UK Civil Servant. Former EA Hub Product Manager. Former Manager of LEAN. Wife of David Moss. Cambridge alumna. Sociology PhD (expertise in digital reputation, qualitative research, social theory). Apologetic left wing representative of the global elite.
Richenda
Karma: 382
Hi Rhys,
Yes, Universities are especially good environments in which to start EA groups for a number of reasons (lots of young people with plenty of free time who are actively reaching for new ideas, experiences and activities, a lot of infrastructural support from institutions, student unions, a captive audience, etc.)
We are very mindful of the differences between local groups and University groups. Internally we work on building expertise about these differences, and customising the support and advice we give based on the nature of the group in question.
We have also drawn on the expertise of other successful student based movements. For example, the Secular Student Alliance has some excellent group growth and management guides which we pass on for recommended reading (while giving full credit, of course).
It’s a fair question, and one I’ve been seriously thinking over since I took over LEAN. As Tee suggests, websites are enormously useful to a small number in a way that makes up for the time and resources ‘lost’ by making it available in cases where it doesn’t pan out as that effective. Secondly, a lot of the answers we got in interviews amounted to ‘well right now we haven’t made use of our website, but that’s because we don’t have the tech manpower and need help to get what we want from this’. So I think there are groups that would be making good use of it if it was more user friendly, or if we were able to provide some minimal support for content management. Overall I think that the static site generator you’re working on is a perfect compromise. We’ll continue taking a critical eye, and may still pull the plug at a later date if we think it’s not cost effective. But right now I think it will be.
Thanks Siebe, I’ll add your suggestion to our list of stuff to do.
I’m glad Meetup.com was helpful for you guys. I think that there are demographic differences in terms of which places have strong Meetup.com participation and which places don’t. In the UK I had never heard of Meetup.com until I became involved in EA. We know that it ends up being highly useful for a minority of groups, and non trivially useful for others. We allow people to experiment with it, but then aim to check in on groups every few months or so and close down the groups if it turns out to be no good for that particular location. I have been toying with the idea of contacting Meetup to ask if they would share their internal data on regional use patterns. I doubt they’d want that information public though.
We agree about the EA Hub. However we were overstretched across too many projects, and have been in the process of identifying which things to prioritise, and which cost-effective things we can deliver to a high standard. This assessment and decisions in the next few months will be critical for the direction of the site.
I mostly agree. However there are definitely some strategic, management-level things that have to be decided when it comes to the Hub. There are an infinite number of fantastic ideas from EAs regarding what things they might want to see, and it’s not a straightforward matter to judge how best to go forward. Particularly when it also means making sure we complement the platform that CEA is developing. Some factors include major choices about things like which codebase we continue with, creating a structure that allows highly skilled EAs in tech to contribute to some degree when they want to, and also making sure we don’t waste resources making a start with something unless we’re confident we’ll be able to maintain it appropriately in the long run. Those are just some of the matters involved, and in this regard available bandwidth, both of myself and our tech labour has been a limiting factor for sure.
However we’ve been making a lot of fast gains since we hired our new tech officer, Larissa, in November. We also have the guidance of seasoned EAs working in tech, and I’m very optimistic about 2018!
Hi Kevin, I’m sure some would benefit from more resources on moral theory. I think casebash is right, though, that we are comparatively strong on theory, but comparatively weak on available practical actions. With the LEAN programme we still have a fairly long wish list to deliver for groups on before we’d be in a place to be worrying about adding theoretical material. The responses in this assessment so far suggest that most organisers are very happy with the quality and variety of written resources that already exist, but that they want to see existing content tidied and presented in a more uniform and accessible way. It also seems that organisers would most value new material in the area of movement growth and outreach technique, and on the issue of impact assessment methodology. So this would probably be the first thing to address before writing more theoretical exposition. That said, if EAs want to write such pieces and post them in personal blogs or here on the forum, you can be sure that many organisers are watching the forum and finding that useful.
