I think EA Global admissions is one of the few places where we can apply steering on how EA is growing and what kind of culture we are developing, and giving this up seems like a cost, without particularly strong commensurate benefits.
I wonder if this is overstated.
I feel like we have a number of other strong channels, including:
Yeah, I agree these are all candidates, though I think these are all actually somewhat downstream of general movement growth:
Funding has been getting a lot less centralized and in-general funding is a lot more flush, at least in the longtermist space, so I think this has been serving much less as a thing that meaningfully steers the culture
Frank discussion on the EA Forum I do think is quite important, though I also think that outside of a few people like Nuno we see very little actual critique of projects, and I think a lot of the people who tend to have written critical things have stopped in the last few years (Larks is stopping his AI Alignment review, I am no longer writing long LTFF writeups, and broadly I have a feeling that there is a lot more mincing of words on the forum than a few years ago), so while I do think this is quite important, I also think it’s becoming a weaker force
Leadership has also been growing and I think leadership is now actually distributed enough and large enough that I feel like this isn’t really doing a ton in terms of shaping culture and changing community growth. I feel far from getting to consensus with people at 80k on how they are thinking about community growth, and my sense is everyone is just really busy and very few people among the de-facto leadership think of themselves as actually responsible for shaping community culture and growth (at least I got a relatively strong feeling of powerlessness from people trying to shape community growth at the latest Coordination Forum, though I might also be projecting my own feelings too much here, so take this with a grain of salt)
I actually think the strongest channel we currently have for shaping culture and growth are things like Lightcone and Constellation, which are more consistent spaces with boundaries that allow some people to maintain more of a walled garden, though I also have complicated feelings about the dynamics here.
I basically agree with this comment, which makes me like the idea of an open EAG. Closed EAG is theoretically good for shaping culture by selecting good participants, but CEA faces a knowledge problem for which people are “good culture fits”, and it moves towards promoting some weird homogenization thing. I have some inchoate instinct that a more decentralized network of smaller walled gardens can preserve and signal good parts of culture, while avoiding frustrating “CEA as kingmaker” dynamics, and allowing an open EAG to introduce novelty into the system.
I wonder if this is overstated.
I feel like we have a number of other strong channels, including:
funding
frank discussions on EAF and other public fora
private discussions/coordination by leaders
Yeah, I agree these are all candidates, though I think these are all actually somewhat downstream of general movement growth:
Funding has been getting a lot less centralized and in-general funding is a lot more flush, at least in the longtermist space, so I think this has been serving much less as a thing that meaningfully steers the culture
Frank discussion on the EA Forum I do think is quite important, though I also think that outside of a few people like Nuno we see very little actual critique of projects, and I think a lot of the people who tend to have written critical things have stopped in the last few years (Larks is stopping his AI Alignment review, I am no longer writing long LTFF writeups, and broadly I have a feeling that there is a lot more mincing of words on the forum than a few years ago), so while I do think this is quite important, I also think it’s becoming a weaker force
Leadership has also been growing and I think leadership is now actually distributed enough and large enough that I feel like this isn’t really doing a ton in terms of shaping culture and changing community growth. I feel far from getting to consensus with people at 80k on how they are thinking about community growth, and my sense is everyone is just really busy and very few people among the de-facto leadership think of themselves as actually responsible for shaping community culture and growth (at least I got a relatively strong feeling of powerlessness from people trying to shape community growth at the latest Coordination Forum, though I might also be projecting my own feelings too much here, so take this with a grain of salt)
I actually think the strongest channel we currently have for shaping culture and growth are things like Lightcone and Constellation, which are more consistent spaces with boundaries that allow some people to maintain more of a walled garden, though I also have complicated feelings about the dynamics here.
[epistemic status: idle uninformed speculation]
I basically agree with this comment, which makes me like the idea of an open EAG. Closed EAG is theoretically good for shaping culture by selecting good participants, but CEA faces a knowledge problem for which people are “good culture fits”, and it moves towards promoting some weird homogenization thing. I have some inchoate instinct that a more decentralized network of smaller walled gardens can preserve and signal good parts of culture, while avoiding frustrating “CEA as kingmaker” dynamics, and allowing an open EAG to introduce novelty into the system.