Hey Tristan,
Mostly the 2nd—We’ve expanded gradually but not aggressively over the years. We’re trying to grow more aggressively now. Why not more before? In part, we had a philosophy of ‘hire slowly, have a high bar’. We probably had this philosophy a bit too much. We regard not growing more earlier as likely to be a mistake. Another part was going through several CEO transitions in a few years, which led to strategic & leadership uncertainty, which is a hard situation to hire in. Hiring’s also just hard and a ton of labour from senior staff. Over the years, we’ve often wanted to grow more than we’ve felt we were able to while keeping up delivery on our core programmes.
It doesn’t feel to me like EA is dying for the long-time EAs. I think I count as a long time EA, & to me it seems like it went through a bit of a fallow period post FTX but is back, & that the long-time EAs don’t hang out on the forum / go to their local groups / talk about EA as much on twitter, but they still “do EA (i.e. work on & donate to important interventions)” & hang out with other EAs & talk & reason about how to do the most good, quite a lot.
I do think that, with shorter AI timelines, there’s a feeling of there being less time for debate / intellectual exploration & more need to act quickly even under significant uncertainty. So that reduces the “EA as a question” vibe, which is reasonable to be sad about. But it seems pretty legit to me to be sensitive to that, since EA has always been about doing what seems genuinely good for the world not just talking / thinking hard about what’s good.