But I am also afraid that … we will see a rush of ever greater numbers of people into our community, far beyond our ability to culturally onboard them
I’ve had a model of community building at the back of my mind for a while that’s something like this:
“New folks come in, and pick up knowledge/epistemics/heuristics/culture/aesthetics from the existing group, for as long as their “state” (wrapping all these things up in one number for simplicity) is “less than the community average”. But this is essentially a one way diffusion sort of dynamic, which means that the rate at which newcomers pick stuff up from the community is about proportional to the gap between their state and the community state, and proportional to the size of community vs number of relative newcomers at any given time.”
The picture this leads to is kind of a blackjack situation. We want to grow as fast as we can, for impact reasons. But if we grow too fast, we can’t onboard people fast enough, the community average starts dropping, and seems unlikely to recover (we go bust). On this view, figuring out how to “teach EA culture” is extremely important—it’s a limiting factor for growth, and failure due to going bust is catastrophic while failure from insufficient speed is gradual.
Currently prototyping something at the Claremont uni group to try and accelerate this. Seems like you’ve thought about this sort of thing a lot—if you’ve got time to give feedback on a draft, that would be much appreciated.
Related to that is “eternal September” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September. Each September, when new students joined there was a period where the new users has not learnt the culture and norms, but new users being the minority they did learn the norms and integrate.
Around 1993 a flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms, and because of the massive and constant influx the norms and culture was permanently changed.
Why would the community average dropping mean we go bust? I’d think our success is more related to the community total. Yes, there are some costs to having more people around who don’t know as much, but it’s further claim that these would outweigh the benefits.
Yup, existing EA’s do not disappear if we go bust in this way. But I’m pretty convinced that it would still be very bad. Roughly, the community dies, even if the people making it up don’t vanish. Trust/discussion/reputation dry up, the cluster of people who consider themselves “EA” are now very different from the current thing, and that cluster kinda starts doing different stuff on its own. Further community-building efforts just grow the new thing, not “real” EA.
I think in this scenario the best thing to do is for the core of old-fashioned EA’s to basically disassociate with this new thing, come up with a different name/brand, and start the community-building project over again.
I’ve had a model of community building at the back of my mind for a while that’s something like this:
“New folks come in, and pick up knowledge/epistemics/heuristics/culture/aesthetics from the existing group, for as long as their “state” (wrapping all these things up in one number for simplicity) is “less than the community average”. But this is essentially a one way diffusion sort of dynamic, which means that the rate at which newcomers pick stuff up from the community is about proportional to the gap between their state and the community state, and proportional to the size of community vs number of relative newcomers at any given time.”
The picture this leads to is kind of a blackjack situation. We want to grow as fast as we can, for impact reasons. But if we grow too fast, we can’t onboard people fast enough, the community average starts dropping, and seems unlikely to recover (we go bust). On this view, figuring out how to “teach EA culture” is extremely important—it’s a limiting factor for growth, and failure due to going bust is catastrophic while failure from insufficient speed is gradual.
Currently prototyping something at the Claremont uni group to try and accelerate this. Seems like you’ve thought about this sort of thing a lot—if you’ve got time to give feedback on a draft, that would be much appreciated.
Related to that is “eternal September” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September. Each September, when new students joined there was a period where the new users has not learnt the culture and norms, but new users being the minority they did learn the norms and integrate.
Around 1993 a flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms, and because of the massive and constant influx the norms and culture was permanently changed.
Why would the community average dropping mean we go bust? I’d think our success is more related to the community total. Yes, there are some costs to having more people around who don’t know as much, but it’s further claim that these would outweigh the benefits.
Yup, existing EA’s do not disappear if we go bust in this way. But I’m pretty convinced that it would still be very bad. Roughly, the community dies, even if the people making it up don’t vanish. Trust/discussion/reputation dry up, the cluster of people who consider themselves “EA” are now very different from the current thing, and that cluster kinda starts doing different stuff on its own. Further community-building efforts just grow the new thing, not “real” EA.
I think in this scenario the best thing to do is for the core of old-fashioned EA’s to basically disassociate with this new thing, come up with a different name/brand, and start the community-building project over again.