I’m currently a co-director at EA Netherlands (with Marieke de Visscher). We’re working to build and strengthen the EA community here.
Before this, I worked as a consultant on urban socioeconomic development projects and programmes funded by the EU. Before that, I studied liberal arts (in the UK) and then philosophy (in the Netherlands).
Hit me up if you wanna find out about the Dutch EA community! :)
For extra info, here’s my personal situation.
In Feb this year, CEA granted me EUR 89,905 as part of the CBG programme. USD 20,000 of that is for ‘operational costs’. At EAN we treat this 20k as ‘money we can freely spend without having to apply for a grant’ — for example, software tools, organiser retreats, etc.
Once taxes are paid, I get EUR 3,167.75 in my account every month. And then in May I also get my holiday allowance.
I need to pay my pension from that 3.1k. I haven’t set this up yet (I know, I know, very bad) but, if I remember correctly, this should be around EUR 600 every month.
For context, at my previous job (well paid but I wasn’t optimising for income), I received EUR 3,533.25 every month, I didn’t have to pay anything towards an additional pension, I worked 4 days a week, and I had 34 days of holiday per year (I now have 25). This was a very good deal. For further context, according to a quick google, the median net monthly income in NL is EUR 2,152.
P.S. Until I started writing this I’d forgotten how good my old job was… I hope this doesn’t come across as me complaining, I’m more than happy with my compensation, I just wanted to give an idea of what a CBG gets in return for their work.
Yes this would be amazing! We’re trying to do something similar with EA Netherlands.
Gave it a second go.
I asked, “As we plan our future initiatives, it’s useful to understand where our community believes we should focus our efforts. Please share your opinion on which of the following we should prioritise.
Growing the Community: Focus on increasing our membership and raising broader awareness of EA.
Developing Community Depth: Concentrate on deepening understanding and engagement.
Taking a Balanced Approach: Allocate our efforts equally between growing and deepening.
Other (Please specify): If you have a different perspective, we’d love to hear it.
I don’t know”
27 people voted, 16 voted for ‘taking a balanced approach’, 6 for ‘growing the community’, 1 for ‘developing community depth’, and 4 for ‘I don’t know’.
I’m pretty sure Narrow EA is usually used to refer to the strategy of influencing a small number of particularly influential people. That’s part of what I’m pushing back against (although we’ve deviated from the original discussion point, which was on organising vs mobilising). [got confused about which quicktake we were discussing]
I think all of the ERIs are narrow (they target talented researchers). A more broad project would be the Existential Risk Observatory, which aims to inform the public through mass media outreach. They’ve done a lot of good work in the Netherlands and abroad, but I don’t think they’ve been able to get funding from the biggest EA funds. I don’t know why but I suspect it’s because their main focus is the general public, and not the decision-makers.
Sounds like an excellent idea to me! Also, don’t know if you’re aware but Non-Trivial has an online course that sounds similar to what you’re talking about, and Kurzgesagt has produced a bunch of videos. Good luck and feel free to send me a DM if you ever want to bounce ideas around.
My answers to your questions:
You simply tell them ‘you can do far more to help others than you realise by simply changing which charities you donate to’. It isn’t very cost-effective in the short term but, in the long term, it helps you build a broad base of support and change cultural norms. It also disproves the harmful narrative about EA just being an elite club for tax-dodging techno-utopian billionaires.
Hard to say how much. More people knowing more about the biggest issues in the world seems like it would be a very good thing.
I don’t think there’s much risk in communicating good ideas well. Seems far less risky than communicating good ideas poorly. Obviously you’ve still got to be careful around info hazards, but that’s doable.
Aren’t they? Like, if I’m aiming for >1% of the population I ought to spend a lot of my resources on marketing and building a network of organisers. If I’m aiming for something smaller I ought to spend my time investing in the community I’ve already got and maybe some field building.
To make it more concrete, in Q1 of 2024 I could spend 15% of my time investing in our marketing so that we double the number of intro programme sign-ups; alternatively, I could put that time into developing a Dutch Existential Risk Initiative. One is big EA, one is narrow EA.
Hmm, yeah, but by arguing for “put your effort into supporting more engaged people” you’re effectively arguing against “relatively large events that require relatively shallow engagement”. I think that’s the mistake. I think it should be an even blend of the two.
People often argue for ‘Narrow EA’. Here is an example of where I suggested this strategy might not be wise and people disagreed.
Although of course, there’s an ‘at the current margin’ thing going on here. I.e., maybe the ideal size is huge, but since we’ve got limited time and resources we should not aim for that and instead focus on keeping it small and high quality.
Perhaps a more informative question would be something like, “For the next 5 years, should the Dutch EA community aim for broad growth or narrow specialisation?” (in other words, something similar to this Q from the MCF survey).
What do you believe is the ideal size for the Dutch EA community?
We recently posed this question in our national WhatsApp community. I was surprised by the result, and others I’ve spoken to were also surprised. I thought I’d post it here to get other takes.
We defined ‘being a member’ as “someone who is motivated in part by an impartial care for others, is thinking very carefully about how they can best help others, and who is taking significant actions to help (most likely through their careers). In practice, this might look like selecting a job or degree program, donating a substantial portion of their income, working on EA-related projects, etc.”
We asked people to choose from the following:
<0.01% of population (<1,700)
0.01% of population (1,700)
0.1% of population (17,000)
1% of population (170,000)
>1% of population (>170,000)
I don’t know
The results:
28 votes in total
By far the most popular (24 votes) was “>1% of population (>170,000)”
3 people voted “0.1% of population (17,000)”
1 person voted “I don’t know”
I was expecting a split between 1,700 and 17,000.
