I feel like this community was never meant to scale. There is little to no internal structure, and like others have said, so much of this community relies on trust. I don’t think this is just an issue of “vultures”, it will also be an issue of internal politics and nepotism.
To me the issue isn’t primarily about grantmaking. If you are a good grantmaker, you should see when people’s proposals aren’t super logical or aligned with EA reasoning. More people trying to get big grants is mostly a good thing, even if many are trying to trick us into giving free money. I think the much larger issue is about status/internal politics, where there is no specific moment if you can decide how aligned someone is.
But first to give some evidence of vultures, I have already seen multiple people in the periphery of my life submit apps to EAGs who literally don’t even plan on going to the conferences, and are just using this as a chance to get a free vacation. I feel sorry to say that they may have heard of EA because of me. More than that, I get the sense that a decent contingent of the people at EAGx Boston came primarily for networking purposes(and I don’t mean networking so the can be more effective altruists). At the scale we are at right now, this seems fine, but I seriously think this could blow up quicker than we realize.
Speaking to the internal politics, I believe we should randomly anonymize the names on the on the forum every few days and see if certain things are correlated with getting more upvotes (more followers on twitter, a job at a prestigous org, etc.). My intuition has been that having a job at a top EA org means 100-500% more upvotes on your posts here, hell even the meme page. Is this what we want? The more people who join for networking purposes, potentially the worse these effects become. That could entail more bias.
I post (relatively) anonymously on twitter, and the amount of (IMO) valid comments I make that don’t get responded to makes me worry we are not as different from normal people as we claim, just having intellectual jousts where we want to seem smart among the other high status people. To be fair this is an amazing community and I trust almost everyone here more than almost anyone not in this community to try to be fair about these things.
I get the sense (probably because this is often going on the back of my mind), that many people are in fact simply optimizing for status in this group, not positive impact as they define it themself. Of course status in this community is associated with positive impact, BUT as defined by the TOP people in the community. Could this be why the top causes haven’t changed much? I don’t feel strongly about this, but it’s worth considering.
As a former group organizer, there is a strong tension between doing what you think is best for the community vs for yourself. Here is an example: To build resilience for your group, you should try to get the people who might run the group after you leave to run events/retreats/network with other group organizers, so they are more committed, have practice, and have a network built up. But you get more clout if you run retreats, if you network with other group organizers, etc. It takes an extremely unselfish person to not just default to not delgating a ton of stuff, in no small part for the clout benefits. This tension exists now, so I’m not claiming this would only result from the influx of money, but now that organizers can get jobs after they graduate school, expect this to become a bigger issue.
P.S. If the community isn’t meant to scale, then individual choices like vegetarianism are not justified within our own worldview.
I’m not a community builder. Also, just to be careful, relevant to the sentiment of this post and your own comment, I want to disclose that I’m both willing to drop and also take the title/status of being an EA, aligned with “improving the long term future”, etc.
In the past, I have been involved in planning and probably understand the work of creating a retreat.
I thought your comment and experiences were important and substantive. In particular, this part of your comment seemed really important.
As a former group organizer, there is a strong tension between doing what you think is best for the community vs for yourself. Here is an example: To build resilience for your group, you should try to get the people who might run the group after you leave to run events/retreats/network with other group organizers, so they are more committed, have practice, and have a network built up. But you get more clout if you run retreats, if you network with other group organizers, etc. It takes an extremely unselfish person to not just default to not delegating a ton of stuff, in no small part for the clout benefits. This tension exists now, so I’m not claiming this would only result from the influx of money, but now that organizers can get jobs after they graduate school, expect this to become a bigger issue.
I wanted to understand more:
For context, this is my basic understanding of how leadership is rewarded in organizations: most successful organizations reward development. Senior people are supposed to and rewarded for dedicating most of their time away from object level work to managing people and fostering talent. This leadership performance is assessed, and good leaders are promoted to greater status and influence, so organizations end up with conscientious, effective leaders at the top who further develop or replicate these virtues.
