Yeah, these are great points. I agree that with enough structure, larger-scale growth seems possible. Basically, I agree with everything you said. I’d perhaps add that in such a world, “EA” would have a quite different meaning from how we use the term now. I also don’t quite buy the point about Ramanujan – I think “spreading the ideas widely” is different from “making the community huge”.
(Small meta nitpick: I find it confusing to call a community of 2 million people “small” – really wish we were using “very large” for 2 million and “insanely huge” for 1% of the population, or similar. Like, if someone said “Jonas wants to keep EA small”, I would feel like they were misrepresenting my opinion.)
I think “spreading the ideas widely” is different from “making the community huge”
Yeah, I think that’s an important insight I also agree with.
In an ideal world the best thing to do would be to expose everyone to some kind of “screening device” (e.g. a pitch or piece of content with a call to action at the end) which draws them into the EA community if and only if they’d make a net valuable contribution. In the actual world there is no such screening device, but I suspect we could still do more to expand the reach of “exposure to the initial ideas / basic framework of EA” while relying on self-selection and existing gatekeeping mechanisms for reducing the risk of dilution etc.
My main concern with such a strategy would actually not be that it risks dilution but that it would be more valuable once we have more of a “task Y”, i.e. something a lot of people can do. (Or some other change that would allow us to better utilize more talent.)
Yeah, these are great points. I agree that with enough structure, larger-scale growth seems possible. Basically, I agree with everything you said. I’d perhaps add that in such a world, “EA” would have a quite different meaning from how we use the term now. I also don’t quite buy the point about Ramanujan – I think “spreading the ideas widely” is different from “making the community huge”.
(Small meta nitpick: I find it confusing to call a community of 2 million people “small” – really wish we were using “very large” for 2 million and “insanely huge” for 1% of the population, or similar. Like, if someone said “Jonas wants to keep EA small”, I would feel like they were misrepresenting my opinion.)
Yeah, I think that’s an important insight I also agree with.
In an ideal world the best thing to do would be to expose everyone to some kind of “screening device” (e.g. a pitch or piece of content with a call to action at the end) which draws them into the EA community if and only if they’d make a net valuable contribution. In the actual world there is no such screening device, but I suspect we could still do more to expand the reach of “exposure to the initial ideas / basic framework of EA” while relying on self-selection and existing gatekeeping mechanisms for reducing the risk of dilution etc.
My main concern with such a strategy would actually not be that it risks dilution but that it would be more valuable once we have more of a “task Y”, i.e. something a lot of people can do. (Or some other change that would allow us to better utilize more talent.)