EDIT: Trying to distill my argument: the effect of growth on movement health is unclear, probably positive, but I do not think “optimise for growth” is what I would come up with if I was solely optimising for the strength of the EA community, it seems like there’s notably more important directions
Thanks a lot for the detailed and transparent post. I’m a bit surprised by the focus on growth.
While I do agree that feeling like you’re in a buzzing growing movement can be good for morale. I also think there are costs to morale from growth like lots of low context new people around, feeling like the movement is drifting away from what older participants care about, etc. Having a bunch of competent and excited new people join who do a lot of awesome stuff seems great for morale, but is significantly harder imo, and requires much more specific plans.
It’s extremely not obvious to me that this is the best way to recover community morale and branding. In particular, under the hypothesis that a lot of damage was caused by FTX, it seems like a good amount of your effort should be going into things like addressing whatever substantial concerns were caused in community members by this, better governance, better trust, better post mortemming and transparency on what went wrong, etc—far better to rebuild better foundations of the existing movement and maintain the existing human capital than try to patch it up with growth. I could even see some interpreting the focus on growth as a deliberate lack of acknowledgement of past failures and mistakes. By all means have growth as one of your goals, but it was surprising to me to have it so prominent
(Note—this is my model of what would be best for resolving community issues and thus having an impact, not a request for what I personally most care about, the changes I suggest would not make a massive difference to me personally)
Thanks Neel! I’ve jotted down some quick clarifications below.
Overall: as I mentioned in my previous comment, I don’t think growth is obviously good and there are a lot of various risks to be aware of. I also think that even though it is only one of four strategy pillars at CEA it is a somewhat easier pillar for us to contribute to as we have more foundations for it. That could mean us unintentionally prioritizing it too much, and that is something I am trying to track. So, overall, I am sympathetic to a lot of your concerns but generally am more optimistic about this direction (as I’ll discuss below).
Some more specific clarifications:
We are trying to grow EA over time, not just during this year. Growing over time will require doing things like working on brand, foundation building, and rehabilitation. We are serious about the “sustainable” part of growth and growth itself is only one of our four major strategy pillars this year.
We are not optimizing for growth — our vision is currently to aim for moderate, sustainable growth (versus growth at all costs). We think growth over time will be important for EA to reach its full potential, but optimizing for it would likely be counterproductive to impact goals for various reasons, as you say.
We are trying to grow the number of people involved in EA across the entire funnel, not just at the top. So part of growth is helping people become more high context/helping high context people progress in their involvement and impact.
I think that retention of people already energized by EA is an important part of growth (if people leave or become demotivated this is of course bad for growth!) — part of this project is thinking about how to double down and revitalize the existing community, and not just about how to bring in new people.
I think it’s appropriate that some EA community building programs have some context level barrier to entry (for instance in-person EA Global events have an admissions policy), whereas some don’t (the EA Newsletter is designed to be a no-barrier intro to EA). My general take is that different spaces should continue to optimize for people with different levels of context. For many of the context-restricted programs, I am actively fighting for “lowering the bar” to be off the table as a growth strategy.
Quick response to another piece:
I think Reflections and lessons from Effective Ventures is a nice example of some of the post morteming etc. I am not saying this is /enough/ but wanted to flag the example as writing it took a fair amount of capacity and shows some work in this area.
Thanks a lot for the clarifications. If you agree with my tactical claims and are optimising for growth over a longer time frame than I agree, we probably don’t disagree much on actions and the actions you describes and cautions seem very reasonable to me. To me Growth feels like a somewhat unhelpful handle here that pushes me in the mind frame of what leads to short-term growth rather than a sustainable healthy community. But if it feels useful to you, fair enough
Thanks Neel! (I work closely with Jessica on the growth pillar.)
To me Growth feels like a somewhat unhelpful handle here that pushes me in the mind frame of what leads to short-term growth rather than a sustainable healthy community. But if it feels useful to you, fair enough
Thanks for your takes on the framing, that’s helpful. The one line description of our 2025-6 strategy is “building sustainable momentum for EA” (as in the body of the post). I do personally find that the best meme to capture the spirit of the strategy. Curious if it resonates!
