The super brief summary is 1. it’s not about translating a book, but about “transmission of a tradition of knowledge” 2. what is needed is a highly competent group of people 3. who can, apart from other things, figure out what the generative question of EA means in the given context (which may be quite different from Oxford or Bay)
Point #2 is the bottleneck. Without it, efforts to have “country/language X EA” will be often unsuccessful or worse. Doing Good Better was translated to e.g. japanese. It is doing a bit worse on Amazon.co.jp than the english version on Amazon.co.uk, but not by many orders. Yet you aren’t seeing a lot of content and projects from EA Japan.
So: One good version of “translation service” seems to be basically giving functional national EA groups money to get as good translations as needed.
One bad version is a “centralized project” trying to translate centrally selected content to centrally selected languages by hiring professional contractors to do it.
Similarly EA spaces:
Hiring offices in 100 cities is easy, and you can do that centrally. Running a space with a good culture and gatekeeping is harder, and bottlenecked on “#2″.
Good version of the project seems to be basically giving functional city EA groups money to get good coworking spaces, which is probably doable via CEA group support.
Many bad versions are somewhere close to “centralized megaproject to run EA spaces everywhere”.
In other words: it isn’t easy to get around the bottleneck ‘you need people on the ground’.
Footnote: there are many variations on this theme. The basic pattern roughly is:
“notice that successful groups are doing activity X” (e.g. they have a coworking space, or materials in the local language, or they organize events,...).
the next step, in which this goes wrong, is, “let’s start a project P(X) that will try to make activity X happen everywhere”.
Also: The chances of bad or explicitly harmful outcomes increase roughly in proportion to the combination of cultural, network and geographic distance from the “centre” from which such activity should be directed. Eg project which will try to run spaces in Stanford from Berkeley seem fine
Regarding coworking spaces everywhere, I strongly agree that you need competent people to set the culture locally, but the number of places with such people is rapidly increasing.
And there’s also something to the fact that if you try to run a project far away from current cultural hubs, then it can drift away from your intended purpose. But if there is decent local culture, some interchange of people between hubs, and some centralised management, I think it would work pretty well.
The considerations for centralising office management and gatekeeping seem strong overall—freeing up a lot of EA organisers’ time, improving scalability, and improving ability to travel between offices.
Both “EA translation service” and “EA spaces everywhere” seem like ideas which can take good, but also many bad or outright harmful forms.
A few years ago, I tried to describe how to to establish a robustly good “local effective altruism” in a new country or culture (other than Anglosphere).
The super brief summary is
1. it’s not about translating a book, but about “transmission of a tradition of knowledge”
2. what is needed is a highly competent group of people
3. who can, apart from other things, figure out what the generative question of EA means in the given context (which may be quite different from Oxford or Bay)
Point #2 is the bottleneck. Without it, efforts to have “country/language X EA” will be often unsuccessful or worse. Doing Good Better was translated to e.g. japanese. It is doing a bit worse on Amazon.co.jp than the english version on Amazon.co.uk, but not by many orders. Yet you aren’t seeing a lot of content and projects from EA Japan.
So: One good version of “translation service” seems to be basically giving functional national EA groups money to get as good translations as needed.
One bad version is a “centralized project” trying to translate centrally selected content to centrally selected languages by hiring professional contractors to do it.
Similarly EA spaces:
Hiring offices in 100 cities is easy, and you can do that centrally. Running a space with a good culture and gatekeeping is harder, and bottlenecked on “#2″.
Good version of the project seems to be basically giving functional city EA groups money to get good coworking spaces, which is probably doable via CEA group support.
Many bad versions are somewhere close to “centralized megaproject to run EA spaces everywhere”.
In other words: it isn’t easy to get around the bottleneck ‘you need people on the ground’.
Footnote: there are many variations on this theme. The basic pattern roughly is:
“notice that successful groups are doing activity X” (e.g. they have a coworking space, or materials in the local language, or they organize events,...).
the next step, in which this goes wrong, is, “let’s start a project P(X) that will try to make activity X happen everywhere”.
Also: The chances of bad or explicitly harmful outcomes increase roughly in proportion to the combination of cultural, network and geographic distance from the “centre” from which such activity should be directed. Eg project which will try to run spaces in Stanford from Berkeley seem fine
Regarding coworking spaces everywhere, I strongly agree that you need competent people to set the culture locally, but the number of places with such people is rapidly increasing.
And there’s also something to the fact that if you try to run a project far away from current cultural hubs, then it can drift away from your intended purpose. But if there is decent local culture, some interchange of people between hubs, and some centralised management, I think it would work pretty well.
The considerations for centralising office management and gatekeeping seem strong overall—freeing up a lot of EA organisers’ time, improving scalability, and improving ability to travel between offices.