Notes from a “mini talk” I gave to a couple people at EA Global.
Local EA groups (and orgs, for that matter) need leadership, and membranes.
Membranes let you control who is part of a community, so you can cultivate a particular culture within that community. They can involve barrier to entry, or actively removing people or behaviors that harm the culture.
Leadership is necessary to give that community structure. A good leader can make a community valuable enough that it’s worth people’s effort to overcome the barriers to entry, and/or maintain that barrier.
A membrane is a semi-permeable barrier that things can enter and leave, but it’s a bit hard to get in and a bit hard to get out. This allows them to store negentropy, which lets them do more interesting things than their surroundings.
An EA group that anyone can join and leave at a whim is going to have relatively low standards. This is fine for recruiting new people. But right now I think the most urgent EA needs have more do with getting people from the middle-of-the-funnel to the end, rather than the beginning-of-the-funnel to the middle. And I think helping the middle requires a higher expectation of effort and knowledge.
(I think a reasonably good mixed strategy is to have public events maybe once every month or two, and then additional events that require some kind of effort on the part of members)
What happens inside the membrane?
First, you meet some basic standards for intelligence, good communication, etc. The basics you need in order to accomplish anything on purpose.
As noted elsewhere, I think EA needs to cultivate the skill of thinking (as well as gaining agency). There are a few ways to go about this, but all of them require some amount of “willing to put in extra effort and work.” Having a space where people have the expectation that everyone there is interested in putting that effort is helpful for motivation and persistence.
In time, you can develop conversation norms that foster better-than-average thinking and communication. (i.e. make sure that admitting you were wrong is rewarded rather than punished)
Membranes can work via two mechanisms:
Be more careful about who you let in, in the first place
Be willing to invest effort in giving feedback, or being willing to expel people from the group.
The first option is easier. Giving feedback and expelling people is quite costly, and painful both for the person being expelled from a group (who may have friends and roots there), as well as the person doing the expelling (which may involve a stressful fight with people second-guessing you).
If you’re much more careful about who you let in, an ounce of prevention can be more valuable than a pound of cure.
On the other hand, if you put up lots of barriers, you may find your community stagnating. There may also be false positives of “so-and-so seemed not super promising” but if you’d given them a chance to grow it would have been fine.
Notes from a “mini talk” I gave to a couple people at EA Global.
Local EA groups (and orgs, for that matter) need leadership, and membranes.
Membranes let you control who is part of a community, so you can cultivate a particular culture within that community. They can involve barrier to entry, or actively removing people or behaviors that harm the culture.
Leadership is necessary to give that community structure. A good leader can make a community valuable enough that it’s worth people’s effort to overcome the barriers to entry, and/or maintain that barrier.
Membranes
A membrane is a semi-permeable barrier that things can enter and leave, but it’s a bit hard to get in and a bit hard to get out. This allows them to store negentropy, which lets them do more interesting things than their surroundings.
An EA group that anyone can join and leave at a whim is going to have relatively low standards. This is fine for recruiting new people. But right now I think the most urgent EA needs have more do with getting people from the middle-of-the-funnel to the end, rather than the beginning-of-the-funnel to the middle. And I think helping the middle requires a higher expectation of effort and knowledge.
(I think a reasonably good mixed strategy is to have public events maybe once every month or two, and then additional events that require some kind of effort on the part of members)
What happens inside the membrane?
First, you meet some basic standards for intelligence, good communication, etc. The basics you need in order to accomplish anything on purpose.
As noted elsewhere, I think EA needs to cultivate the skill of thinking (as well as gaining agency). There are a few ways to go about this, but all of them require some amount of “willing to put in extra effort and work.” Having a space where people have the expectation that everyone there is interested in putting that effort is helpful for motivation and persistence.
In time, you can develop conversation norms that foster better-than-average thinking and communication. (i.e. make sure that admitting you were wrong is rewarded rather than punished)
Membranes can work via two mechanisms:
Be more careful about who you let in, in the first place
Be willing to invest effort in giving feedback, or being willing to expel people from the group.
The first option is easier. Giving feedback and expelling people is quite costly, and painful both for the person being expelled from a group (who may have friends and roots there), as well as the person doing the expelling (which may involve a stressful fight with people second-guessing you).
If you’re much more careful about who you let in, an ounce of prevention can be more valuable than a pound of cure.
On the other hand, if you put up lots of barriers, you may find your community stagnating. There may also be false positives of “so-and-so seemed not super promising” but if you’d given them a chance to grow it would have been fine.