In this ideal model, the more and active strong the junior people are, the more credit and status the leaders get. Leaders don’t lose their status, no matter how much junior people do, they would get promoted themselves. There is no incentive to squat on duties.
It seems like this isn’t true in this situation. This seems important. I wanted to ask questions to learn more:
“It takes an extremely unselfish person to not just default to not delegating a ton of stuff”
I think you are saying there is an incentive to do the work of running a retreat personally, even when there are talented people who can do this, and you already have experience running a retreat.
I don’t understand, wouldn’t it make sense to get others to do the work, mentor them, and then go on the retreat with them? Maybe you cannot actually attend the retreat? It also just seems more fun and rewarding to work on this cooperatively with good people, compared to hiding them away, or even directly managing them.
It seems like decisions of the leader and the experiences of the juniors can be assessed by “upper management” or the people giving CBGs. Do you think there is adequate assessment, such as interviewing? Is this assessment ineffective or low effort? (Leaders might evade or hide junior people but it this seems like real misconduct).
Again, the right outcome and common belief would look like everyone saying, “Wow, Guthmann is a hero, he scouted out A, B, and C, who are huge future leaders. Imagine what new people and projects Guthmann can foster!”.
I’m uncertain how much I will learn, but others might and it seems worth asking.
Please let me know if I’m wrong or muddying the water. I also understand if you don’t respond.
I started Northwestern’s EA club with a close friend my sophomore year at northwestern (2019). My friend graduated at the end of that year and our club was still nascent. There was an exec board of 6 or 7 but truly only a couple were trustworthy with both getting stuff done and actually understanding EA.
Running the club during covid and having to respond to all these emails and carrying all this responsibility somewhat alone(alone isn’t quite fair but ) and never meeting anyone in person and having to explain to strangers over and over again what ea was stressed /tired me a decent bit (I was 19-20) and honestly I just started to see EA more negatively and not want to engage with the community as much, even though I broadly agreed with it about everything.
I’m not sure I really feel externally higher status in any way because of it. I guess I might feel some internal status/confidence from founding the club, because it is a unique story I have, but I would be lying if I said more than 1 or 2 people hit me up during eagx boston (had a great time btw, met really cool people)to talk over swapcard, meanwhile my friend who has never interacted with ea outside of NU friends and fellowship but has an interesting career was dmed up like 45 times. And the 2 people who hit me up did not even do so because I founded, much less organized the club. The actual success of the club in terms of current size/avg. commitment and probabilistic trajectory does not seem to be data that anyone in the community would necessarily notice if I didn’t try to get them to notice. Don’t even get me started on whether or not they would know if I promoted/delegated (to) the right people. At any point during our clubs history I could tell you which people were committed and which weren’t, but no one ever asked. There are people who work with the university groups but it’s not like they truly knew the ins and outs of the club, and even if I told them how things are truly going, what does that really do for me? It may be the case that they would be more likely to hirer or recommend people who are better at delegating but anecdotally this doesn’t even seem true to me. Which is still a far cry from doing impact estimates and funding me based on that. Plus isn’t it possible that people who delegate less just inherently seem like a more important piece of a universities “team”. Maybe there are other people waiting to take over and do and even better job but they are quite literally competition to their boss in that case. Perhaps it increases my chance of getting jobs? but I’m not sure, and if it was, it’s not like it would be connected to any sort of impact score.
Founding the club has at best a moderate impact on its own. It is the combination of starting the club and giving it a big enough kick to keep going that I believe is where the value is created. Otherwise the club may die and you basically did nothing. A large part of this “kick” is ofc ensuring the people after you are good. Currently, Northwestern’s Effective Altruism club is doing pretty good. We seem to be on pace to graduate 50+ fellows this year, we have had 10-15 people attend conferences. TO BE CLEAR—I have done almost nothing this year. The organizers that (at risk of bragging) I convinced/told last year to do the organizing this year have done a fire job. Much better than I could have. I like to think that if I had put very little effort in last year, or potentially even worse, not give authority to other positive actors in the club, there would have been a not tiny chance the club would have just collapsed, though I could be wrong. It does seem as though there is a ton of interest in effective altruism among the young people here, so it’s feasible that this wasn’t such a path dependent story.
