Agree. I’d also add that this is a natural effect of the focus EA has put on outreach in universities and to young people. Not to say that the young people are the problem—they aren’t, and we are happy to have them. But in prioritizing that, we did deprioritize outreach to mid and late-stage professionals. CEA and grantmakers only had so much bandwidth, and we only had so many people suited to CB/recruiting/outreach-style roles.
We have had glaring gaps for a while in ability to manage people, scale programs, manage and direct projects and orgs, and perform due diligence checks on and advising for EA organisations. In other words, we lack expertise.
I’d say 80K has been somewhat aware of this gap and touched on it lightly, and the community itself has dialled in on the problem by discussing EA recruiters. Yet CEA, funders, and others working on movement-building seem to repeatedly conflate community building with getting more young people to change careers, revealing their priorities, IMO, by what they actually work on.
Open Phil has done this as well. Looking at their Effective Altruism Community Growth focus area , 5 out of the 6 suggestions are focused on young people. The sixth is translating EA materials, so all options to directly work with promising people are focused on young people. Admittedly there is a form to submit other ideas, but given what looks like a ~5/5.5 base rate of thinking youth are worth mentioning where they could have mentioned something else, I’m not hopeful they care about non-youth interventions. When I look at that page, I cant help but think, “So, are we building a sustainable movement and network of professionals, or are we essentially running disjointed Thiel fellowships?”
Things I’d like to see to increase expertise and experience in EA (in addition to new roles, interventions, and EA orgs focused on improving governance in EA):
I hope it’s not moot to discuss funder priorities now: I’d like to see funders and grantmakers overtly acknowledge that we need expertise from professionals outside the EA movement. The expertise bottleneck is the other side of the coin to the operations bottleneck, and it never got addressed. I’d also like to see blunt transparency of their reasons to have not prioritized or called for people to work on building experienced professional leadership and leadership assistance in EA orgs. If reasoning is made overt, perhaps we can workshop it, eg, if they think EAs are bad at talking to late-stage professionals, we hire someone who is good, or we ask a couple promising comms EAs to go through some class on recruiting executives.
I’d also like to see EA individuals and orgs themselves take on this mantle of increasing expertise in EA. It feels like EA individuals have been saying this for a while but very few have been trying to solve the problem. Charity Entrepreneurship could even add charities with related missions to their incubation program. It can’t be that different from Animal Advocacy Careers which they incubated already.
I’d also like to see more nuanced terms than “community building” or “movement building” to better clarify what is being prioritized under the hood. Governance-building, professional network-building, and direct-worker building all have different focuses (and I could name so many more). I think the vagueness of the CB term could be responsible for a lot of our gaps, and also responsible for the lack of promising outcomes CB grantees might have seemed to yield, from the point of view of funders and grantmakers.
Very much agree on everything you said. I have shared my opinions on this a lot in the past days and happy to see that more and more people see the issue with scaling without a structure built around
Agree. I’d also add that this is a natural effect of the focus EA has put on outreach in universities and to young people. Not to say that the young people are the problem—they aren’t, and we are happy to have them. But in prioritizing that, we did deprioritize outreach to mid and late-stage professionals. CEA and grantmakers only had so much bandwidth, and we only had so many people suited to CB/recruiting/outreach-style roles.
We have had glaring gaps for a while in ability to manage people, scale programs, manage and direct projects and orgs, and perform due diligence checks on and advising for EA organisations. In other words, we lack expertise.
I’d say 80K has been somewhat aware of this gap and touched on it lightly, and the community itself has dialled in on the problem by discussing EA recruiters. Yet CEA, funders, and others working on movement-building seem to repeatedly conflate community building with getting more young people to change careers, revealing their priorities, IMO, by what they actually work on.
Open Phil has done this as well. Looking at their Effective Altruism Community Growth focus area , 5 out of the 6 suggestions are focused on young people. The sixth is translating EA materials, so all options to directly work with promising people are focused on young people. Admittedly there is a form to submit other ideas, but given what looks like a ~5/5.5 base rate of thinking youth are worth mentioning where they could have mentioned something else, I’m not hopeful they care about non-youth interventions. When I look at that page, I cant help but think, “So, are we building a sustainable movement and network of professionals, or are we essentially running disjointed Thiel fellowships?”
Things I’d like to see to increase expertise and experience in EA (in addition to new roles, interventions, and EA orgs focused on improving governance in EA):
I hope it’s not moot to discuss funder priorities now: I’d like to see funders and grantmakers overtly acknowledge that we need expertise from professionals outside the EA movement. The expertise bottleneck is the other side of the coin to the operations bottleneck, and it never got addressed. I’d also like to see blunt transparency of their reasons to have not prioritized or called for people to work on building experienced professional leadership and leadership assistance in EA orgs. If reasoning is made overt, perhaps we can workshop it, eg, if they think EAs are bad at talking to late-stage professionals, we hire someone who is good, or we ask a couple promising comms EAs to go through some class on recruiting executives.
I’d also like to see EA individuals and orgs themselves take on this mantle of increasing expertise in EA. It feels like EA individuals have been saying this for a while but very few have been trying to solve the problem. Charity Entrepreneurship could even add charities with related missions to their incubation program. It can’t be that different from Animal Advocacy Careers which they incubated already.
I’d also like to see more nuanced terms than “community building” or “movement building” to better clarify what is being prioritized under the hood. Governance-building, professional network-building, and direct-worker building all have different focuses (and I could name so many more). I think the vagueness of the CB term could be responsible for a lot of our gaps, and also responsible for the lack of promising outcomes CB grantees might have seemed to yield, from the point of view of funders and grantmakers.
Very much agree on everything you said. I have shared my opinions on this a lot in the past days and happy to see that more and more people see the issue with scaling without a structure built around