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What would it take to revive EA?

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?
  • 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 (?)