If you take the approach that “EA is for everyone,” this means your group is more appealing and accessible to people, but usually also less intellectually rigorous and dedicated. If you take the approach that “EA is for a small group of people,” you can build a smaller group of people committed to making progress on hard problems and focus more on helping them skill up, but there’s a higher barrier to entry and makes more people feel like there’s not a place for them in EA.
I’m not very familiar with these EA groups and the specific circumstances that community builders go through, so forgive me if this is wildly off the mark.
Do any of the groups have some kind of a tiered approach? That seems like it would reduce/mitigate the problems of being either inclusive or exclusive. I think that a lot of churches and volunteer organizations have a sort of a tiered system: it is for everyone if you mean simply attending the events, a smaller subset of people who have specifically expressed a higher level of interest are the type who volunteer at the food shelter once a month, a smaller group of people who have demonstrated more interest and commitment join for higher commitment activities, etc.
This is basically just and alternative way of describing a funnel, but doesn’t this go a long ways toward addressing the inclusive vs exclusive issue?
I had an adjacent thought when reading this: Not all your events need to have the same target audience or sit in the same place on the inclusivity spectrum.
E.g. One week you might run an intro event where small groups discuss cause prioritisation, that’s planned and advertised to be newcomer friendly. Another week you might run an an in depth discussion on a policy submission the group is making that’s targeted towards people who are engaged with the specific policy area.
I’m not sure if many groups already do this, but I think it can be useful when planning events (even regular weekly events) to explicitly think about who the event is for and to communicate this (either explicitly or implicitly) when advertising the event.
PISE follows the tiered approach (which is the default for any student organization in the Netherlands). There, the board is involved with strategy and day-to-day operations, active members are part of one of the organizing committees that focus on careers/socials/marketing or some other topic, and passive members just join events.
However, I can definitely relate to the inclusive vs exclusive issue. When we first had low barriers to entry, some people became active members without reading up too much about EA. Later in the year, conversations were sometimes diluted when some participants had no more EA knowledge than the basics. On the other hand, some of the members that showed the greatest progress over the year, would not have been accepted to PISE in the first place if there had been a higher barrier to entry.
My feeling on this is that there is a distinction between how many people could become interested and how many people we have capacity for right now. The number of people who have the potential to become engaged, have a deep understanding of the ideas along with how they relate to existing conclusions and feel comfortable pushing back on any conclusions that they find less persuasive in a transparent way is much larger than the number of people we can actually engage deeply like this.
I feel like a low barrier of entry is great when your existing membership is almost all really engaged people with really nuanced views. A newcomer can come in, and with the right mindset, the group can quickly cross inferential gaps with them as they arise because everyone agrees on the fundamental principles (even if there might be disagreement on final cause prioritisation etc). Once a group is 50% newcomers though, it becomes extremely difficult to cross those inferential gaps because conversations are constantly getting side-tracked from the concepts and ideas that are relatively robust that are foundational to so many of the conclusions (even though there is still plenty to debate once you’re past the foundational premises).
I feel like the barrier of entry should shift depending on the current composition. When there are less newcomers, I think that it’s good to have a low barrier of entry and put a tonne of effort into including pretty much anyone who is curious who buys into the idea that helping others is a worthwhile use of their efforts and that maybe a scientific method-y kind of way of approaching this could be good too.
Once a group is more newcomers than people who have a deep understanding of the existing ideas and concepts, then I think crossing inferential gaps is too hard for it to be productive to try and be inclusive to even more newcomers. I think then prioritising whoever is reading the most and finding it the most natural or whoever already understands the ideas makes a little more sense (on the margin).
It’s less of a a question of who has the potential to understand things, it’s more a question of whether the group has the capacity to give them that understanding.
An EA group can have various levels of inclusiveness, and people can (to a great extent) self-select for what level of intensity/commitment they want. Organizing a conference is much higher commitment, and organizing and hosting a movie night is much lower commitment.
Once per month-ish social event. This event has very little to do with EA, other than the default conversation topics when greeting new people or when eating dinner together. A movie night, frisbee in the park, a hike, rock climbing, tea/coffee and chat… lots of different things could work. A meal could follow or precede the event.
Beginner-friendly book club.
Advanced or in-depth book club.
