Thanks for raising this question about EA’s growth, though I fully agree it would have been better to frame that question more like: “Given that we’re pouring a substantial amount of money into EA community growth, why doesn’t it show up in some of these metrics?” To that end, while I may refer to “growing” or “not growing” below for brevity I mean those terms relative to expectations rather than in an absolute sense. With that caveat out of the way…
There’s a very telling commonality about almost all the possible explanations that have been offered so far. Aside from a fraction of one comment, none of the explanations in the OP or this followup post even entertain the possibility that any mistakes by people/organizations in the EA community inhibited growth. That seems worthy of a closer look. We expect an influx of new funding (ca. ~2016-7) to translate into growth (with some degree of lag), but only if it is deployed in effective strategies that are executed well. If we see funding but not growth, why not look at which strategies were funded and how well they were executed?
CEA is probably the most straightforward example to look at, as an organization that has run a lot of community building projects and that received much of Open Phil’s initial “EA focus area” funding. Let’s look only at projects from 2015-2019, as more recent projects might not be reflected in growth statistics yet. In rough chronological order, here are some projects where mistakes could have plausibly impacted EA’s growth trajectory.
GWWC grew quickly in its early years (2009-2014), but starting in 2016 CEA made the mistake (their wording) of “underinvesting in GWWC” (the main person responsible for the project had other full-time responsibilities), leading growth to suffer until GWWC was spun off as an independent organization in late 2020.
EA Ventures was publicly launched in early 2015 and used significant amounts of staff and applicant time, but seems to have made only 2 small grants in its entire history. This project was shut down in 2016.
Pareto Fellowship attracted hundreds of applicants, many of whom could have been alienated because “the interview process was unprofessional and made them deeply uncomfortable.” This project was shut down in 2016.
EA Grants was piloted at small scale in 2017 before announcing plans to grant ~$2.6 million in 2018. Less than half that amount was actually granted, and the majority of money given was via a referral program rather than the open applications that were originally intended. The program was plagued by operational issues, many of them quite basic (“We did not maintain well-organized records of individuals applying for grants, grant applications under evaluation, and records of approved or rejected applications”). This project was shut down in April 2020.
Shouldn’t we consider the possibility that one or more of these issues contributed to EA’s underwhelming growth trajectory? The GWWC case seems pretty clear cut. CEA realized they had made a “mistake” (CEA’s word) by under-prioritizing GWWC, and spun the project off. Now that GWWC is getting proper attention, growth has very rapidly picked back up. If GWWC had been prioritized all along, wouldn’t we be seeing better growth metrics than we see now? To his credit, Aaron Gertler (who works at CEA) flagged GWWC’s growth rate as “solid evidence of weaknesses in community building strategy”, though nobody else engaged with this observation.
If we use Occam’s Razor to try and understand a lack of growth, isn’t “we deprioritized a major growth vehicle” a simpler explanation than “there was a shift in which rationalist blogs were popular”, “Google Trends data is wrong”, or “EA is innate, you can’t convert people”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about EA Grants/CBGs granting ~$4 million less than planned (~$2m granted vs. ~$6m planned) in 2018-19? Or the Pareto Fellowship putting “nearly 500” applicants (all people so eager to deepen their engagement with EA that they applied for an intensive fellowship) and “several hundred” semi-finalists through what one interviewee described as: “one of the strangest, most uncomfortable experiences I’ve had over several years of being involved in EA. I’m posting this from notes I took right after the call, so I am confident that I remember this accurately… It seemed like unscientific, crackpot psychology. It was the sort of thing you’d expect from a New Age group or Scientology… The experience left me feeling humiliated and manipulated.”
Let me pause here to say: There’s plenty of merit in some of the other explanations for lower than expected growth that people have raised, like a pivot in emphasis from donations to careers. My list above is also clearly cherry-picked to illustrate a point. CEA has obviously also done a lot of things to help the EA community. And CEA has recognized and taken steps to address many of the problems I mentioned, like spinning off GWWC and EA Funds, changing management teams and strategies, shutting down problematic projects like EA Ventures, the Pareto Fellowship, and EA Grants, etc. And it should be obvious that any organization will make mistakes and that plenty of people beyond CEA have made mistakes since 2015 (I know I have!) Indeed, it could be useful to invite people and organizations to submit mistakes they’ve made over the years so that we can collectively learn from them. Even if these mistakes were reasonable decisions at the time, hindsight is a wonderful teacher if you use it.