“I’m not suggesting that quantitive facts should be ignored during the hypothesis generation stage, just that we need to understand the hypothesis space before we can choose appropriate metrics, otherwise we may artificially limit the set of theories that we consider.”
I very much agree with this view methodologically. This is why we used qualitative research methods in addition to quantitative for the LEAN impact assessment. There is real risk of narrowing perspective and obscuring important factors from view if you commit to specific metrics prematurely. Qualitative research design is based on the aim of keeping the research process grounded and inductive, always responsive to unanticipated factors, regularly revisiting fundamental problem framing and steering sharply clear of methodological individualism, which is the approach you described (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodological_individualism).
In the case of the impact assessment (where LEAN was trying to judge how effective our group support programme is, and how much impact groups have), we could look at metrics like group size, the number of individuals converted to EA, lifestyle changes, donations, pledges, events held and so forth. However qualitative interviews were used to piece together more complicated pathways that connect different nodes. The EA network is relatively small, which means that detailed examples can be very informative. I would like to see mixed methods of this kind used more.
If people want to avoid methodological individualism while still using quantitative techniques, social network analysis and multiple correspondence analysis are two quantitative techniques that many sociologists have used in order to tackle similar issues when working with much larger datasets. Social network analysis allows you to map out ‘pipelines’ of the kind you described in order to identify which nodes in the community are the most prominent and influential in terms of providing critical connections.
We don’t, however, even need to do any more empirical analysis of EA to know that what you say is true… that many of the most important, high impact and high yield developments and achievements come down to an interaction between different community and information sources all coming together in a fortuitous way for a given trajectory. We can be sure of this not only by reflecting on examples in EA but also because this is simply a sociological human fact (often analysed and illustrated in the sprawling ‘social capital’ research field). The question then becomes, as you suggest, how do we cultivate the right environment for these vital spontaneous connections and interactions to take place?
My opinion on this is that we already do very well in this regard. Not through any virtue per se, other than the fact that the smaller a community is, the faster and more readily connections will arise (too small, of course, and you run out of useful nodes). However we definitely can do better, and the most urgent area for practical intervention is restructuring this forum in order to better serve the EA online community. This is something that has come out very clearly both in the 2017 Local Group Survey but also our interviews with group organisers. I think it is also quite self evident. On offer for budding EAs are either dead backwater Facebook groups with no life, or monstrous central groups with hundreds of members where only the most confident EAs feel comfortable posting. The forum is similar. Although the option of anonymity probably empowers some people to speak up, there is a much larger collective of lurkers who will feel too intimidated to contribute. A system of subforums that allow sheltered zones targetted at different kinds of EA would encourage a good deal more to come out of the woodwork and allow them to connect to one another. Individuals could then progress from a newbie friendly subforum to more ‘advanced’ or in depth content and conversations. I’m very happy that CEA will be taking on a restructure of the forum in the coming months.
Another area that can be optimised is the streamlining and organisation of content into a more user friendly and accessible format. This is something LEAN will be working on in the near future both in terms of making existing content more navigable but also in terms of continuing to make bespoke introductions between aligned individuals and organisations, but also helping EAs and EA groups to find one another more easily (like through our map of EAs) and through maintaining up to date contact information, and ensuring that it is easily found.
Hi Tobias. From what Sarah (developer of the CEA groups app) told me, the tool will provide a dashboard where organisers can use CRM functionality to track their members, categorise them, and communicate with them efficiently. The EA Hub does not plan to provide anything along these lines at all.
Since its launch in 2014, the EA Hub has offered:
Personal profiles for EAs
A donation registry
A map of EAs and of EA groups
Group profiles
The EA wiki
The EA Survey
Various guides and information
The planned change will be to rearrange content and services so that the user interface is significantly more accessible and appealing. The main addition is to create a high quality home for written guides and resources relating to EA groups. Primarily, this does not involve creating new content but rather gathering existing content from across the community, and synthesising these into a practical and convenient tool. Of course copyright and authorial permission will be carefully attended to. We may make some minimal functional changes such as removing the EA groups feature (which we would then replace with a more simple directory, since we know of many visitors who found a local group on the EA Hub via google, and thus became counterfactually connected). We are very happy to keep people informed in the coming months as development unfolds, thanks!
