Recruit outside your social network: We teach a DeCal (student taught course) about Effective Altruism that is posted on a list of DeCals that all Berkeley students can see, and we play speed Giving Games with random students who are walking down Sproul plaza. The class has been pretty successful; the speed Giving Games not so much (most successes there are with people who already know someone in the club). I’ll be posting a retrospective about EA Berkeley soon with more details. TL;DR: This is hard to do.
I would say “be welcoming” is more important—there’s already a small base rate of people outside standard EA social networks that have some interest in EA. Currently I think a very large proportion of them (>80%) end up not becoming a part of EA. (Compared to ~50% for standard EA demographics.) Bringing that number down would be very helpful, and I think is more tractable.
Re: random unrelated note: That makes sense, but I will say that my impression of “be welcoming” is not “suppress weird ideas”, I’ve said more about this in a comment above.
Recruit outside your social network: We teach a DeCal (student taught course) about Effective Altruism that is posted on a list of DeCals that all Berkeley students can see, and we play speed Giving Games with random students who are walking down Sproul plaza. The class has been pretty successful; the speed Giving Games not so much (most successes there are with people who already know someone in the club). I’ll be posting a retrospective about EA Berkeley soon with more details. TL;DR: This is hard to do.
I would say “be welcoming” is more important—there’s already a small base rate of people outside standard EA social networks that have some interest in EA. Currently I think a very large proportion of them (>80%) end up not becoming a part of EA. (Compared to ~50% for standard EA demographics.) Bringing that number down would be very helpful, and I think is more tractable.
Re: random unrelated note: That makes sense, but I will say that my impression of “be welcoming” is not “suppress weird ideas”, I’ve said more about this in a comment above.