The paragraphs below are partly responding to your framing of the issue here. If you frame it as “we can either have 4x attendees and not be inclusive by sponsering flights and visas, or 3x attendees and be inclusive” that’s pursuasive, if you’re saying “we can cut the costs of this conference by a large amount by not sponsering any flights or visas, which means more malaria nets or more ai grants and I think that’s worth it” that’s potentially pursuasive, but when you frame it as about about the project of inclusion in general, then I do feel like you’re making a mistake of unevenly placed skepticism here.
I think community builders and those funding/steering community building efforts should be more explicit and open about what their theory of change for global community building is
I do think meta orgs could be clearer about their theory of change, but to get there via the questioning of the value of diversity seems like an odd reasoning path, the lack of clarity is so much deeper than that! I feel like there is some selective scepticism going on here. If you apply this skepticism to the bigger picture then I don’t see why one ought to zero in on diversity initiatives in particular as the problem.
Firstly, I think it would be illustrative if you said what you think is the point of community building, in your view? Community building is inherently pretty vague and diffuse as a path to impact and why you do it changes what you do.
For instance, suppose you think the point of community is to recruit new staff. Then I’d say maybe you ought to focus on targetted headhunting specifically rather than doing community-building? Or failing that, training people for roles? As far as non-technical roles, it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge shortage of 95th+ percentile generally-high-talent people who want an EA job but don’t have one, but there’s lots of work to be done in vetting them, or training them. As far as technical roles, you can try and figure out who the leaders of relevant technical fields are and recruit them directly. If I wanted to just maximize staff hires I wouldn’t do community building, I’d do headhunting, training, vetting, recruitment, matchmaking etc in tight conjunction with the high impact orgs i was trying to serve.
Or, if you think the point of the community building is to have meetings between key players, then why not just only invite existing staff members within your specific cause area in a small room? From a networking perspective community building is too diffuse, there’s not much in the way of real professional reasons why the AI safety people and the animal rights people need to meet. You don’t need a huge conference or local groups for that.
I think when someone focuses on community building, when someone thinks that’s the best way to make change, then (assuming they are thinking from an impact maximizing perspective at all, i suspect at least some resources people direct towards meta has more in common with the psychology of donating to your university or volunteering with your church than with cold utilitarian calculus, and i think that’s okay) they’re probably thinking of stuff which is quite indirect and harder to quantify, like the value of having people from very different segments of the community who would ordinarily have no reason to meet encounter each other, or the value of provoding some local way to connect to EA for everyone who is part of it. For these purposes, being geographically inclusive makes sense. Questions like whether people could sponser their own flights depend on how valueable you think that type of community building is, I agree that there’s a difference between thinking it’s valueable and thinking it’s valuable enough to fly everyone in even if they don’t have a clear intent to work on something that requires flying in like you did. If community building is intended to capture soft and not easily quantified effects that don’t have an obvious reason behind them, then I don’t see why those soft and not easily quantified effects shouldn’t include global outreach. Fostering connections between community members even if they work in different areas or are across the globe from each other, or taking advantage of word of mouth spread in local contexts, or the benefits of having soft ties on each continent such as a friendly base for an EA travelling for work to crash or having a friend of a friend who works in the right government agency for your policy proposal, seem like a valid type of “soft and hard to quantify” effect. Like right now, you can throw a dart on the map, and you will probably be able to find one ea in that country to stay with, and if you throw a few more darts then you can probably find an ea in a government and so on, in a handwavey sense I most people would say that this is a generally beneficial effect of doing inclusive global outreach for any policy or ngo goal.
Whereas if you don’t have much faith in that soft and hard to quantify narrative, if you’re pursuing hard, quantified impact maximizing, then why do community outreach at all? Why not instead work on something more direct like headhunting or fund some more direct work?
I’m sympathetic to “this theory of change isn’t clear enough”, it just seems weird to me that if you’ve accepted all the other unclear things about the community building theory of change, that you would worry about inclusion efforts specifically. If you were sending out malaria nets I would understand if you made the choice that gave out the most nets even if it was less inclusive, because in that scenario at least you would have some chance of accurately predicting when inclusion reduced your nets. But in community building, that doesn’t make as much sense, if inclusion is hurting your bottom line how would you even know it? I feel like maybe you have to have a harder model of what your theory of change is before you can go around saying “regrettably, inclusion efforts funge against our bottom line in our theory of change”, because it seems to me like on soft and fuzzy not very quantified models of impact, inclusion efforts and global reach mostly make as much sense as any other community building impact model, and when one is in that scenario why not do the common sensically positive thing of being inclusive at least when it’s not very expensive to do so?
