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The Haste Consideration, Revisited

reducing-suffering.org · 3,212 words · saved by 1 readers

Internal rates of return for charity are high, but they may not be as high as they seem naively. Haste is important, but because long-term growth is logistic rather than exponential, it's less important than has been suggested by some. That said, if artificial general intelligence (AGI) comes soon and exponential growth does not level off too quickly, naive haste may still be roughly appropriate. There are other factors for and against haste that parallel donate-vs.-invest considerations. Restating the summary in simpler language: Movements should saturate or at least show diminishing returns at some point, so that movement building sooner amounts to either just a few more years of the movement existing or only modest marginal increases in the movement's size. These impacts could still matter—they're just not as extreme as in a naive model in which, if it takes 2 years to create a hard-core altruist, then starting 2 years earlier doubles the long-term number of altruists. In a thought-

By Brian Tomasik First published: 2013 Feb 03 . Last nontrivial update: 2018 Apr 19 . Summary Internal rates of return for charity are high, but they may not be as high as they seem naively. Haste is important, but because long-term growth is logistic rather than exponential, it's less important than has been suggested by some. That said, if artificial general intelligence (AGI) comes soon and exponential growth does not level off too quickly, naive haste may still be roughly appropriate. There are other factors for and against haste that parallel donate-vs.-invest considerations. Restating th

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