What are the low-hanging fruit or outliers of EA community building?
(where community building is defined as growing the number of engaged EAs who are likely to take medium-to-large sized actions in accordance to the EA values and/​or framework. it could include group activities, events, infrastructure building, resource)
the EA community talks a lot about low-hanging fruits and the outlier interventions that are 100x or 1000x better than the next best intervention
it seems plausible that either of these exist for community building
Low hanging fruits
from working in the community building space for the last 2+ years, i have found what i believe are many low-hanging fruit (which are decently impactful) but no extreme outliers that are orders of magnitude more impactful than the next best thing
I think low hanging fruits are relatively neglected areas of community building
The biggest one that I observed is careers advice outside of 80K’s general scope is very neglected, and within those there are mostly similar effectiveness interventions (or at least not 100-1000x apart).
What other low-hanging fruit do you think there are?
Extreme Outliers
i would guess that any outlier interventions could fall into 1 of two categories (which obviously don’t pose undue risk to the community):
Intervention that is moderately to very good at achieving X (where X can be either recruitment, education, engagement or retention, see more), but also have the property of scaling very quickly (e.g. a web service, written resource or a skill that could be taught to many group organisers )
Intervention is very good at recruiting a few extremely engaged, aligned & talented people (the hits based model, where you have 99% failure and 1% success), or getting them engaged (I imagine there’s fewer education or retention interventions)
Do you know of clearly obvious outlier interventions ?
I think introductory fellowships are extreme outlier interventions. EA Philippines’ 8-week Intro to EA Discussion Group (patterned after Stanford’s Arete fellowship) in May-July 2020 was by far our best activity yet. 31 signed up and 15 graduated, and out of the graduates, I believe we’ve created the following counterfactual impact:
One became the president of our student chapter EA Blue
Another became a core team member of EA Blue
Two have since taken the GWWC pledge
Three have become new volunteers (spending ~1-2 hrs/​week) for EA Philippines (we actually got two more volunteers aside from these three, but those two I would say were not counterfactual ones)
Helped lead to a few career plan changes (I will write a separate impact report about EA PH’s 2020, and can talk about this more there).
EA Blue is now doing an Introductory Fellowship similar to ours with 26 participants, which I’m a facilitator for, and I think we’re having similarly good results!
What are the low-hanging fruit or outliers of EA community building?
(where community building is defined as growing the number of engaged EAs who are likely to take medium-to-large sized actions in accordance to the EA values and/​or framework. it could include group activities, events, infrastructure building, resource)
the EA community talks a lot about low-hanging fruits and the outlier interventions that are 100x or 1000x better than the next best intervention
it seems plausible that either of these exist for community building
Low hanging fruits
from working in the community building space for the last 2+ years, i have found what i believe are many low-hanging fruit (which are decently impactful) but no extreme outliers that are orders of magnitude more impactful than the next best thing
I think low hanging fruits are relatively neglected areas of community building
The biggest one that I observed is careers advice outside of 80K’s general scope is very neglected, and within those there are mostly similar effectiveness interventions (or at least not 100-1000x apart).
What other low-hanging fruit do you think there are?
Extreme Outliers
i would guess that any outlier interventions could fall into 1 of two categories (which obviously don’t pose undue risk to the community):
Intervention that is moderately to very good at achieving X (where X can be either recruitment, education, engagement or retention, see more), but also have the property of scaling very quickly (e.g. a web service, written resource or a skill that could be taught to many group organisers )
Intervention is very good at recruiting a few extremely engaged, aligned & talented people (the hits based model, where you have 99% failure and 1% success), or getting them engaged (I imagine there’s fewer education or retention interventions)
Do you know of clearly obvious outlier interventions ?
I think introductory fellowships are extreme outlier interventions. EA Philippines’ 8-week Intro to EA Discussion Group (patterned after Stanford’s Arete fellowship) in May-July 2020 was by far our best activity yet. 31 signed up and 15 graduated, and out of the graduates, I believe we’ve created the following counterfactual impact:
One became the president of our student chapter EA Blue
Another became a core team member of EA Blue
Two have since taken the GWWC pledge
Three have become new volunteers (spending ~1-2 hrs/​week) for EA Philippines (we actually got two more volunteers aside from these three, but those two I would say were not counterfactual ones)
Helped lead to a few career plan changes (I will write a separate impact report about EA PH’s 2020, and can talk about this more there).
EA Blue is now doing an Introductory Fellowship similar to ours with 26 participants, which I’m a facilitator for, and I think we’re having similarly good results!
I don’t have an answer, but I’m curious—why don’t you publish it as a proper post?
This is a very rough post and I don’t know how much I would stick to this framing of the question if I spent more time thinking it over!
Makes sense, even though it feels alright to me as a post :)
I’d really like to see more answers to this question!