Yeah, that’s a good categorisation, although often 3 is less ‘professionally focused events’ and more ‘events for highly committed EAs’.
I think the common EA CB view is captured in the below quote (my own italics), which is taken from the CEA’s Group Resource Centre’s page ‘How do EA groups produce impact?’.
We believe a central obstacle to progress on the world’s most pressing problems is a shortage of talented people taking significant actions. Therefore, we are particularly excited about people pivoting into high-impact careers. This is not to say that we don’t think spending time on funding and sharing EA ideas is not positive, just that perhaps these things are not as neglected as providing platforms for talented people to take significant actions. Some examples could be changing career plans, founding organisations or start-ups, or assisting those already producing impact. For more examples, see Ollie Base’s EA forum post about what people who were part of the EA Warwick group are doing now.
That isn’t to say groups should only optimize for career changes (and we don’t advocate for trying to push people into specific careers); it’s one useful frame for understanding your group’s impact. This also suggests that you should focus time and effort on deeply engaging the most committed members rather than just shifting some choices of many people.
I think this is broadly right. But I think EA CBs often overcorrect in this direction and, as a result, neglect events that aim for broad reach but shallow engagement.
When I first started at EA Netherlands I was explicitly advised against it, and more generally it seems to be ‘in the air’. For example:
The groups resource hub says “This also suggests that you should focus time and effort on deeply engaging the most committed members rather than just shifting some choices of many people.”
Kuhan’s widely shared post on ‘lessons from running Stanford EA’ has in its summary “Focus on retention and deep engagement over shallow engagement”
CEA’s Groups Team’s post on ‘advice we give to new university organiser’ says “We think it’s good to do broad recruiting at the beginning of the semester, as with any club or activity. But beyond this big push of raising awareness, we think it’s most often better to pay more attention to people who seem very interested in—and willing to take significant action based on—EA ideas”
Writing this out has made me realise something. I think this advice makes more sense in a university context, where students are time-rich and are going through an intense social experience, but it makes less sense when you’re targeting professionals. I suspect it’s still ‘in the air’ because, historically, CEA has been very good at targeting students.
As a consequence, very few national orgs (including ourselves) organise TPC-esque events (broad reach, low engagement). For us, this is because our strategy is to focus on supporting local organisers in organising their own events (the theory is that then we can have lots of events without having to organise all of them ourselves). But I don’t think that’s the case for other national organisations (other national CBs, please jump in and correct me if I’m wrong, e.g., I know @lynn at EA UK has been organising career talks).
Ultimately, I guess what I’m saying is what I’ve said elsewhere: you need a blend of ‘mobilising’ (broad reach, low engagement) and ‘organising’ (narrow reach, high engagement), and I think EA groups often do too much organising.
I think events are underrated in EA community building.
I have heard many people argue against organising relatively simple events such as, ‘get a venue, get a speaker, invite people’. I think the early success of the Tien Procent Club in the Netherlands should make people doubt that advice.
Why? Well, the first thing to mention is that they simply get great attendance, and their attendees are not typical EAs. I think their biggest so far has been 400, and the typical attendee is a professional in their 30s or 40s. It also does an amazing job of generating buzz. For example, suppose you’ve got a journalist writing an article about your community. In that case, it’s pretty cool if you can invite them to an event with hundreds of regular people in attendance.
Now, of course, attendance doesn’t translate to impact. However, I think we can see the early signs of people actually changing their behaviour.
For example, running a quick check on GWWC’s referral dashboard, I can see four pledges that refer to the Tien Procent Club (2 trial, 2 full). Based on GWWC’s March 2023 impact evaluation, they can therefore self-attribute ~$44k of 2022-equivalent donations to high-impact funding opportunities.
This is despite the fact they started less than two years ago and don’t have any funding other than what they have provided themselves or raised through selling tickets.
What’s more, it’s beginning to look like their formula works in different contexts. They started in Amsterdam, but since then they’ve seeded new organising teams elsewhere in the Netherlands, and the teams in Rotterdam and Utrecht have successfully organised their first events.
One caveat to all of this is that they received quite a bit of promotion from Rutger Bregman, a very prominent writer in the Netherlands. I know people are going to experiment with the TPC format abroad. I assume they won’t have a similar ambassador. It will therefore be interesting to see if the formula still works without such a resource.
In the meantime, my current takeaways are: get an endorsement from someone like Bregman + if your target audience is non-students who aren’t already EAs, put on events that only require shallow engagement but are good fun + focus on doing what you’re good at (e.g., they only do large events, and they only do them once every 3 months).
Oh I agree. But in this post I think PauseAI was couched as being at the extreme end?
Just chiming in to say that for EA Netherlands, financial cost is definitely a big factor. Another factor is that for a long time, we didn’t have a sufficiently established programme to evaluate. A third is that, until recently, we didn’t know anything about M&E other than ‘we should do an impact evaluation!’.
Fortunately, the second and third factors are beginning to change, so hopefully we’ll actually be able to commission something soon.
However, realistically, we’d only have a few thousand to spend, and I don’t know how much expertise that would get us. So, if there’s anyone in this thread who thinks they can help us given our low budget, please do reach out!
Helpful post! If you’d ever like data from EA Netherlands please feel free to reach out.
FYI I think you’ve made a mistake in the first line of this post? You mention Seren Kell on alt proteins?
Thanks for the comment!
I’d say EA is very much a movement.
First, MacAskill mentions it in his definition of EA:
Second, you can see it reflected in CEA’s programming. I’d say their Groups programme is a social movement support programme (and, as I’m funded by that programme, I’d say most of my work is social movement work).
Third, the outside world perceives it as a movement. See the Wikipedia definition, this New Yorker article, and this TIME article.