Thanks for this! Agree with what I take to be your main point—building up support for university groups and their organizers would be great.
The main thing I’m nervous about: I suspect this post heavily underestimates the value and difficulty of having regional coordinators be excellent fits for their work, and that this means the hiring of regional coordinators should be much more cautious (and will have to be much slower) than the post at times suggests.
Some intuitions and evidence that point toward that:
As the post suggests, this (under-emphasizing of the importance and difficulty of getting excellent coordinators) was the main thing that seemed off about this post, to several other experienced organizers who reviewed a draft.
Experience-based conventional wisdom seems to be that good hiring is very important. E.g. I’ve read/heard from tech companies, nonprofits, and senior government officials that hiring is one of the most important things—or the most important thing—they do.
The difference between university groups’ outcomes is vast (even if we’re comparing similar universities), suggesting that the quality of a group is generally very important.
Anecdotally, the difference between university group organizers’ personal fit for organizing these university groups (e.g. differences in commitment to impact, relevant social skills, relevant knowledge) is vast. For example, some organizers explicitly don’t prioritize impact in their career planning, and it seems likely that such a regional coordinator would set a discouraging (or at least non-inspiring) example for university group members and organizers.
There seem to be very few people who seem to be both great fits for group coordinating and interested in such work.
Within the US, this is a small enough community that I think we know all the people who fit that bill—it’s currently just a handful of people.
If there were more people who fit that bill (great fit + interest), they would already have applied to the EA Infrastructure Fund to do relevant work, and there wouldn’t still be so much low-hanging fruit in this space.
As you rightly point out, regional groups could do super useful stuff, like starting new groups and distributing knowledge (or, I’d emphasize, more extensive mentorship/management). These things are hard to do well—relevant experience and skills seem very useful.
Anecdotally, groups’ success seems mainly constrained by whether they have organizers who strategically dedicate lots of time to the group and have strong relevant social skills.
(The comfort of getting funding seems relatively unimportant. If my memory is right, I think a draft reviewer with knowledge of group funders’ situations also noted that they didn’t consider funding logistics to be a major current or potential bottleneck on their end.)
[edit: moved a point to a comment for length]
I think in a few years, today’s community building work will have paid off in (among other things) creating a bunch more people who are strong fits for doing excellent work as regional coordinators. But if people rush now to have mediocre fits fill these roles, I worry they might crowd out future excellent work, which would be losing lots of value.
As I mentioned before, I’m a big fan of the overall idea! Just hoping that this hiring aspect gets implemented well.
Hey, thank you so much for writing such a well thought out response! I can’t seem to be able to write a similarly good, so I’ll just respond to a few points that stood out to me.
Re hiring: I think there’s a difference between hiring for “people to set up the infrastructure” and hiring for “people to fill out the infrastructure” (I wrote about this in another comment). I agree that the first one is very important to do well, I think that the second one can be done on a more natural selection basis.
Another thing that your comment got me thinking about is: I wish we reverted back to the more volunteer basis of community building. It makes me sad to see people in EA always cling to “throw a bunch of money at this” or “hire someone to do it for you”, instead of thinking of systematic ways to make the situation better (sorry this sounds uncharitable, can’t think of a better wording). But this is kind of a hot take I have to think about more...
> If there were more people who fit that bill (great fit + interest), they would already have applied to the EA Infrastructure Fund to do relevant work, and there wouldn’t still be so much low-hanging fruit in this space.
This seems like the wrong intuition. There might as well be lots of people who “fit that bill”, but because it’s hard to discern what the low-hanging fruit is, and there’s no infrastructure or system for them to effectively pick the fruit, they don’t take action, and maybe that’s why we got so few people in CB careers...
> I think in a few years, today’s community building work will have paid off in (among other things) creating a bunch more people who are strong fits for doing excellent work as regional coordinators. But if people rush now to have mediocre fits fill these roles, I worry they might crowd out future excellent work, which would be losing lots of value.
I feel like you might be overestimating how excellent can community building work be (but I’m not sure!). E.g. if I think about my LA region, I can’t think of ways how the roughly 4 to 6 colleges and their uni groups can do excellent community building work. Of course, they can get together and organize bigger stuff, which can be excellent, but on the level of one uni group, it only gets as good. The reason I wrote this post is because I feel like we’re very far off from the point where every uni has a uni group as good as it could have.
