I work for an effective altruism organization. I’d say that over half of my friends are at least adjacent to the space and talk about EA-ish topics regularly.
The thing I’d most like to change is the general friendliness of first-time encounters with EA. I think EA Global is good about this, but house parties tend to have a very competitive, emotionally exhausting ‘everyone is sizing you up’ vibe, unless you’re already friends with some people from another context.
Next-most-important (and related), probably, is that I would want everyone to proactively express how much confidence they have their statements in some fashion, through word choice, body language, and tone of voice, rather than providing a numerical description only when explicitly asked. This can prevent false-consensus effects and stop people from assuming that a person must be totally right because they sound so confident.
More selfishly, another thing I wish for is more social events that consist of 10-20 people doing something in the daytime with minimal drugs, rather than 50-100 people at a wild party. I just enjoy small daytime gatherings so much more, and I would like to get closer to the community, but I rarely have the energy for parties.
Anonymous #31:
Where are all these crazy EA parties that I keep reading about? The only EA parties I’ve heard of were at EA Global.
My guess is that there is a very large underestimation of the value from a higher baseline level of cross pollination of ideas.