But here’s the critical point: even if you don’t think “mistakes were made” is the main explanation for why growth has been slow, it should scare the hell out of you that only one person thought to mention it in passing because clearly some mistakes were made. Recognizing these problems is how you begin to fix them. CEA recognized that GWWC wasn’t getting enough attention and spun it off to remedy that. Lo and behold, in the new Executive Director’s “first three months, the rate of new pledges tripled.”
This refusal to look inward is a blind spot, and a particularly troubling one for a community that prides itself on unbiased thinking, openness to uncomfortable ideas, and strong epistemics. Here’s a (crucial?) consideration: if GWWC had been reasonably staffed and compounding at a higher growth rate for the last five years, if the Pareto Fellowship put ~500 extremely enthusiastic EAs through a normal rather than alienating interview process in 2016, if EA Grants/CBGs had granted an additional ~$4 million into the community as planned (tripling the amount actually granted), if the time and money invested in projects that didn’t get off the ground had gone toward sustainable projects paying ongoing dividends, and if other people and organizations hadn’t made countless other mistakes over the years, what would our community growth metrics look like today? Are we confident all the necessary lessons have been learned from these mistakes, and that we’re not at risk of repeating those mistakes?
I agree that this is a (significant) part of the explanation. For instance, I think there are a variety of things I could have done last year that would have helped our groups support improve more quickly.
Plug: if you have feedback about mistakes CEA is making or has made, I’d love to hear it. You can share thoughts (including anonymously) here.
Thanks Max! It’s incredibly valuable for leaders like yourself to acknowledge the importance of identifying and learning from mistakes that have been made over the years.
I agree that it’s worth asking for an explanation why growth has—if anything—slowed, while funds have vastly increased. One interesting exercise is to categorise the controversies. Some major categories:
Leverage-people violating social norms (which was a mistake)
CEA under-delivering operationally (mistake)
Re-prioritising toward longtermism (not a mistake imo)
Re-prioritising away from community growth (unclear whether a mistake)
The mistakes:
GWWC deprioritised (3,4)
EA Ventures (1,2)
EA Global 2015 PR (1,3)
Pareto Fellowship cultishness (1)
EA Funds deprioritised (2)
EA Grants under-delivered (2)
Community Building Grants under-delivered (2)
But the more interesting question is: “fundamentally, why has growth not sped up?”. In my view, (1-3) did not directly slow growth. But (1-3) led EA community leaders to deprioritise community growth (i.e. led to (4)). And the lack of acceleration is basically because we didn’t allocate that much resources to community growth. At any given time, most community leaders (except perhaps when writing and promoting books) have spent their time on research, business, academia, and grantmaking therein, rather than community growth.
I think that in order to reinvigorate community growth, you really need to work on (4). We need to develop a new vision for what growth of the EA community (or some related community, such as a longtermist one) should look like, and establish that it would be worthwhile, before investing in it. How could it gather elite talent, of the sort that can substantially help with effectively disbursing funds to reduce long-term risks? And so on.
This surprised me—wouldn’t you expect 1 and 2 to directly slow growth somewhat, e.g. by putting people off or causing growth projects to fail to meet their goals? (Maybe you just don’t think these were very significant?)
“fundamentally, why has growth not sped up?”
I think it’s good to ask “what was the relative importance of these factors?”, but the framing of “fundamentally, why has growth not sped up?” seems to be implicitly pushing towards there being a single explanation. I think there were probably multiple significant factors.
Re your last para, I hope that CEA’s plans are part of the answer, although I think it’s good for us to pursue a variety of approaches—e.g. I also think it’s good for GWWC to spread its message somewhat more quickly/widely.
I’d agree that on the current margin, “EAs getting harder to find” could be a factor, as well as some combination of things like (#2-4).
Having said that, what seems like an underrated fact is that although EA outreach (CEA/80k/CFAR) deploys less funds than EA research (FHI/MIRI/CSER/...), a priori, I’d expect outreach to scale better—since research has to be more varied, and requires more specific skills. This leads to the question: why we don’t we yet have a proof of concept for turning ~$100M into high quality movement growth? Maybe this is the biggest issue. (#2) can explain why CEA hasn’t offered this. (#4) is more comprehensive, because it explain why 80k and others haven’t.