The paragraphs below are partly responding to your framing of the issue here. If you frame it as “we can either have 4x attendees and not be inclusive by sponsering flights and visas, or 3x attendees and be inclusive” that’s pursuasive, if you’re saying “we can cut the costs of this conference by a large amount by not sponsering any flights or visas, which means more malaria nets or more ai grants and I think that’s worth it” that’s potentially pursuasive, but when you frame it as about about the project of inclusion in general, then I do feel like you’re making a mistake of unevenly placed skepticism here.
I do think meta orgs could be clearer about their theory of change, but to get there via the questioning of the value of diversity seems like an odd reasoning path, the lack of clarity is so much deeper than that! I feel like there is some selective scepticism going on here. If you apply this skepticism to the bigger picture then I don’t see why one ought to zero in on diversity initiatives in particular as the problem.
Firstly, I think it would be illustrative if you said what you think is the point of community building, in your view? Community building is inherently pretty vague and diffuse as a path to impact and why you do it changes what you do.
For instance, suppose you think the point of community is to recruit new staff. Then I’d say maybe you ought to focus on targetted headhunting specifically rather than doing community-building? Or failing that, training people for roles? As far as non-technical roles, it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge shortage of 95th+ percentile generally-high-talent people who want an EA job but don’t have one, but there’s lots of work to be done in vetting them, or training them. As far as technical roles, you can try and figure out who the leaders of relevant technical fields are and recruit them directly. If I wanted to just maximize staff hires I wouldn’t do community building, I’d do headhunting, training, vetting, recruitment, matchmaking etc in tight conjunction with the high impact orgs i was trying to serve.
Or, if you think the point of the community building is to have meetings between key players, then why not just only invite existing staff members within your specific cause area in a small room? From a networking perspective community building is too diffuse, there’s not much in the way of real professional reasons why the AI safety people and the animal rights people need to meet. You don’t need a huge conference or local groups for that.
I think when someone focuses on community building, when someone thinks that’s the best way to make change, then (assuming they are thinking from an impact maximizing perspective at all, i suspect at least some resources people direct towards meta has more in common with the psychology of donating to your university or volunteering with your church than with cold utilitarian calculus, and i think that’s okay) they’re probably thinking of stuff which is quite indirect and harder to quantify, like the value of having people from very different segments of the community who would ordinarily have no reason to meet encounter each other, or the value of provoding some local way to connect to EA for everyone who is part of it. For these purposes, being geographically inclusive makes sense. Questions like whether people could sponser their own flights depend on how valueable you think that type of community building is, I agree that there’s a difference between thinking it’s valueable and thinking it’s valuable enough to fly everyone in even if they don’t have a clear intent to work on something that requires flying in like you did. If community building is intended to capture soft and not easily quantified effects that don’t have an obvious reason behind them, then I don’t see why those soft and not easily quantified effects shouldn’t include global outreach. Fostering connections between community members even if they work in different areas or are across the globe from each other, or taking advantage of word of mouth spread in local contexts, or the benefits of having soft ties on each continent such as a friendly base for an EA travelling for work to crash or having a friend of a friend who works in the right government agency for your policy proposal, seem like a valid type of “soft and hard to quantify” effect. Like right now, you can throw a dart on the map, and you will probably be able to find one ea in that country to stay with, and if you throw a few more darts then you can probably find an ea in a government and so on, in a handwavey sense I most people would say that this is a generally beneficial effect of doing inclusive global outreach for any policy or ngo goal.
Whereas if you don’t have much faith in that soft and hard to quantify narrative, if you’re pursuing hard, quantified impact maximizing, then why do community outreach at all? Why not instead work on something more direct like headhunting or fund some more direct work?
I’m sympathetic to “this theory of change isn’t clear enough”, it just seems weird to me that if you’ve accepted all the other unclear things about the community building theory of change, that you would worry about inclusion efforts specifically. If you were sending out malaria nets I would understand if you made the choice that gave out the most nets even if it was less inclusive, because in that scenario at least you would have some chance of accurately predicting when inclusion reduced your nets. But in community building, that doesn’t make as much sense, if inclusion is hurting your bottom line how would you even know it? I feel like maybe you have to have a harder model of what your theory of change is before you can go around saying “regrettably, inclusion efforts funge against our bottom line in our theory of change”, because it seems to me like on soft and fuzzy not very quantified models of impact, inclusion efforts and global reach mostly make as much sense as any other community building impact model, and when one is in that scenario why not do the common sensically positive thing of being inclusive at least when it’s not very expensive to do so?