Still—If I had started the club, put almost no effort in to creating any structure to the club/giving anyone else a meaningful role during covid year other than running events with people I wanted to meet (and coordinating with them myself, which counterintuitively is easier then delegating), and then not stepped down/maintained control this year so that I could continue doing so, no one would have criticized me, even though this action would probably have cost ea 15-30 committed northwestern students already, and potentially many more down the line. I mean, no one criticized me when I ghosted them last year(lol). If I had a better sense of the possibility of actually getting paid currently or after school for this stuff, I could see it increasing the chance I actually did something like above. Moreover, if I had a sense of the potential networking opportunities I might have had access to this year ( I did almost all my organizing except the very beginning during heavy covid), this probably would have increased my chances of doing something like above even more than the money.
To be clear I probably suck at organizing, and even if I hadn’t solely used the club as my own status machine it would have been pretty terrible if I didn’t step down and get replaced by the people who currently organize.
To summarize/ Organize:
There is a lack of real supervision (maybe this has changed like I said I wasn’t super involved this year) from the top of what is happening at these clubs, and to the extent that you might receive status for success while you organize, it seems highly related to how willing you are to reach out to people in CEA and ask for more responsibility, or to post updates online, or to generally socialize with other EAs about stuff
If you correctly step down so someone better can run the club, it’s not clear there is any sort of reward
I would be surprised if delegating correctly was noticed.
In general, being a good organizer isn’t even something that seems to get you much clout in this community, see other post today about this (i haven’t read it yet)
Thus, the real clout from organizing, esp. If you don’t have an online presence, comes from the access organizing can give you
organizing provides opportunities to reach out to anyone in the community
BUT, these opportunities often come hand in hand with specific events that your club is participating in. The most “bonding” moments come from helping plan events with other members of EA from different places. There are a finite number of these and each one you delegate is a lost opportunity to talk to someone at CEA, another organizer, a possible speaker, etc.
It can feel as though you deserve these opportunities because if you just spent the work that you used on organizing networking in the first place, or blogging, you would probably be more respected, since in the first place organizing doesn’t seem to get much status. Because there is no real oversight, you definitely are not at risk of getting shamed for using the club as a status machine.
So you start attending meetings that someone else in the club should have been at, or emailing people to ask them to speak at the club when you should have let a freshman or sophomore email them.
or even giving an intro talk when you should have let a younger student give it, because it means all the other people from your school will see you more as one of the sole leaders of the club, which tbf is less related to the overarching concept of this post. And also I want to give a nod to the discussion on balancing resilliance vs. immediate impact, in the sense that you might give a better talk(or so you think), which will convince more people, which might make the club more resilient. But Then I would say you should have coached the younger student better.
Seems like we might be promoting squeaky wheels. You get paid if you ask for money(i think?), you get status if you take it, etc. This could both provide bad incentives and be incredibly frustrating to the shyer folk.
No one has ever reached out to me for advice on starting a club, or asked how my experience went, or asked me if I would be interested in meta work. I have never received a cent for any of my community building work. If I was actually getting paid what I believe my time is worth, which is probably still much much less than the actual value of my time to EA while I was organizing, I would almost certainly be owed (tens of?) thousands of dollars. I definitely feel like my sense that this was a community where you didn’t need to market yourself to get to the top was not as true as I originally envisioned. At the same time I don’t regret starting the club at all. It is probably one of the few things I have done in my life that I feel proud of.
What should we do? Can we federalize clubs? Should we have more data analysts and researchers and CEA people work on this? Would we actually audit a college club? Should we pay organizers more? ← but wouldn’t this increase “vulturism”?
