I think the post made some important but underappreciated arguments at the time, especially for high stakes countries with more cultural differences, such as China, Russia, and Arabic speaking countries. I might have been too negative about expanding into smaller countries that are culturally closer. I think it had some influence too, since people still often ask me about it.
One aspect I wish I’d emphasised more is that it’s very important to expand to new languages – my main point was that the way we should do it is by building a capable, native-language team, who can build a community in that language, and then investing heavily once we have that (rather than rushing to do more piecemeal efforts in the meantime). For instance, the Tianxia Fellowship in China seems great.
These days I think we’re in a better position to expand EA into new languages (tho I still wish we had more up-to-date intro materials), and to do mass outreach in general, and expanding into new languages also seems higher priority since it’s more plausible we’ve already reached the low hanging fruit in English-speaking countries. So overall I’m more pro-expansion than I was when I wrote it, though I would still say the ideal way to go about it is as in the paragraph above.
I think the post made some important but underappreciated arguments at the time, especially for high stakes countries with more cultural differences, such as China, Russia, and Arabic speaking countries. I might have been too negative about expanding into smaller countries that are culturally closer. I think it had some influence too, since people still often ask me about it.
One aspect I wish I’d emphasised more is that it’s very important to expand to new languages – my main point was that the way we should do it is by building a capable, native-language team, who can build a community in that language, and then investing heavily once we have that (rather than rushing to do more piecemeal efforts in the meantime). For instance, the Tianxia Fellowship in China seems great.
These days I think we’re in a better position to expand EA into new languages (tho I still wish we had more up-to-date intro materials), and to do mass outreach in general, and expanding into new languages also seems higher priority since it’s more plausible we’ve already reached the low hanging fruit in English-speaking countries. So overall I’m more pro-expansion than I was when I wrote it, though I would still say the ideal way to go about it is as in the paragraph above.