What’s the difference between “field building” and “community building”? I liked this definition that my wife came up with: a “field” is professional (eg “Technical AI Safety”), and building that is the act of eg causing more researchers to exist. Versus, a “community” is a specific group of people who bump into each other repeatedly.
Field building might be more scaleable, impersonal, metrics-driven. Community building feels more cozy, bespoke, vibesy.
With a definition like that, you might think I’m stacking the deck in favor of “community building” — doesn’t this frame presuppose that community is better?
(And, it’s definitely easier for me to reason about community building. Many of my projects lean into a cozy community vibe. Community sure seems to be in short supply in the modern era, a thing that many people want.)
But there seem to be limits to how far you get with community building. I also care a lot about scaleability, and it seems like communities hit certain limits (famously, Dunbar’s number). One read of where Manifold went wrong is that it never figured out how to be a platform that served multiple communities (like subreddits), vs a single hivemind community that would then naturally reach its
Community building also runs into personal limits — I can only keep track of so many different unique people in my fallible monkey brain. (These days, every time I get to know someone new, I feel like my brain must be evicting somebody else to make room…)
The startups of yore (esp the consumer eg AirBnB & Uber) were “communities” for their staff, and “fields” for their users.
But historically, as startups grow in headcount, they struggle with internal comms and overhead and maintaining product velocity. Have any large tech companies cracked this code?
Or, looking broader than tech: what is the largest community that exists today? Maybe the Catholic church?
I think AI safety and EA have historically been “communities”, and now find themselves needing to make a transition to become “fields”. A bunch of old-school intuitions may not apply.
Perhaps, one way to scale up a field is by creating more and more distinct communities within it.
The internet led to a new kind of community becoming possible: ForDiscord chat, Twitter exchanges. I’m still waiting to see what kinds of new communities
These days I also think a lot about building for the AIs, and I’m not sure whether building for the “field” or for the “community” of AIs makes more sense.
Also another analogy from old IT days: should you treat your servers as worthy of special care (”pets”), or replaceable (”cattle”)? This might rhyme with the community vs field dichotomy.