The core realization should be that EA needs an institution(s) that doesn’t exist. Without more complex institutions we are basically being culty and trusting each other on a variety of dimensions. I hope the trust remains but why not build resiliency(unless of course, you believe gatekeeping is the solution).
I know I didn’t precisely answer your questions and more just rambled. let me know if you have questions, and obviously if I said stuff that sounds wrong disagree. I feel like even though this post is long it’s lacking a lot of nuance I would like to include but I felt it was best to post it like this.
I am not writing in an official CEA capacity but just wanted to respond with a couple quick personal thoughts that don’t cover everything you mentioned
I am sorry you had negative experiences while organizing.
I do think a lot has changed in the community building space in the past year.
Right now CEA has about 1.5 fte covering ~100 groups so it isn’t possible to keep completely up to date on each group but we are working to expand capacity so we can offer some additional support. In particular, our new University Group Accelerator Program aims to add a lot more oversight and support. I wish it had existed when you were starting up your group. It provides mentorship, stipends, and support for people starting groups.
Even though we are expanding support, we strongly encourage groups to be public about how they are doing, for instance by writing on the forum. I think this is helpful for other groups to see as well and drives innovation, collaboration, and progress in the community.
When I am personally thinking about hiring, one of the things that impress me a lot is how successful someone was at passing off their group. I am also impressed with organizers who act as “senior advisors” where they help on some strategy level stuff but not the object level group organizing. I am generally more impressed with someone who does this well than someone who kept doing active organizing until they graduated and let their club die.
I think there is some clout around doing really good organizing but that requires being publically engaged. I also hope people aren’t just doing it for the clout though.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, appreciate it. Super valid points. Upon re-reading it seems I may have come off insultingly towards the community building contingent of EA. Certainly not my intention! I think y’all are doing a great job and I def don’t want to give the impression that I would have a better plan in mind. I am somewhat familiar with the recent initiatives with universities and think they will def be solid also.
Makes me a bit sad that you need to be publicly engaged to receive recognition. I understand this is probably just a truism about life, not anyone in particulars fault.
Good to hear things are moving forward, def rooting for the success of the new initiatives.
Can you comment on why there are only 1.5 FTE covering uni groups? does no one want those jobs? Trying to be very careful abt scaling? Seems remarkably low when considering potential Cost Benefit but I haven’t thought about it enough. I don’t think it would be crazy to have as many as 25 FTE but maybe that is completely ridiculous( maybe this is happening w/ugap?).
Good to hear that you care about delegation/passing off. I wonder if you think it’s worth making it clear to people that this incentive exists? or do you think it is clear already? Moreover if you hire people at the end of senior year of college how do you know whether or not they did a good job passing off the group?
I wonder what you think would happen if you were a nepotist- say you advantaged the community builders you had closer relationships with in hiring/referal decisions. Would you expect to be fired and how quickly?
Again I just want to clarify that I don’t think EA community builders are doing anything specifically wrong per se, and I don’t think most of these issues are even super specific to the community building sector of EA. I think the issues I brought up would be present in pretty much any new social movement that is fast scaling and has lots of opportunities.
Just another super quick response that doesn’t cover everything and is purely my own thoughts and not necessarily accurate to CEA:
We are currently expanding the groups team :) We are careful about scaling too fast and want to make high-quality offers. You can read some more on hiring in previous CEA reports.
Ideally, people have entirely passed off their group by the end of their senior year (ie: someone else has been running the group and they have just been advising).
Much of the groups team’s hiring process is blinded and has clear guidelines and rubrics to help reduce unintentional biases here. (I also think if we were hiring faster this would be even more of a concern!). I think it is basically impossible to remove all biases here (especially in referral decisions since it really relies on having context on the person) but this is something we take seriously and do not tolerate people acting with conflict of interests.