EDIT: Trying to distill my argument: the effect of growth on movement health is unclear, probably positive, but I do not think “optimise for growth” is what I would come up with if I was solely optimising for the strength of the EA community, it seems like there’s notably more important directions
Thanks a lot for the detailed and transparent post. I’m a bit surprised by the focus on growth.
While I do agree that feeling like you’re in a buzzing growing movement can be good for morale. I also think there are costs to morale from growth like lots of low context new people around, feeling like the movement is drifting away from what older participants care about, etc. Having a bunch of competent and excited new people join who do a lot of awesome stuff seems great for morale, but is significantly harder imo, and requires much more specific plans.
It’s extremely not obvious to me that this is the best way to recover community morale and branding. In particular, under the hypothesis that a lot of damage was caused by FTX, it seems like a good amount of your effort should be going into things like addressing whatever substantial concerns were caused in community members by this, better governance, better trust, better post mortemming and transparency on what went wrong, etc—far better to rebuild better foundations of the existing movement and maintain the existing human capital than try to patch it up with growth. I could even see some interpreting the focus on growth as a deliberate lack of acknowledgement of past failures and mistakes. By all means have growth as one of your goals, but it was surprising to me to have it so prominent
(Note—this is my model of what would be best for resolving community issues and thus having an impact, not a request for what I personally most care about, the changes I suggest would not make a massive difference to me personally)
Thanks Neel! I’ve jotted down some quick clarifications below.
Overall: as I mentioned in my previous comment, I don’t think growth is obviously good and there are a lot of various risks to be aware of. I also think that even though it is only one of four strategy pillars at CEA it is a somewhat easier pillar for us to contribute to as we have more foundations for it. That could mean us unintentionally prioritizing it too much, and that is something I am trying to track. So, overall, I am sympathetic to a lot of your concerns but generally am more optimistic about this direction (as I’ll discuss below).
Some more specific clarifications:
We are trying to grow EA over time, not just during this year. Growing over time will require doing things like working on brand, foundation building, and rehabilitation. We are serious about the “sustainable” part of growth and growth itself is only one of our four major strategy pillars this year.
We are not optimizing for growth — our vision is currently to aim for moderate, sustainable growth (versus growth at all costs). We think growth over time will be important for EA to reach its full potential, but optimizing for it would likely be counterproductive to impact goals for various reasons, as you say.
We are trying to grow the number of people involved in EA across the entire funnel, not just at the top. So part of growth is helping people become more high context/helping high context people progress in their involvement and impact.
I think that retention of people already energized by EA is an important part of growth (if people leave or become demotivated this is of course bad for growth!) — part of this project is thinking about how to double down and revitalize the existing community, and not just about how to bring in new people.
I think it’s appropriate that some EA community building programs have some context level barrier to entry (for instance in-person EA Global events have an admissions policy), whereas some don’t (the EA Newsletter is designed to be a no-barrier intro to EA). My general take is that different spaces should continue to optimize for people with different levels of context. For many of the context-restricted programs, I am actively fighting for “lowering the bar” to be off the table as a growth strategy.
Quick response to another piece:
I think Reflections and lessons from Effective Ventures is a nice example of some of the post morteming etc. I am not saying this is /enough/ but wanted to flag the example as writing it took a fair amount of capacity and shows some work in this area.
Thanks a lot for the clarifications. If you agree with my tactical claims and are optimising for growth over a longer time frame than I agree, we probably don’t disagree much on actions and the actions you describes and cautions seem very reasonable to me. To me Growth feels like a somewhat unhelpful handle here that pushes me in the mind frame of what leads to short-term growth rather than a sustainable healthy community. But if it feels useful to you, fair enough
Thanks Neel! (I work closely with Jessica on the growth pillar.)
Thanks for your takes on the framing, that’s helpful. The one line description of our 2025-6 strategy is “building sustainable momentum for EA” (as in the body of the post). I do personally find that the best meme to capture the spirit of the strategy. Curious if it resonates!
Oh, that handle is way better, and not what I took from the post at all!