I largely agree with your categorizations, and how you classify the mistakes. But I agree with Max that I’d expect 1 and especially 2 to impact growth directly.
FWIW, I don’t think it was a mistake to make longtermism a greater priority than it had been (#3), but I do think mistakes were made in pushing this way too far (e.g. having AI/longtermist content dominate the EA Handbook 2.0 at the expense of other cause areas) and I’m concerned this is still going on (see for example the recent announcement that the EA Infrastructure Fund’s new managers are all longtermists.)
I agree with a lot of this, and I appreciated both the message and the effort put into this comment. Well-substantiated criticism is very valuable.
I do want to note that GWWC being scaled back was flagged elsewhere, most explicitly in Ben Todd’s comment (currently 2nd highest upvoted on that thread). But for example, Scott’s linked reddit comment also alludes to this, via talking about the decreased interest in seeking financial contributions.
But it’s true that in neither case would I expect the typical reader to come away with the impression that a mistake was made, which I think is your main point and a good one. This is tricky because I think there’s significant disagreement about whether this was a mistake or a correct strategic call, and in some cases I think what is going on is that the writer thinks the call was correct (in spite of CEA now thinking otherwise), rather than simply refusing to acknowledge past errors.
But it’s true that in neither case would I expect the typical reader to come away with the impression that a mistake was made, which I think is your main point and a good one. This is tricky because I think there’s significant disagreement about whether this was a mistake or a correct strategic call, and in some cases I think what is going on is that the writer thinks the call was correct (in spite of CEA now thinking otherwise), rather than simply refusing to acknowledge past errors.
I do think it was a mistake to deprioritize GWWC, though I agree this is open to interpretation. But I want to clarify that my main point is that the EA community seems to have strong and worrisome cultural biases toward self-congratulation and away from critical introspection.
Thanks for raising this question about EA’s growth, though I fully agree it would have been better to frame that question more like: “Given that we’re pouring a substantial amount of money into EA community growth, why doesn’t it show up in some of these metrics?” To that end, while I may refer to “growing” or “not growing” below for brevity I mean those terms relative to expectations rather than in an absolute sense. With that caveat out of the way…
There’s a very telling commonality about almost all the possible explanations that have been offered so far. Aside from a fraction of one comment, none of the explanations in the OP or this followup post even entertain the possibility that any mistakes by people/organizations in the EA community inhibited growth. That seems worthy of a closer look. We expect an influx of new funding (ca. ~2016-7) to translate into growth (with some degree of lag), but only if it is deployed in effective strategies that are executed well. If we see funding but not growth, why not look at which strategies were funded and how well they were executed?
CEA is probably the most straightforward example to look at, as an organization that has run a lot of community building projects and that received much of Open Phil’s initial “EA focus area” funding. Let’s look only at projects from 2015-2019, as more recent projects might not be reflected in growth statistics yet. In rough chronological order, here are some projects where mistakes could have plausibly impacted EA’s growth trajectory.
GWWC grew quickly in its early years (2009-2014), but starting in 2016 CEA made the mistake (their wording) of “underinvesting in GWWC” (the main person responsible for the project had other full-time responsibilities), leading growth to suffer until GWWC was spun off as an independent organization in late 2020.
EA Ventures was publicly launched in early 2015 and used significant amounts of staff and applicant time, but seems to have made only 2 small grants in its entire history. This project was shut down in 2016.
EA Global 2015 elicited prominent negative publicity and complaints from the community about cause representation.
Pareto Fellowship attracted hundreds of applicants, many of whom could have been alienated because “the interview process was unprofessional and made them deeply uncomfortable.” This project was shut down in 2016.
EA Funds received little attention after it launched in 2017, leading to confusion about whether the platform was even operational during its first giving season and repeated complaints about a lack of transparency and infrequent grantmaking.
EA Grants was piloted at small scale in 2017 before announcing plans to grant ~$2.6 million in 2018. Less than half that amount was actually granted, and the majority of money given was via a referral program rather than the open applications that were originally intended. The program was plagued by operational issues, many of them quite basic (“We did not maintain well-organized records of individuals applying for grants, grant applications under evaluation, and records of approved or rejected applications”). This project was shut down in April 2020.