I think you are vastly overestimating the access one gains from organizing events. You don’t need to organize anything to get access to people. You just have to have something interesting to talk about. I’ve had access to VIPs in my field since I was 16 because I was working on interesting projects, and my experience within the EA community has been similar—the VIPs are easy to reach as long as you have a reason. And if you are managing someone else who is organizing an event, this should be easy to do, e.g. you can check up on your subordinates’ performance.
In general, being a good organizer isn’t even something that seems to get you much clout in this community, see other post today about this (i haven’t read it yet)
I feel like this community was never meant to scale. There is little to no internal structure, and like others have said, so much of this community relies on trust. I don’t think this is just an issue of “vultures”, it will also be an issue of internal politics and nepotism.
To me the issue isn’t primarily about grantmaking. If you are a good grantmaker, you should see when people’s proposals aren’t super logical or aligned with EA reasoning. More people trying to get big grants is mostly a good thing, even if many are trying to trick us into giving free money. I think the much larger issue is about status/internal politics, where there is no specific moment if you can decide how aligned someone is.
But first to give some evidence of vultures, I have already seen multiple people in the periphery of my life submit apps to EAGs who literally don’t even plan on going to the conferences, and are just using this as a chance to get a free vacation. I feel sorry to say that they may have heard of EA because of me. More than that, I get the sense that a decent contingent of the people at EAGx Boston came primarily for networking purposes(and I don’t mean networking so the can be more effective altruists). At the scale we are at right now, this seems fine, but I seriously think this could blow up quicker than we realize.
Speaking to the internal politics, I believe we should randomly anonymize the names on the on the forum every few days and see if certain things are correlated with getting more upvotes (more followers on twitter, a job at a prestigous org, etc.). My intuition has been that having a job at a top EA org means 100-500% more upvotes on your posts here, hell even the meme page. Is this what we want? The more people who join for networking purposes, potentially the worse these effects become. That could entail more bias.
I post (relatively) anonymously on twitter, and the amount of (IMO) valid comments I make that don’t get responded to makes me worry we are not as different from normal people as we claim, just having intellectual jousts where we want to seem smart among the other high status people. To be fair this is an amazing community and I trust almost everyone here more than almost anyone not in this community to try to be fair about these things.
I get the sense (probably because this is often going on the back of my mind), that many people are in fact simply optimizing for status in this group, not positive impact as they define it themself. Of course status in this community is associated with positive impact, BUT as defined by the TOP people in the community. Could this be why the top causes haven’t changed much? I don’t feel strongly about this, but it’s worth considering.
As a former group organizer, there is a strong tension between doing what you think is best for the community vs for yourself. Here is an example: To build resilience for your group, you should try to get the people who might run the group after you leave to run events/retreats/network with other group organizers, so they are more committed, have practice, and have a network built up. But you get more clout if you run retreats, if you network with other group organizers, etc. It takes an extremely unselfish person to not just default to not delgating a ton of stuff, in no small part for the clout benefits. This tension exists now, so I’m not claiming this would only result from the influx of money, but now that organizers can get jobs after they graduate school, expect this to become a bigger issue.
P.S. If the community isn’t meant to scale, then individual choices like vegetarianism are not justified within our own worldview.
I’m not a community builder. Also, just to be careful, relevant to the sentiment of this post and your own comment, I want to disclose that I’m both willing to drop and also take the title/status of being an EA, aligned with “improving the long term future”, etc.
In the past, I have been involved in planning and probably understand the work of creating a retreat.
I thought your comment and experiences were important and substantive. In particular, this part of your comment seemed really important.
I wanted to understand more:
For context, this is my basic understanding of how leadership is rewarded in organizations: most successful organizations reward development. Senior people are supposed to and rewarded for dedicating most of their time away from object level work to managing people and fostering talent. This leadership performance is assessed, and good leaders are promoted to greater status and influence, so organizations end up with conscientious, effective leaders at the top who further develop or replicate these virtues.
In this ideal model, the more and active strong the junior people are, the more credit and status the leaders get. Leaders don’t lose their status, no matter how much junior people do, they would get promoted themselves. There is no incentive to squat on duties.
