Thanks for writing this post, I’ve been thinking about this framing recently. Although more because I felt like I was member-first when I started community building and now I am much more cause-first when I’m thinking about how to have the most impact.
I don’t agree with some of the categorisations in the table and think there are quite a few that don’t fall on the cause/member axis. For example you could have member first outreach that is highly deferential (GiveWell suggestions) and cause-first outreach that brings together very different people that disagree with EA.
Also when you say the downsides of cause-first are that it led to lock in or lack of diversification I feel like those are more likely due to earlier on member-first focus in EA.
(I generally don’t feel that happy with my proposed definitions and the categorization in the table, and I hope other people could make better distinctions and framing for thinking about EA community strategy. )
I don’t quite share your intuition on the couple of examples you suggest, and I wonder whether that’s because our definitions differ or because the categorization really is off/misleading/inaccurate.
For me, your first example shows that the relation to deference doesn’t necessarily result from a choice of the overall strategy, but I still expect it to usually be correlated (unless strong and direct effort is taken to change focus on deference).
And for the second example, I think I view a kind of “member first” strategy as (gradually) pushing for more cause-neutrality, whereas the cause-first is okay with stopping once a person is focused on a high-impact cause.
When I started community building I would see the 20 people who turned up most regularly or had regular conversations with and I would focus on how I could help them improve their impact, often in relatively small ways.
Over time I realised that some of the people that were potentially having the biggest impact weren’t turning up to events regularly, maybe we just had one conversation in four years, but they were able to shift into more impactful careers. Partially because there were many more people who I had 1 chat with than there were people I had 5 chats with, but also the people who are more experienced/busy with work have less time to keep on turning up to EA social events, and they often already had social communities they were a part of.
It also would be surprising/suspicious if the actions that make members the happiest also happened to be the best solution for allocating talent to problems.
Thanks for writing this post, I’ve been thinking about this framing recently. Although more because I felt like I was member-first when I started community building and now I am much more cause-first when I’m thinking about how to have the most impact.
I don’t agree with some of the categorisations in the table and think there are quite a few that don’t fall on the cause/member axis. For example you could have member first outreach that is highly deferential (GiveWell suggestions) and cause-first outreach that brings together very different people that disagree with EA.
Also when you say the downsides of cause-first are that it led to lock in or lack of diversification I feel like those are more likely due to earlier on member-first focus in EA.
(I generally don’t feel that happy with my proposed definitions and the categorization in the table, and I hope other people could make better distinctions and framing for thinking about EA community strategy. )
I don’t quite share your intuition on the couple of examples you suggest, and I wonder whether that’s because our definitions differ or because the categorization really is off/misleading/inaccurate.
For me, your first example shows that the relation to deference doesn’t necessarily result from a choice of the overall strategy, but I still expect it to usually be correlated (unless strong and direct effort is taken to change focus on deference).
And for the second example, I think I view a kind of “member first” strategy as (gradually) pushing for more cause-neutrality, whereas the cause-first is okay with stopping once a person is focused on a high-impact cause.
Do you mean, “the most impact as a community builder”?
I guess the overlap is quite high for myself between ‘impact’ and ‘impact as a community builder’.
Thanks, that makes sense. Can you say a bit about what has changed, and in what way you now focus more on impact?
When I started community building I would see the 20 people who turned up most regularly or had regular conversations with and I would focus on how I could help them improve their impact, often in relatively small ways.
Over time I realised that some of the people that were potentially having the biggest impact weren’t turning up to events regularly, maybe we just had one conversation in four years, but they were able to shift into more impactful careers. Partially because there were many more people who I had 1 chat with than there were people I had 5 chats with, but also the people who are more experienced/busy with work have less time to keep on turning up to EA social events, and they often already had social communities they were a part of.
It also would be surprising/suspicious if the actions that make members the happiest also happened to be the best solution for allocating talent to problems.