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 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.