It seems like this isn’t true in this situation. This seems important. I wanted to ask questions to learn more:
I think you are saying there is an incentive to do the work of running a retreat personally, even when there are talented people who can do this, and you already have experience running a retreat.
I don’t understand, wouldn’t it make sense to get others to do the work, mentor them, and then go on the retreat with them? Maybe you cannot actually attend the retreat? It also just seems more fun and rewarding to work on this cooperatively with good people, compared to hiding them away, or even directly managing them.
It seems like decisions of the leader and the experiences of the juniors can be assessed by “upper management” or the people giving CBGs. Do you think there is adequate assessment, such as interviewing? Is this assessment ineffective or low effort? (Leaders might evade or hide junior people but it this seems like real misconduct).
Again, the right outcome and common belief would look like everyone saying, “Wow, Guthmann is a hero, he scouted out A, B, and C, who are huge future leaders. Imagine what new people and projects Guthmann can foster!”.
I’m uncertain how much I will learn, but others might and it seems worth asking.
Please let me know if I’m wrong or muddying the water. I also understand if you don’t respond.
I started Northwestern’s EA club with a close friend my sophomore year at northwestern (2019). My friend graduated at the end of that year and our club was still nascent. There was an exec board of 6 or 7 but truly only a couple were trustworthy with both getting stuff done and actually understanding EA.
Running the club during covid and having to respond to all these emails and carrying all this responsibility somewhat alone(alone isn’t quite fair but ) and never meeting anyone in person and having to explain to strangers over and over again what ea was stressed /tired me a decent bit (I was 19-20) and honestly I just started to see EA more negatively and not want to engage with the community as much, even though I broadly agreed with it about everything.
I’m not sure I really feel externally higher status in any way because of it. I guess I might feel some internal status/confidence from founding the club, because it is a unique story I have, but I would be lying if I said more than 1 or 2 people hit me up during eagx boston (had a great time btw, met really cool people)to talk over swapcard, meanwhile my friend who has never interacted with ea outside of NU friends and fellowship but has an interesting career was dmed up like 45 times. And the 2 people who hit me up did not even do so because I founded, much less organized the club. The actual success of the club in terms of current size/avg. commitment and probabilistic trajectory does not seem to be data that anyone in the community would necessarily notice if I didn’t try to get them to notice. Don’t even get me started on whether or not they would know if I promoted/delegated (to) the right people. At any point during our clubs history I could tell you which people were committed and which weren’t, but no one ever asked. There are people who work with the university groups but it’s not like they truly knew the ins and outs of the club, and even if I told them how things are truly going, what does that really do for me? It may be the case that they would be more likely to hirer or recommend people who are better at delegating but anecdotally this doesn’t even seem true to me. Which is still a far cry from doing impact estimates and funding me based on that. Plus isn’t it possible that people who delegate less just inherently seem like a more important piece of a universities “team”. Maybe there are other people waiting to take over and do and even better job but they are quite literally competition to their boss in that case. Perhaps it increases my chance of getting jobs? but I’m not sure, and if it was, it’s not like it would be connected to any sort of impact score.
Founding the club has at best a moderate impact on its own. It is the combination of starting the club and giving it a big enough kick to keep going that I believe is where the value is created. Otherwise the club may die and you basically did nothing. A large part of this “kick” is ofc ensuring the people after you are good. Currently, Northwestern’s Effective Altruism club is doing pretty good. We seem to be on pace to graduate 50+ fellows this year, we have had 10-15 people attend conferences. TO BE CLEAR—I have done almost nothing this year. The organizers that (at risk of bragging) I convinced/told last year to do the organizing this year have done a fire job. Much better than I could have. I like to think that if I had put very little effort in last year, or potentially even worse, not give authority to other positive actors in the club, there would have been a not tiny chance the club would have just collapsed, though I could be wrong. It does seem as though there is a ton of interest in effective altruism among the young people here, so it’s feasible that this wasn’t such a path dependent story.
