What are current problems with EA?
- Evaporative cooling
- Whereas once EA was the place for smart people to talk, now many former leaders are distancing themselves from the brand
- Brain drain into AI safety, specifically
- EA Forum no longer feels like a good place to talk about things; average comment or post quality is lower than LessWrong; EAGs no longer feel like the best place to meet people
- Loss of cohesion — AI safety vs animal welfare vs GHD vs earning to give are pretty different in terms of the kind of person who works in that
- Also: vibes-wise, Bay Area EA feels pretty different than London EA, and imo it’s a problem that much of the community stuff is governed by London EA (80k, CEA)
- Retention — if you’re earning to give or just EA-adjacent, there’s not much keeping you engaged
- Insularity — Constellation is great, but has some ivory-tower-ness to it: hard for people to come in, hard for ideas to flow out
Interesting things to try
- Copying social technology of how religious groups retain members:
- Small groups: sets of 5-10 people who come together weekly and share a meal and talk about EA-y things
- different than a “meetup” in how close the members are — I vividly remember my college Christian small group leader going out of his way to deliver groceries to our house
- explicitly not trying to grow beyond a certain size
- Volunteering, service: once upon a time, the meme was “earn to give”; then “direct work”; but something is lost when people don’t put in their own labor into making a thing better
- volunteering at events like EAG is good, but not regular/consistent
- Proselytizing! Why is this considered just a university thing?
- Mass service: regular meeting point for the local congregation
- What would EA solstice look like?
- Stronger leadership
- I think it’d be fun to elect a “President of EA” to be the face of the movement
- More clear boundaries on whether someone is in/out
- EA membership cards, renewing yearly
- Better communication/organization among members
- A single Slack that every EA is on
- Generator question: what are technologies that are used within large (1k-10k ppl) orgs? Could we adopt those within EA?
Things that EA does uniquely well, compared to other movements
- Collections of group houses and hubs, having physical places to congregate
- Great writers, serving as top-of-funnel for EA ideas and philosophy
- Having a lot of money
- Professionalized recruitment (?)
- Events (?)