Community Building Grants launched in early 2018, taking resources away from other important community building efforts in a way that probably inhibited growth. Since its inception the CBG program has consistently failed to meet its goals for accepting open applications (including at time of writing). In 2019, CEA had a combined budget for EA Grants and CBGs of $3.7 million, but together they ended up only granting ~$1.1 million due to operational limitations.
Shouldn’t we consider the possibility that one or more of these issues contributed to EA’s underwhelming growth trajectory? The GWWC case seems pretty clear cut. CEA realized they had made a “mistake” (CEA’s word) by under-prioritizing GWWC, and spun the project off. Now that GWWC is getting proper attention, growth has very rapidly picked back up. If GWWC had been prioritized all along, wouldn’t we be seeing better growth metrics than we see now? To his credit, Aaron Gertler (who works at CEA) flagged GWWC’s growth rate as “solid evidence of weaknesses in community building strategy”, though nobody else engaged with this observation.
If we use Occam’s Razor to try and understand a lack of growth, isn’t “we deprioritized a major growth vehicle” a simpler explanation than “there was a shift in which rationalist blogs were popular”, “Google Trends data is wrong”, or “EA is innate, you can’t convert people”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about EA Grants/CBGs granting ~$4 million less than planned (~$2m granted vs. ~$6m planned) in 2018-19? Or the Pareto Fellowship putting “nearly 500” applicants (all people so eager to deepen their engagement with EA that they applied for an intensive fellowship) and “several hundred” semi-finalists through what one interviewee described as: “one of the strangest, most uncomfortable experiences I’ve had over several years of being involved in EA. I’m posting this from notes I took right after the call, so I am confident that I remember this accurately… It seemed like unscientific, crackpot psychology. It was the sort of thing you’d expect from a New Age group or Scientology… The experience left me feeling humiliated and manipulated.”
Let me pause here to say: There’s plenty of merit in some of the other explanations for lower than expected growth that people have raised, like a pivot in emphasis from donations to careers. My list above is also clearly cherry-picked to illustrate a point. CEA has obviously also done a lot of things to help the EA community. And CEA has recognized and taken steps to address many of the problems I mentioned, like spinning off GWWC and EA Funds, changing management teams and strategies, shutting down problematic projects like EA Ventures, the Pareto Fellowship, and EA Grants, etc. And it should be obvious that any organization will make mistakes and that plenty of people beyond CEA have made mistakes since 2015 (I know I have!) Indeed, it could be useful to invite people and organizations to submit mistakes they’ve made over the years so that we can collectively learn from them. Even if these mistakes were reasonable decisions at the time, hindsight is a wonderful teacher if you use it.
But here’s the critical point: even if you don’t think “mistakes were made” is the main explanation for why growth has been slow, it should scare the hell out of you that only one person thought to mention it in passing because clearly some mistakes were made. Recognizing these problems is how you begin to fix them. CEA recognized that GWWC wasn’t getting enough attention and spun it off to remedy that. Lo and behold, in the new Executive Director’s “first three months, the rate of new pledges tripled.”
This refusal to look inward is a blind spot, and a particularly troubling one for a community that prides itself on unbiased thinking, openness to uncomfortable ideas, and strong epistemics. Here’s a (crucial?) consideration: if GWWC had been reasonably staffed and compounding at a higher growth rate for the last five years, if the Pareto Fellowship put ~500 extremely enthusiastic EAs through a normal rather than alienating interview process in 2016, if EA Grants/CBGs had granted an additional ~$4 million into the community as planned (tripling the amount actually granted), if the time and money invested in projects that didn’t get off the ground had gone toward sustainable projects paying ongoing dividends, and if other people and organizations hadn’t made countless other mistakes over the years, what would our community growth metrics look like today? Are we confident all the necessary lessons have been learned from these mistakes, and that we’re not at risk of repeating those mistakes?
I agree that this is a (significant) part of the explanation. For instance, I think there are a variety of things I could have done last year that would have helped our groups support improve more quickly.
Plug: if you have feedback about mistakes CEA is making or has made, I’d love to hear it. You can share thoughts (including anonymously) here.
Thanks Max! It’s incredibly valuable for leaders like yourself to acknowledge the importance of identifying and learning from mistakes that have been made over the years.