Still—If I had started the club, put almost no effort in to creating any structure to the club/giving anyone else a meaningful role during covid year other than running events with people I wanted to meet (and coordinating with them myself, which counterintuitively is easier then delegating), and then not stepped down/maintained control this year so that I could continue doing so, no one would have criticized me, even though this action would probably have cost ea 15-30 committed northwestern students already, and potentially many more down the line. I mean, no one criticized me when I ghosted them last year(lol). If I had a better sense of the possibility of actually getting paid currently or after school for this stuff, I could see it increasing the chance I actually did something like above. Moreover, if I had a sense of the potential networking opportunities I might have had access to this year ( I did almost all my organizing except the very beginning during heavy covid), this probably would have increased my chances of doing something like above even more than the money.
To be clear I probably suck at organizing, and even if I hadn’t solely used the club as my own status machine it would have been pretty terrible if I didn’t step down and get replaced by the people who currently organize.
To summarize/ Organize:
There is a lack of real supervision (maybe this has changed like I said I wasn’t super involved this year) from the top of what is happening at these clubs, and to the extent that you might receive status for success while you organize, it seems highly related to how willing you are to reach out to people in CEA and ask for more responsibility, or to post updates online, or to generally socialize with other EAs about stuff
If you correctly step down so someone better can run the club, it’s not clear there is any sort of reward
I would be surprised if delegating correctly was noticed.
In general, being a good organizer isn’t even something that seems to get you much clout in this community, see other post today about this (i haven’t read it yet)
Thus, the real clout from organizing, esp. If you don’t have an online presence, comes from the access organizing can give you
organizing provides opportunities to reach out to anyone in the community
BUT, these opportunities often come hand in hand with specific events that your club is participating in. The most “bonding” moments come from helping plan events with other members of EA from different places. There are a finite number of these and each one you delegate is a lost opportunity to talk to someone at CEA, another organizer, a possible speaker, etc.
It can feel as though you deserve these opportunities because if you just spent the work that you used on organizing networking in the first place, or blogging, you would probably be more respected, since in the first place organizing doesn’t seem to get much status. Because there is no real oversight, you definitely are not at risk of getting shamed for using the club as a status machine.
So you start attending meetings that someone else in the club should have been at, or emailing people to ask them to speak at the club when you should have let a freshman or sophomore email them.
or even giving an intro talk when you should have let a younger student give it, because it means all the other people from your school will see you more as one of the sole leaders of the club, which tbf is less related to the overarching concept of this post. And also I want to give a nod to the discussion on balancing resilliance vs. immediate impact, in the sense that you might give a better talk(or so you think), which will convince more people, which might make the club more resilient. But Then I would say you should have coached the younger student better.
Seems like we might be promoting squeaky wheels. You get paid if you ask for money(i think?), you get status if you take it, etc. This could both provide bad incentives and be incredibly frustrating to the shyer folk.
No one has ever reached out to me for advice on starting a club, or asked how my experience went, or asked me if I would be interested in meta work. I have never received a cent for any of my community building work. If I was actually getting paid what I believe my time is worth, which is probably still much much less than the actual value of my time to EA while I was organizing, I would almost certainly be owed (tens of?) thousands of dollars. I definitely feel like my sense that this was a community where you didn’t need to market yourself to get to the top was not as true as I originally envisioned. At the same time I don’t regret starting the club at all. It is probably one of the few things I have done in my life that I feel proud of.
What should we do? Can we federalize clubs? Should we have more data analysts and researchers and CEA people work on this? Would we actually audit a college club? Should we pay organizers more? ← but wouldn’t this increase “vulturism”?
The core realization should be that EA needs an institution(s) that doesn’t exist. Without more complex institutions we are basically being culty and trusting each other on a variety of dimensions. I hope the trust remains but why not build resiliency(unless of course, you believe gatekeeping is the solution).
