then once they start getting diminishing returns switch to expanding through reproduction. EA isn't to this changeover point yet, and isn't likely to be for a while.
Maybe. I have the impression that religions most used missionaries to expand geographically, and hit diminishing returns very quickly once they had a foothold. Basically, I guess that as soon as a potential convert knows the organization exists, you've essentially already hit the wall of diminishing returns. I agree as long as EA stuff has non-structural geographic lumpiness (i.e. geographic concentrations that are a result of accidents of history rather than for intrinsic reasons related to where EA memes are most effective) then EA missionary work may be the major driver of growth. But I think the EA memes are most effective on a wealthy, technologically connected sub-population which we may quickly saturate in just a few years.
I hear many more people describe their own conversion experience as something akin to "I heard the argument, and it just immediately clicked" (even if personal inertia prevented them making immediate drastic changes). I do not hear many people describe it as "I had heard about these ideas a few times, but it was only when Bob [who was supported by EA funding] took the time to sit and talk with me for a few hours that I was convinced." (Again, that's just anecdotal.)
Can we look at the history of the Catholic church during times when new populations of potential converts became accessible through exploration/colonization? What fraction of the church's resources went to missionary work, and did the church reduce its emphasis on having children so that parents would have more free money to give to the church?
Incidentally, these kind of questions are what make me wish we had more EA historians. We could use a lot more data and systematic analysis.
I went to the Cambridge, MA LessWrong/Rationality "MegaMeetup" and it was almost exclusively students
Weird; that's not my memory of it or my perception of the group. The meetup was at Harvard, which meant we had a couple more students than usual, but I think 80%+ of the local people at the meetup were out of school.
At the meetup yesterday night, which I remember better, there were about 15 of us and I think only one student (late 30s statistics grad student).
...Is there a Boston EA community substantially disjoint from this LW/Rationality grou
In "The Immorality of Having Children" (2013, pdf) Rachels presents the "Famine Relief Argument against Having Children":
They present this as a special case of Peter Singer's argument from Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972), which is why they haven't called it something more reasonable like the "Opportunity Cost Argument".
[Note: the use of "Famine Relief" here is in reference to Peter Singer's 1972 example, but famine relief is not where your money does the most good. Treat the argument as "that money would be far better spent on GiveWell's top charities" or whatever organization you think is most effective.]
It's true that having and raising a child is very expensive. They use an estimate of $227k for the direct expenditure through age 18 while noting that college [1] and time costs could make this much higher. Let's use a higher estimate of $500k to account for these. Considered over twenty years, that's $25k/year or $2k/month. This puts it at the top of the range of expenses, next to housing. It's also true that this money can do a lot of good when spent on effective charities. At GiveWell's current best estimate of $2.3k this is enough money to save nearly one life per month. [2]
But perhaps we shouldn't be thinking of this money as an expense at all, and instead more as an investment? Could having kids be a contender for the most effective charity? That is, could having and raising kids be one of the most effective things you could do with your time and money?
For example you could convince your kid to be unusually generous, donating far more than they cost to raise. Except that it's much cheaper to convince other people's kids to be generous, and our influence on the adult behavior of our children is not that big. Alternatively, if you're unusually smart, by having kids you could help make there be more smart people in the future. But how many more generations will pass before we learn enough about the genetics of intelligence to make this aspect of parental genetics irrelevant? Rachels considers the idea that your having children might greatly benefit the world, and rightly finds it insufficient. While your child may do a lot of good, for the expense there are much better options. Having kids is not a contender for the most effective charity, or even very close.
Having kids is a special case of spending your time and money in ways that make you happy. A moral system for human beings needs to allow some amount of this. It's like working for $56k at a job you enjoy instead of getting $72k at a job you like less. [3] Or spending your free time reading instead of working extra hours building up a consulting business. Keeping in mind both the cost and that on average people don't seem to be happier parenting, if having kids is what would make you most happy for the expense in time and money then it seems justified.
(This is how Julia and I thought of it when deciding whether we should have kids.)
I also posted this on my blog.
[1] College is currently in a huge state of flux. Advertised costs are rising far faster than inflation as colleges realize they can get away with near perfect price discrimination in the form of "either pay the extremely high sticker price or give us all your financial data so we can determine exactly how much you can afford." At the same time online courses and mixed models are getting to where they can provide much of the value of traditional lecture courses, and in some ways do better. I have very little idea what to budget for college for a kid born now; likely costs range from "free" to "all you have".
[2] Rachels uses a much lower number:
Their Brenzel citation is to the Vaccine-Preventable Diseases section of the DCP2. The $205 number is "Estimated cost per death averted for the Traditional Immunization Program in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia" in table 20.5.
[3] This is a $16k difference, which comes from taking $500k over 20 years and dividing by two for the two parents, and then adding some for taxes. Though the earnings difference is likely to last more like 40 years.