I agree that it’s worth asking for an explanation why growth has—if anything—slowed, while funds have vastly increased. One interesting exercise is to categorise the controversies. Some major categories:
Leverage-people violating social norms (which was a mistake)
CEA under-delivering operationally (mistake)
Re-prioritising toward longtermism (not a mistake imo)
Re-prioritising away from community growth (unclear whether a mistake)
The mistakes:
GWWC deprioritised (3,4)
EA Ventures (1,2)
EA Global 2015 PR (1,3)
Pareto Fellowship cultishness (1)
EA Funds deprioritised (2)
EA Grants under-delivered (2)
Community Building Grants under-delivered (2)
But the more interesting question is: “fundamentally, why has growth not sped up?”. In my view, (1-3) did not directly slow growth. But (1-3) led EA community leaders to deprioritise community growth (i.e. led to (4)). And the lack of acceleration is basically because we didn’t allocate that much resources to community growth. At any given time, most community leaders (except perhaps when writing and promoting books) have spent their time on research, business, academia, and grantmaking therein, rather than community growth.
I think that in order to reinvigorate community growth, you really need to work on (4). We need to develop a new vision for what growth of the EA community (or some related community, such as a longtermist one) should look like, and establish that it would be worthwhile, before investing in it. How could it gather elite talent, of the sort that can substantially help with effectively disbursing funds to reduce long-term risks? And so on.
This surprised me—wouldn’t you expect 1 and 2 to directly slow growth somewhat, e.g. by putting people off or causing growth projects to fail to meet their goals? (Maybe you just don’t think these were very significant?)
I think it’s good to ask “what was the relative importance of these factors?”, but the framing of “fundamentally, why has growth not sped up?” seems to be implicitly pushing towards there being a single explanation. I think there were probably multiple significant factors.
Re your last para, I hope that CEA’s plans are part of the answer, although I think it’s good for us to pursue a variety of approaches—e.g. I also think it’s good for GWWC to spread its message somewhat more quickly/widely.
I’d agree that on the current margin, “EAs getting harder to find” could be a factor, as well as some combination of things like (#2-4).
Having said that, what seems like an underrated fact is that although EA outreach (CEA/80k/CFAR) deploys less funds than EA research (FHI/MIRI/CSER/...), a priori, I’d expect outreach to scale better—since research has to be more varied, and requires more specific skills. This leads to the question: why we don’t we yet have a proof of concept for turning ~$100M into high quality movement growth? Maybe this is the biggest issue. (#2) can explain why CEA hasn’t offered this. (#4) is more comprehensive, because it explain why 80k and others haven’t.
I largely agree with your categorizations, and how you classify the mistakes. But I agree with Max that I’d expect 1 and especially 2 to impact growth directly.
FWIW, I don’t think it was a mistake to make longtermism a greater priority than it had been (#3), but I do think mistakes were made in pushing this way too far (e.g. having AI/longtermist content dominate the EA Handbook 2.0 at the expense of other cause areas) and I’m concerned this is still going on (see for example the recent announcement that the EA Infrastructure Fund’s new managers are all longtermists.)
To be fair, people pivoted hard toward longtermism because they’re convinced that it’s a much higher priority, which seems correct to me.
Just wanted to say that I really liked this comment, thanks for writing it.
Thanks Jonas!
I agree with a lot of this, and I appreciated both the message and the effort put into this comment. Well-substantiated criticism is very valuable.
I do want to note that GWWC being scaled back was flagged elsewhere, most explicitly in Ben Todd’s comment (currently 2nd highest upvoted on that thread). But for example, Scott’s linked reddit comment also alludes to this, via talking about the decreased interest in seeking financial contributions.
But it’s true that in neither case would I expect the typical reader to come away with the impression that a mistake was made, which I think is your main point and a good one. This is tricky because I think there’s significant disagreement about whether this was a mistake or a correct strategic call, and in some cases I think what is going on is that the writer thinks the call was correct (in spite of CEA now thinking otherwise), rather than simply refusing to acknowledge past errors.
Thanks AGB!
I do think it was a mistake to deprioritize GWWC, though I agree this is open to interpretation. But I want to clarify that my main point is that the EA community seems to have strong and worrisome cultural biases toward self-congratulation and away from critical introspection.