Community Organiser for EA UK
Organiser for EA Finance
DavidNash
Karma: 4,745
I didn’t vote but there has been discussion of issues in richer countries that received votes but the author pointed out how it fit into the context of effective altruism.
There have also been posts about mass media interventions but they generally refer to stronger evidence for their effectiveness.
Thanks for diving into the data David, I think a lot of this might hinge on the ‘highly engaged EAs’ metric and how useful that is for determining impact vs how much someone has an interest in EA.
Are you also able to see if there are differences between different types of local groups (National/City/University/interest)?
I would go further and say that more people are interested in specific areas like AI safety and biosecurity than the general framing of x-risks. Especially senior professionals that have worked in AI/bio careers.
There is value for some people to be working on x-risk prioritisation but that would be a much smaller subset than the eventual sizes of the cause specific fields.
You mention this in your counterarguments but I think that it should be emphasised more.
Also Matt Clifford has written regularly about wanting to encourage more entrepreneurship and increasing growth
Wave is a good example.
When I started community building I would see the 20 people who turned up most regularly or had regular conversations with and I would focus on how I could help them improve their impact, often in relatively small ways.
Over time I realised that some of the people that were potentially having the biggest impact weren’t turning up to events regularly, maybe we just had one conversation in four years, but they were able to shift into more impactful careers. Partially because there were many more people who I had 1 chat with than there were people I had 5 chats with, but also the people who are more experienced/busy with work have less time to keep on turning up to EA social events, and they often already had social communities they were a part of.
It also would be surprising/suspicious if the actions that make members the happiest also happened to be the best solution for allocating talent to problems.
I guess the overlap is quite high for myself between ‘impact’ and ‘impact as a community builder’.
Thanks for writing this post, I’ve been thinking about this framing recently. Although more because I felt like I was member-first when I started community building and now I am much more cause-first when I’m thinking about how to have the most impact.
I don’t agree with some of the categorisations in the table and think there are quite a few that don’t fall on the cause/member axis. For example you could have member first outreach that is highly deferential (GiveWell suggestions) and cause-first outreach that brings together very different people that disagree with EA.
Also when you say the downsides of cause-first are that it led to lock in or lack of diversification I feel like those are more likely due to earlier on member-first focus in EA.
I thought this post has a good overview.
I think the BOTEC is conflating being aware of EA with being an ‘EA’.
Also most people are usually optimising for other factors when choosing where to live so the number on the table is much less.
You can make the Global Health tab your front page if that’s the main content you want to see.
I meant the communities/organisations that have overlap with EA but focused on a specific cause, but it would be useful to connect people to less EA related orgs like the Nuclear Threat Initiative, CEPI, etc.
It seems like there is less field building for existential risk but also not that much within specific causes compared with the amount of EA specific field building there has been.
This seems to be changing though with things like the Summit on Existential Security this year, and updates being made by people at EA organisations (mentioned by @trevor1 in another comment).
Earlier in the post - ‘We also sent out a survey to the Foresight community, which generated 41 responses from participants in our technical groups’
In my example I was more referring to orgs like EVF, but I imagine if EA was more centralised there would be a range of larger orgs, some more like EVF and others more like Open Phil, who aren’t incubating projects.
It seems that there would be more to be gained from building bridges between the STEM and existential risk communities rather than EA more broadly.
EA has a lot of seemingly disconnected ideas that aren’t as relevant to most people. Some will be interested in all of them, but most people will be interested in just a subset. Also with x-risk, some people will have much more interest in one of nuclear/AI/bio risks than all of them.
I think it would be better to have 20 organisations with about 50 people each than 3 organisations with 50 people and then everyone else working as individuals. One organisation with 1000 people would probably be the worst option.
There is info here—although tickets are pricey, £120 for 90 minutes.
That doesn’t seem to match with EA being a front cover story last year, and being shown in a positive light.
I might have missed this but can you say how many people took the survey, and how many people filled out the FTX section?
I thought about this briefly a few months ago and came up with these ideas.
CEA—incubate CBG groups as team members until they are registered as separate organisations with their own operations staff
CEA but for professional EA network building (EA Consulting network, High Impact Engineers, Hi-Med, etc). They are even more isolated than CBGs which have some support from CEA
Rethink Priorities—One of the incubated orgs could do similar work to EV Ops (which is maybe what the special projects team is doing already, but it might be good to have something more separate from RP, or a cause specific support org (animal advocacy/AI safety, biosecurity)
EV Ops—Spin out 80k/GWWC to increase capacity for other smaller orgs
Open Phil—Some of their programs might work better with project managers rather than individuals getting grants (e.g. the century fellowship)
Also looking at local groups, there is some coordination on the groups slack and some retreats but there is still a lot of duplication and a high rate of turnover which limits any sustained institutional knowledge.