Hopefully when CEA develops the EA Forum in the coming months there will be a designated section for job listings :)
Thanks for sharing this. I’m looking forward to the second part!
Reflections like this are amazingly valuable for the movement building community. I’m especially interested in how you factored in the local context in order to choose the best strategy for EA in the Czech Republic. I also totally agree that it’s great to hear perspectives that come from outside of the Oxbridge/Silicone Valley bubble—and even the anglophile bubble.
A lot of people are grappling with the issue of how to appropriate EA in non-English communities. I’ll be sharing this report with each of those that approach LEAN with these challenges.
I’ve been thinking for awhile that there’s a surprising lack of historical research in EA. I mean not that surprising given the dominance of STEM backgrounds, but rather in the sense that it’s such an obviously useful tool to exploit.
I haven’t heard of anything, I’m afraid.
I’ve added this to the EA Groups Resource Map: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ATRWGcN3GLouaWJIa6Za3xbLe5nuk0CQHhwhsBLTDvA/edit#gid=0.
Thanks Risto!
Hi Dunja,
Actually there is empirical research on this! LEAN interviewed EA group organisers as part of the 2017 LEAN Impact Assessment, and actually face to face, in person experiences such as retreats and EAG frequently came up as the most significant, landmark influence for a fair few successful organisers in actually kick starting them into getting something going, and also giving them the confidence, reassurance and optimism to see it as a worthwhile investment of their time.
I was slightly surprised by how much of a big factor this was for people, but the evidence seems pretty strongly supportive at this stage.
https://rtcharity.org/2017-lean-impact-assessment-qualitative-findings/
We don’t have that, so we have to go by models, guesstimates, anecdotal personal experience, and expert opinion.
There is some relevant social research on it: https://rtcharity.org/2017-lean-impact-assessment-qualitative-findings/
RCTs, in my view would be unsuited to measuring anything actually useful about groups, however tempting the idea is. There are so many variables muddying the water for such assessment that you would end up just fabricating without realising.
Also, communities in Brno and Bratislava have become more active after their members attended the retreat. This is fantastic!
I think I know what my next birthday party is:
Play cooperative board games about saving the world (e.g. Mansions of Madness) An AI Safety themed LARP
Thanks Matej. Yes I agree entirely!
Changing a career is a direct action, but not everyone is able to do it all the time. It is important for groups to have the ability to engage people in tangible or more abstract way. I think this could diversify ea ideas, members, and avoid it to be a group of mathematicians and philosophers talking together, about their favourite subjects.
This is especially a really important point that I’ve also been thinking a lot. Our philosophers, mathematicians etc. are great, but there are many other personality and thinking types that are underrepresented in our movement. Anything we can do to attract and integrate more people with different cognitive approaches seems very valuable!
Also, as you suggest… I think there are a lot of EAs who are not necessarily high earning, and not everyone has the material means or opportunities to donate much or switch to the most frequently recommended careers. It’s important to demonstrate to people that you can make a real difference, and that your involvement is valued, regardless of your position in life.
Thanks Michal! I wish I had already read your post about fetishising the long term (which I’ll do now!) as I definitely would have referenced it here! These are great additional points that I wish I’d written ;)
I agree totally that there are a lot of risks to conservatism and over-caution when it comes to taking action. Another metaphor I came across years ago was that ‘you can’t steer a car if it’s not moving’. CZEA is a really inspirational example of striking this reflexive balance of doing, but doing in an experimental and analytical fashion.
Thanks Charlie. Just posting to say I’ve seen this and will respond more fully soon!
I really like the idea of doing more to identify new potential cause areas. Vetting is really important, but I’m wary of the idea of anointing a specific EA org with sole discretion over vetting decisions. If possible, democratic vetting would be ideal (challenging though such arrangements can be).