I know I didn’t precisely answer your questions and more just rambled. let me know if you have questions, and obviously if I said stuff that sounds wrong disagree. I feel like even though this post is long it’s lacking a lot of nuance I would like to include but I felt it was best to post it like this.
Hi Charles,
I am not writing in an official CEA capacity but just wanted to respond with a couple quick personal thoughts that don’t cover everything you mentioned
I am sorry you had negative experiences while organizing.
I do think a lot has changed in the community building space in the past year.
Right now CEA has about 1.5 fte covering ~100 groups so it isn’t possible to keep completely up to date on each group but we are working to expand capacity so we can offer some additional support. In particular, our new University Group Accelerator Program aims to add a lot more oversight and support. I wish it had existed when you were starting up your group. It provides mentorship, stipends, and support for people starting groups.
Even though we are expanding support, we strongly encourage groups to be public about how they are doing, for instance by writing on the forum. I think this is helpful for other groups to see as well and drives innovation, collaboration, and progress in the community.
When I am personally thinking about hiring, one of the things that impress me a lot is how successful someone was at passing off their group. I am also impressed with organizers who act as “senior advisors” where they help on some strategy level stuff but not the object level group organizing. I am generally more impressed with someone who does this well than someone who kept doing active organizing until they graduated and let their club die.
I think there is some clout around doing really good organizing but that requires being publically engaged. I also hope people aren’t just doing it for the clout though.
Hi,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, appreciate it. Super valid points. Upon re-reading it seems I may have come off insultingly towards the community building contingent of EA. Certainly not my intention! I think y’all are doing a great job and I def don’t want to give the impression that I would have a better plan in mind. I am somewhat familiar with the recent initiatives with universities and think they will def be solid also.
Makes me a bit sad that you need to be publicly engaged to receive recognition. I understand this is probably just a truism about life, not anyone in particulars fault.
Good to hear things are moving forward, def rooting for the success of the new initiatives.
Can you comment on why there are only 1.5 FTE covering uni groups? does no one want those jobs? Trying to be very careful abt scaling? Seems remarkably low when considering potential Cost Benefit but I haven’t thought about it enough. I don’t think it would be crazy to have as many as 25 FTE but maybe that is completely ridiculous( maybe this is happening w/ugap?).
Good to hear that you care about delegation/passing off. I wonder if you think it’s worth making it clear to people that this incentive exists? or do you think it is clear already? Moreover if you hire people at the end of senior year of college how do you know whether or not they did a good job passing off the group?
I wonder what you think would happen if you were a nepotist- say you advantaged the community builders you had closer relationships with in hiring/referal decisions. Would you expect to be fired and how quickly?
Again I just want to clarify that I don’t think EA community builders are doing anything specifically wrong per se, and I don’t think most of these issues are even super specific to the community building sector of EA. I think the issues I brought up would be present in pretty much any new social movement that is fast scaling and has lots of opportunities.
Just another super quick response that doesn’t cover everything and is purely my own thoughts and not necessarily accurate to CEA:
We are currently expanding the groups team :) We are careful about scaling too fast and want to make high-quality offers. You can read some more on hiring in previous CEA reports.
Ideally, people have entirely passed off their group by the end of their senior year (ie: someone else has been running the group and they have just been advising).
Much of the groups team’s hiring process is blinded and has clear guidelines and rubrics to help reduce unintentional biases here. (I also think if we were hiring faster this would be even more of a concern!). I think it is basically impossible to remove all biases here (especially in referral decisions since it really relies on having context on the person) but this is something we take seriously and do not tolerate people acting with conflict of interests.
I think you are vastly overestimating the access one gains from organizing events. You don’t need to organize anything to get access to people. You just have to have something interesting to talk about. I’ve had access to VIPs in my field since I was 16 because I was working on interesting projects, and my experience within the EA community has been similar—the VIPs are easy to reach as long as you have a reason. And if you are managing someone else who is organizing an event, this should be easy to do, e.g. you can check up on your subordinates’ performance.
Which post is this?