Re hiring: I think there’s a difference between hiring for “people to set up the infrastructure” and hiring for “people to fill out the infrastructure” (I wrote about this in another comment). I agree that the first one is very important to do well, I think that the second one can be done on a more natural selection basis.
I’m not sure I buy either of those claims.
I have a pretty strong intuition that someone trying to set up this infrastructure is doomed if they don’t try a bunch of things and closely engage with feedback loops (just because knowing what works is hard). If that’s the case—if doing regional coordinating is very important for setting up regional coordination infrastructure—then the two roles are not neatly separable (i.e. they need to be done by the same people, so we can’t have different hiring practices for the two roles).
I don’t have a good sense of what you mean by “natural selection basis.”
If you mean “hire people who are taking initiative and doing excellent work at smaller-scale / local organizing,” then I probably agree.
If you mean “hire people who aren’t excellent fits,” then I disagree for the reasons discussed in my original comment.
I wish we reverted back to the more volunteer basis of community building.
I’m pretty confused about how this fits with your interest in establishing infrastructure. Anecdotally, it seems that volunteer-based infrastructure often collapses because volunteers get busy with other stuff, while paying people creates financial incentives + financial capability for people to devote lots of time to a thing.
It makes me sad to see people in EA always cling to “throw a bunch of money at this” or “hire someone to do it for you”, instead of thinking of systematic ways to make the situation better
I also don’t get this—isn’t hiring people a systematic way to make a situation better?
There might as well be lots of people who “fit that bill”, but [...]
I think we can rule that out empirically—we can get a rough upper bound on the number of people who are prepared to do excellent regional coordination from the number of people on full-time CBGs. Unless I’m mistaken, in the US that’s just a few people.
I feel like you might be overestimating how excellent can community building work be (but I’m not sure!).
My estimate of (a lower bound of) how excellent community building work can be (relative to median community building work) comes largely from the evidence discussed in this post and this one. I think these posts provide strong support for the conclusion that some EA university groups are many times more impactful than others (even if we’re just comparing EA groups at similar universities). If you don’t think those posts strongly support that conclusion, I’d be really curious to hear why not. (Or maybe you see other strong evidence to the contrary?)
Thanks for this! Agree with what I take to be your main point—building up support for university groups and their organizers would be great.
The main thing I’m nervous about: I suspect this post heavily underestimates the value and difficulty of having regional coordinators be excellent fits for their work, and that this means the hiring of regional coordinators should be much more cautious (and will have to be much slower) than the post at times suggests.
Some intuitions and evidence that point toward that:
As the post suggests, this (under-emphasizing of the importance and difficulty of getting excellent coordinators) was the main thing that seemed off about this post, to several other experienced organizers who reviewed a draft.
Experience-based conventional wisdom seems to be that good hiring is very important. E.g. I’ve read/heard from tech companies, nonprofits, and senior government officials that hiring is one of the most important things—or the most important thing—they do.
The difference between university groups’ outcomes is vast (even if we’re comparing similar universities), suggesting that the quality of a group is generally very important.
Anecdotally, the difference between university group organizers’ personal fit for organizing these university groups (e.g. differences in commitment to impact, relevant social skills, relevant knowledge) is vast. For example, some organizers explicitly don’t prioritize impact in their career planning, and it seems likely that such a regional coordinator would set a discouraging (or at least non-inspiring) example for university group members and organizers.
There seem to be very few people who seem to be both great fits for group coordinating and interested in such work.
Within the US, this is a small enough community that I think we know all the people who fit that bill—it’s currently just a handful of people.
If there were more people who fit that bill (great fit + interest), they would already have applied to the EA Infrastructure Fund to do relevant work, and there wouldn’t still be so much low-hanging fruit in this space.
As you rightly point out, regional groups could do super useful stuff, like starting new groups and distributing knowledge (or, I’d emphasize, more extensive mentorship/management). These things are hard to do well—relevant experience and skills seem very useful.
