Thanks for the elaboration, Michael. Pleased to hear you like the new name—your feedback was significant in the decision to debate a name change, so thank you for providing it. Your phrasing generally describes the broader discussion we had on this argument for the name change during our deliberations—it’s a good reference for others who are considering this argument.
We had an interesting point come out of our deliberation on this topic of “apparent monopolisation”: we want to address a lack of community for physical engineers in EA so, in a way, we want to monopolise the space so as to collect as many engineers as possible in one place to maximise network effects. This initially updated us relatively strongly towards keeping “EA” in the name. However, a counterpoint is that having a name that is sufficiently recognisable to EAs—“High Impact [x]”, for example—hopefully derives a decent portion of the monopolisation benefit, while reducing the risk of “apparent monopolisation”. Therefore, we concluded that the “maximise network effects by monopolisation through using EA in the title” point only weakly updated us towards keeping “EA” in the name.
We would be very excited to see more organisations doing things for physical engineers in the future. We’ve been bouncing around quite a few ideas as we’ve been developing a strategy for the org, most of which will be out of our scope. So we would be interested in discussing ideas with anyone who is interested in starting an org in this space!
(I’ll note that we discussed this in some detail and that the use of ‘we’ and ‘us’ in this comment may not accurately reflect the views each team member but hopefully I’ve captured our average view relatively accurately)
Thanks for the elaboration, Michael. Pleased to hear you like the new name—your feedback was significant in the decision to debate a name change, so thank you for providing it. Your phrasing generally describes the broader discussion we had on this argument for the name change during our deliberations—it’s a good reference for others who are considering this argument.
We had an interesting point come out of our deliberation on this topic of “apparent monopolisation”: we want to address a lack of community for physical engineers in EA so, in a way, we want to monopolise the space so as to collect as many engineers as possible in one place to maximise network effects. This initially updated us relatively strongly towards keeping “EA” in the name. However, a counterpoint is that having a name that is sufficiently recognisable to EAs—“High Impact [x]”, for example—hopefully derives a decent portion of the monopolisation benefit, while reducing the risk of “apparent monopolisation”. Therefore, we concluded that the “maximise network effects by monopolisation through using EA in the title” point only weakly updated us towards keeping “EA” in the name.
We would be very excited to see more organisations doing things for physical engineers in the future. We’ve been bouncing around quite a few ideas as we’ve been developing a strategy for the org, most of which will be out of our scope. So we would be interested in discussing ideas with anyone who is interested in starting an org in this space!
(I’ll note that we discussed this in some detail and that the use of ‘we’ and ‘us’ in this comment may not accurately reflect the views each team member but hopefully I’ve captured our average view relatively accurately)
That pretty accurately describes my thoughts on this :)