EA - Tradeoffs in Community Building by sabrinac

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Tradeoffs in Community Building, published by sabrinac on July 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Community-builders make a lot of implicit tradeoffs when deciding how to spend their time and run their group. I think it’s useful to explicitly consider these tradeoffs in order to develop better group strategies. This post isn’t intended to be prescriptive, but to offer a framework for thinking about group strategy. It’s worth noting that for most of these tradeoffs, it’s probably optimal to have some combination of the two. The tradeoffs are also oversimplifications of the decisions that groups make. Skilling yourself up vs. helping your group members This tradeoff is really salient for EA group organizers and also one of the most debated tradeoffs in community-building. Should I spend an additional five hours trying to build my understanding of what’s going on in AI safety, or should I spend another five hours working on my EA group? Some people think that talented group organizers are spending way too much time marketing EA and not building their own understanding of object-level issues enough, while other people think that the multiplier effect wins and it’s worth group organizers sacrificing their own skill-building in return for finding more talented people. Community-building is also itself a skill, but in my personal experience, there are upper bounds on what you can learn while community-building. Beyond a certain point, parts of community-building get repetitive and aren’t necessarily pushing your understanding of object-level issues or ways of reasoning about the world. (It also makes you a worse community-builder when you don’t understand the problems you’re encouraging other people to work on.) Inclusiveness vs. exclusiveness There’s a fundamental tension in community building between creating inclusive, welcoming environments and prioritizing the people in your groups who you think will have the biggest impact or are the “most engaged”. While EA groups want to be inclusive, inclusivity sometimes cuts against impact since a lot of EA isn’t friendly to new people and you really want your group members to get into the weeds of ideas. If you take the approach that “EA is for everyone,” this means your group is more appealing and accessible to people, but usually also less intellectually rigorous and dedicated. If you take the approach that “EA is for a small group of people,” you can build a smaller group of people committed to making progress on hard problems and focus more on helping them skill up, but there’s a higher barrier to entry and makes more people feel like there’s not a place for them in EA. Buying into EA vs. buying into [X] How much does someone need to buy into the philosophy behind EA in order to make substantial progress working on the world’s most pressing problems? Community-builders can educate their group members on the tools of EA (e.g. scope sensitivity, cost-effectiveness, using expected values), or they can pitch their group members on the object-level things EA advocates for (e.g. AI safety is really important and you should work on it). This isn’t always a direct tradeoff, since most EA groups are doing a combination of the two, but I still think groups can vary in how much they pitch object-level causes vs. EA reasoning and principles. It’s also usually easier to pitch people on the object-level things that EA does as opposed to the entire framework of EA. Being entrepreneurial vs. playing it safe EA groups all use the same handbook—the quintessential EA group runs an intro fellowship every semester, hosts weekly dinners or socials, and does lots of 1:1s. While the EA Groups Slack and resources like GCP’s handbook make it easy for people to start and run an EA group, it also means most undergraduates get into EA via very si...