There are actions that a sufficiently capable team could take now to make it more likely that EA becomes extraordinarily valuable in the future.
There are a number of risks that a rapidly growing community has to avoid in order to be successful. At EA Global I touched on four: the Eternal September effect, coordination failure, ossification, and epistemic failure, although there are many others. The central tension is that the EA community has to grow to accomplish its goals, but growth may increase the probability of the movement getting off track.
Yet, I think we can avoid some of these risks by thoughtfully building community infrastructure that helps the community grow rapidly and safely. Examples of community infrastructure include EA Global, local EAGx conferences, effectivealtruism.org, the EA forum, EA Ventures, and the EA handbook. At full scale, the community infrastructure should allow us to seamlessly catch new people up to speed on our ideas, connect them to their local EA community, and help them contribute to the ongoing intellectual development of the community. More details on how we can make it more likely that EA becomes extraordinarily valuable in the future are available in our 2016 plan.
If this claim were false a plausible reason would be that the task at hand is intractable. It could be the case that once the initial conditions of a social movement are set, very little can be done to alter the trajectory. It could also be the case that one cannot make reasonable decisions about a social movement from inside the social movement. That is, the tribal aspects of being a part of a social movement may be especially good at making impartial reasoning impossible.
There are a number of risks that a rapidly growing community has to avoid in order to be successful. At EA Global I touched on four: the Eternal September effect, coordination failure, ossification, and epistemic failure, although there are many others. The central tension is that the EA community has to grow to accomplish its goals, but growth may increase the probability of the movement getting off track.
Yet, I think we can avoid some of these risks by thoughtfully building community infrastructure that helps the community grow rapidly and safely. Examples of community infrastructure include EA Global, local EAGx conferences, effectivealtruism.org, the EA forum, EA Ventures, and the EA handbook. At full scale, the community infrastructure should allow us to seamlessly catch new people up to speed on our ideas, connect them to their local EA community, and help them contribute to the ongoing intellectual development of the community. More details on how we can make it more likely that EA becomes extraordinarily valuable in the future are available in our 2016 plan.
If this claim were false a plausible reason would be that the task at hand is intractable. It could be the case that once the initial conditions of a social movement are set, very little can be done to alter the trajectory. It could also be the case that one cannot make reasonable decisions about a social movement from inside the social movement. That is, the tribal aspects of being a part of a social movement may be especially good at making impartial reasoning impossible.