Some kind of praxis/action-oriented event.
Semi-regular group volunteering
Project-based tasks, such as collaborating on an EA forum post, red teaming something, etc.
I’m not very familiar with these EA groups and the specific circumstances that community builders go through, so forgive me if this is wildly off the mark.
Do any of the groups have some kind of a tiered approach? That seems like it would reduce/mitigate the problems of being either inclusive or exclusive. I think that a lot of churches and volunteer organizations have a sort of a tiered system: it is for everyone if you mean simply attending the events, a smaller subset of people who have specifically expressed a higher level of interest are the type who volunteer at the food shelter once a month, a smaller group of people who have demonstrated more interest and commitment join for higher commitment activities, etc.
This is basically just and alternative way of describing a funnel, but doesn’t this go a long ways toward addressing the inclusive vs exclusive issue?
I had an adjacent thought when reading this: Not all your events need to have the same target audience or sit in the same place on the inclusivity spectrum.
E.g. One week you might run an intro event where small groups discuss cause prioritisation, that’s planned and advertised to be newcomer friendly. Another week you might run an an in depth discussion on a policy submission the group is making that’s targeted towards people who are engaged with the specific policy area.
I’m not sure if many groups already do this, but I think it can be useful when planning events (even regular weekly events) to explicitly think about who the event is for and to communicate this (either explicitly or implicitly) when advertising the event.
PISE follows the tiered approach (which is the default for any student organization in the Netherlands). There, the board is involved with strategy and day-to-day operations, active members are part of one of the organizing committees that focus on careers/socials/marketing or some other topic, and passive members just join events.
However, I can definitely relate to the inclusive vs exclusive issue. When we first had low barriers to entry, some people became active members without reading up too much about EA. Later in the year, conversations were sometimes diluted when some participants had no more EA knowledge than the basics. On the other hand, some of the members that showed the greatest progress over the year, would not have been accepted to PISE in the first place if there had been a higher barrier to entry.
My feeling on this is that there is a distinction between how many people could become interested and how many people we have capacity for right now. The number of people who have the potential to become engaged, have a deep understanding of the ideas along with how they relate to existing conclusions and feel comfortable pushing back on any conclusions that they find less persuasive in a transparent way is much larger than the number of people we can actually engage deeply like this.
I feel like a low barrier of entry is great when your existing membership is almost all really engaged people with really nuanced views. A newcomer can come in, and with the right mindset, the group can quickly cross inferential gaps with them as they arise because everyone agrees on the fundamental principles (even if there might be disagreement on final cause prioritisation etc). Once a group is 50% newcomers though, it becomes extremely difficult to cross those inferential gaps because conversations are constantly getting side-tracked from the concepts and ideas that are relatively robust that are foundational to so many of the conclusions (even though there is still plenty to debate once you’re past the foundational premises).
I feel like the barrier of entry should shift depending on the current composition. When there are less newcomers, I think that it’s good to have a low barrier of entry and put a tonne of effort into including pretty much anyone who is curious who buys into the idea that helping others is a worthwhile use of their efforts and that maybe a scientific method-y kind of way of approaching this could be good too.
Once a group is more newcomers than people who have a deep understanding of the existing ideas and concepts, then I think crossing inferential gaps is too hard for it to be productive to try and be inclusive to even more newcomers. I think then prioritising whoever is reading the most and finding it the most natural or whoever already understands the ideas makes a little more sense (on the margin).
It’s less of a a question of who has the potential to understand things, it’s more a question of whether the group has the capacity to give them that understanding.
A few miscellaneous related thoughts:
An EA group can have various levels of inclusiveness, and people can (to a great extent) self-select for what level of intensity/commitment they want. Organizing a conference is much higher commitment, and organizing and hosting a movie night is much lower commitment.
Once per month-ish social event. This event has very little to do with EA, other than the default conversation topics when greeting new people or when eating dinner together. A movie night, frisbee in the park, a hike, rock climbing, tea/coffee and chat… lots of different things could work. A meal could follow or precede the event.
Beginner-friendly book club.
Advanced or in-depth book club.
Some kind of praxis/action-oriented event.
Semi-regular group volunteering
Project-based tasks, such as collaborating on an EA forum post, red teaming something, etc.
Attending an EA conference together