Nice document overall, makes a lot of sense. A few small (slightly nit-picky) comments:
Our vision is an optimal world.
This slogan feels a bit off to me. Most EA activities are aimed towards avoiding clearly bad things; the idea of aiming for any specific conception of utopia doesn’t seem to me to represent that very well. There’s a lot of disagreement over what sort of worlds would be optimal, or whether that concept even makes sense.
People for whom doing good is a goal in their life, who are open to changing their focus
I’m not sure either of these things is a crucial characteristic of the people you should be targeting. Consider someone working in an EA cause area who’s not open to changing their focus, and who joined that area solely out of personal interest, but who nevertheless is interested in EA ideas and contributes a lot of useful things to the community (career guidance, support, etc).
We also will attempt to track the following metrics to inform strategy...
While I’m sure you’ll have a holistic approach towards these metrics, they all fall into the broad bucket of “do more standard EA things”. I have some concerns that this leads to people overfitting to ingroup incentives. So I’d suggest also prioritising something like “promoting the general competence and skills of group members”. For example, there are a bunch of EA London people currently working in government. If they informally gave each other advice and mentorship and advanced to more senior roles more rapidly, that would be pretty valuable, but not show up in any of the metrics you mention.
Just want to second Richard’s point about the vision feeling ‘off’. Having an ambitious vision makes sense and I’m somewhat more sympathetic about CEA having this vision but the scope seems disproportionate to the organisation. I would have expected the vision to at least be limited in scope to what can be achieved in London.
Relatedly, we’ve occasionally tried to think of better alternatives to “optimal world” language on CEA’s website. I even tried some timed/targeted brainstorming, and nothing much came out of it. If anyone has suggestions for language that is a bit less utopian but still keeps the “get the best things done” idea, I’d love to hear them!
I agree with everything you said, I guess those three points aren’t things that I think about often but might make sense to update the document to better reflect that.
Nice document overall, makes a lot of sense. A few small (slightly nit-picky) comments:
This slogan feels a bit off to me. Most EA activities are aimed towards avoiding clearly bad things; the idea of aiming for any specific conception of utopia doesn’t seem to me to represent that very well. There’s a lot of disagreement over what sort of worlds would be optimal, or whether that concept even makes sense.
I’m not sure either of these things is a crucial characteristic of the people you should be targeting. Consider someone working in an EA cause area who’s not open to changing their focus, and who joined that area solely out of personal interest, but who nevertheless is interested in EA ideas and contributes a lot of useful things to the community (career guidance, support, etc).
While I’m sure you’ll have a holistic approach towards these metrics, they all fall into the broad bucket of “do more standard EA things”. I have some concerns that this leads to people overfitting to ingroup incentives. So I’d suggest also prioritising something like “promoting the general competence and skills of group members”. For example, there are a bunch of EA London people currently working in government. If they informally gave each other advice and mentorship and advanced to more senior roles more rapidly, that would be pretty valuable, but not show up in any of the metrics you mention.
Just want to second Richard’s point about the vision feeling ‘off’. Having an ambitious vision makes sense and I’m somewhat more sympathetic about CEA having this vision but the scope seems disproportionate to the organisation. I would have expected the vision to at least be limited in scope to what can be achieved in London.
Relatedly, we’ve occasionally tried to think of better alternatives to “optimal world” language on CEA’s website. I even tried some timed/targeted brainstorming, and nothing much came out of it. If anyone has suggestions for language that is a bit less utopian but still keeps the “get the best things done” idea, I’d love to hear them!
I agree with everything you said, I guess those three points aren’t things that I think about often but might make sense to update the document to better reflect that.