As someone who is quite familiar with what drives traffic to EA and Rationality related websites, 2015 marks the end of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which (whatever you might think about it) was probably the single biggest recruitment device that has existed in at least the rationality community’s history (though I also think it was also a major driver to the EA community). It is also the time Eliezer broadly stopped posting online, and he obviously had a very outsized effect on recruitment.
I also know that during 2015 (which is when I started working at CEA), CEA was investing very heavily in trying to grow the community, which included efforts of trying to get people like Elon Musk to talk at EAG 2015, which I do think was also a major draw to the community. A lot of the staff responsible for that focus on growth left over the following years and CEA stopped thinking as much in terms of growth (I think whether that was good or bad is complicated, though I mostly think that that shift was good).
Yeah, there were a couple other organizations that might have been able at one point to take advantage of naturally occurring opportunities for growth of the EA movement, or what we might call EA’s constituent sub-communities. For various reasons, they also couldn’t or at least didn’t end up prioritizing the growth of EA.
I think it would be beneficial, and perhaps necessary for some goals, to attract more and more different kinds of people than are currently in the EA community to join. One could also specify just the ‘existential risk reduction’ community, or ‘effective animal advocacy’, but for whichever community, it’s hard to imagine whichever group in EA as it exists now is more optimal than any other way they could be configured in the future. So to become better at achieving our goals, perhaps EA doesn’t need to grow as much as we need to adapt or change. That seems like it will eventually entail attracting some more new people to effective altruism as a movement/community.
I think one reason other effective altruists are less optimistic about prospects of growing the EA movement than I am is because they think for the amount of resources that have previously been invested in movement growth, the success has been mixed, and it’s unclear what among what has been tried worked best. I agree, and that is why I have been trying to figure out ways to grow EA as a movement with greater fidelity than we have a community have been able to in the past. I hope to publish some of those ideas in the near future.
A lot of those ideas are still more theoretical than practical. So I don’t think they can be quickly applied to grow EA anyway. Ultimately, I agree it’s not a bad thing that EA’s movement growth has slowed, since it’s unclear right now how the community would take advantage of such continued rapid growth.
As someone who is quite familiar with what drives traffic to EA and Rationality related websites, 2015 marks the end of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which (whatever you might think about it) was probably the single biggest recruitment device that has existed in at least the rationality community’s history (though I also think it was also a major driver to the EA community). It is also the time Eliezer broadly stopped posting online, and he obviously had a very outsized effect on recruitment.
I also know that during 2015 (which is when I started working at CEA), CEA was investing very heavily in trying to grow the community, which included efforts of trying to get people like Elon Musk to talk at EAG 2015, which I do think was also a major draw to the community. A lot of the staff responsible for that focus on growth left over the following years and CEA stopped thinking as much in terms of growth (I think whether that was good or bad is complicated, though I mostly think that that shift was good).
Yeah, there were a couple other organizations that might have been able at one point to take advantage of naturally occurring opportunities for growth of the EA movement, or what we might call EA’s constituent sub-communities. For various reasons, they also couldn’t or at least didn’t end up prioritizing the growth of EA.
I think it would be beneficial, and perhaps necessary for some goals, to attract more and more different kinds of people than are currently in the EA community to join. One could also specify just the ‘existential risk reduction’ community, or ‘effective animal advocacy’, but for whichever community, it’s hard to imagine whichever group in EA as it exists now is more optimal than any other way they could be configured in the future. So to become better at achieving our goals, perhaps EA doesn’t need to grow as much as we need to adapt or change. That seems like it will eventually entail attracting some more new people to effective altruism as a movement/community.
I think one reason other effective altruists are less optimistic about prospects of growing the EA movement than I am is because they think for the amount of resources that have previously been invested in movement growth, the success has been mixed, and it’s unclear what among what has been tried worked best. I agree, and that is why I have been trying to figure out ways to grow EA as a movement with greater fidelity than we have a community have been able to in the past. I hope to publish some of those ideas in the near future.
A lot of those ideas are still more theoretical than practical. So I don’t think they can be quickly applied to grow EA anyway. Ultimately, I agree it’s not a bad thing that EA’s movement growth has slowed, since it’s unclear right now how the community would take advantage of such continued rapid growth.