Anecdotally, groups’ success seems mainly constrained by whether they have organizers who strategically dedicate lots of time to the group and have strong relevant social skills.
(The comfort of getting funding seems relatively unimportant. If my memory is right, I think a draft reviewer with knowledge of group funders’ situations also noted that they didn’t consider funding logistics to be a major current or potential bottleneck on their end.)
[edit: moved a point to a comment for length]
I think in a few years, today’s community building work will have paid off in (among other things) creating a bunch more people who are strong fits for doing excellent work as regional coordinators. But if people rush now to have mediocre fits fill these roles, I worry they might crowd out future excellent work, which would be losing lots of value.
As I mentioned before, I’m a big fan of the overall idea! Just hoping that this hiring aspect gets implemented well.
Hey, thank you so much for writing such a well thought out response! I can’t seem to be able to write a similarly good, so I’ll just respond to a few points that stood out to me.
Re hiring: I think there’s a difference between hiring for “people to set up the infrastructure” and hiring for “people to fill out the infrastructure” (I wrote about this in another comment). I agree that the first one is very important to do well, I think that the second one can be done on a more natural selection basis.
Another thing that your comment got me thinking about is: I wish we reverted back to the more volunteer basis of community building. It makes me sad to see people in EA always cling to “throw a bunch of money at this” or “hire someone to do it for you”, instead of thinking of systematic ways to make the situation better (sorry this sounds uncharitable, can’t think of a better wording). But this is kind of a hot take I have to think about more...
> If there were more people who fit that bill (great fit + interest), they would already have applied to the EA Infrastructure Fund to do relevant work, and there wouldn’t still be so much low-hanging fruit in this space.
This seems like the wrong intuition. There might as well be lots of people who “fit that bill”, but because it’s hard to discern what the low-hanging fruit is, and there’s no infrastructure or system for them to effectively pick the fruit, they don’t take action, and maybe that’s why we got so few people in CB careers...
> I think in a few years, today’s community building work will have paid off in (among other things) creating a bunch more people who are strong fits for doing excellent work as regional coordinators. But if people rush now to have mediocre fits fill these roles, I worry they might crowd out future excellent work, which would be losing lots of value.
I feel like you might be overestimating how excellent can community building work be (but I’m not sure!). E.g. if I think about my LA region, I can’t think of ways how the roughly 4 to 6 colleges and their uni groups can do excellent community building work. Of course, they can get together and organize bigger stuff, which can be excellent, but on the level of one uni group, it only gets as good. The reason I wrote this post is because I feel like we’re very far off from the point where every uni has a uni group as good as it could have.
Hey, thanks for your thoughts!
I’m not sure I buy either of those claims.
I have a pretty strong intuition that someone trying to set up this infrastructure is doomed if they don’t try a bunch of things and closely engage with feedback loops (just because knowing what works is hard). If that’s the case—if doing regional coordinating is very important for setting up regional coordination infrastructure—then the two roles are not neatly separable (i.e. they need to be done by the same people, so we can’t have different hiring practices for the two roles).
I don’t have a good sense of what you mean by “natural selection basis.”
If you mean “hire people who are taking initiative and doing excellent work at smaller-scale / local organizing,” then I probably agree.
If you mean “hire people who aren’t excellent fits,” then I disagree for the reasons discussed in my original comment.
I’m pretty confused about how this fits with your interest in establishing infrastructure. Anecdotally, it seems that volunteer-based infrastructure often collapses because volunteers get busy with other stuff, while paying people creates financial incentives + financial capability for people to devote lots of time to a thing.
I also don’t get this—isn’t hiring people a systematic way to make a situation better?
I think we can rule that out empirically—we can get a rough upper bound on the number of people who are prepared to do excellent regional coordination from the number of people on full-time CBGs. Unless I’m mistaken, in the US that’s just a few people.
My estimate of (a lower bound of) how excellent community building work can be (relative to median community building work) comes largely from the evidence discussed in this post and this one. I think these posts provide strong support for the conclusion that some EA university groups are many times more impactful than others (even if we’re just comparing EA groups at similar universities). If you don’t think those posts strongly support that conclusion, I’d be really curious to hear why not. (Or maybe you see other strong evidence to the contrary?)