(Weakly held personal opinion) I would go further and say that you attract people like you.[1]If what you or your core group is signalling most to outsiders are your community building (or marketing) qualities, you’re likely to attract folks who are also keen on community building (and put off folks who are likely keen on the object level work you’re recruiting for).
Here’s an intuition pump I have. Imagine two EA uni group websites that are exactly the same except for one difference in their profile page:
Website A showcases students who have internships in orgs solving x-risk issues, has co-published a paper on cost-effective poverty interventions, wrote a series of blog posts on effective animal advocacy, etc.
Website B showcases students who have basically none of the above
I feel pretty confident that A will attract the right kinds of people into EA.
I also feel somewhat confident that B will be a net negative. I could imagine that each cohort of students coming into B gets worse in quality each year, until it becomes “ponzi scheme’ish” entity.
(Weakly held personal opinion) I would go further and say that you attract people like you.[1]If what you or your core group is signalling most to outsiders are your community building (or marketing) qualities, you’re likely to attract folks who are also keen on community building (and put off folks who are likely keen on the object level work you’re recruiting for).
Here’s an intuition pump I have. Imagine two EA uni group websites that are exactly the same except for one difference in their profile page:
Website A showcases students who have internships in orgs solving x-risk issues, has co-published a paper on cost-effective poverty interventions, wrote a series of blog posts on effective animal advocacy, etc.
Website B showcases students who have basically none of the above
I feel pretty confident that A will attract the right kinds of people into EA.
I also feel somewhat confident that B will be a net negative. I could imagine that each cohort of students coming into B gets worse in quality each year, until it becomes “ponzi scheme’ish” entity.
https://medium.com/@michelbachmann/start-with-who-15b8857ed718