It appears the best of both worlds might be to seed local EA presence where the initial social network is composed of individuals who were always intrinsically motivated by EA who were also friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the story behind many local EA communities which became well-organized independent of one another. Of course if this is the key to bringing together local EA presences as social networks which tend toward lower rates of value drift, the kind of data we’re collecting so far won’t be applicable to what we want to learn for long. The anecdata of EAs who have been in the community since before there was significant investment in and direction of movement growth won’t be relevant when we’re trying to systematize that effort in a goal-driven fashion. As EA enters another stage of organization as a movement, it’s a movement structured fundamentally differently than how it organically emerged from a bunch of self-reflective do-gooders finding each other on the internet 5+ years ago.
It appears the best of both worlds might be to seed local EA presence where the initial social network is composed of individuals who were always intrinsically motivated by EA who were also friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the story behind many local EA communities which became well-organized independent of one another. Of course if this is the key to bringing together local EA presences as social networks which tend toward lower rates of value drift, the kind of data we’re collecting so far won’t be applicable to what we want to learn for long. The anecdata of EAs who have been in the community since before there was significant investment in and direction of movement growth won’t be relevant when we’re trying to systematize that effort in a goal-driven fashion. As EA enters another stage of organization as a movement, it’s a movement structured fundamentally differently than how it organically emerged from a bunch of self-reflective do-gooders finding each other on the internet 5+ years ago.