The people you need to soften/moderate your message to reach (or who need social proof in order to get involved) are seldom going to be the ones who can think clearly about this stuff.
I strongly agree with this. (I wrote a post about it years ago.[1])
Even of the people who were not “in early”, of the ones who I most respect, and who seem to me to be doing the most impressive work that I’m most grateful to have in the world, 0 of them needed hand-holding or “outreach” to get them on board.
Writing the sequences was an amazing, high quality intervention that continues to pay dividends to this day. I think writing on the internet about the things that you think are important is a fantastic strategy, at least if your intellectual taste is good.
The payoff of most of the “movement building” and “community building” seems much murkier to me. At least some of it was clearly positive, but I don’t know if it was positive on net (I think a smaller and more intense EA than the one we have in practice probably would have been better).
There’s selection bias in kinds of community building I observed, but it seems to me that community building was more effective to the extent that it was “just get together and try to do the thing” instead of “try to do outreach to get other people on board”.
eg
The best MIRIx groups > CFAR workshops[2] > EAGs > EA onboarding programs at universities.
The HP:MoR wrap parties seem to have pretty notably impactful though, and those were closer to outreach.
To be clear, CFAR workshops were always community building interventions, and fell far short of the standard that I would expect of a group working to seriously develop a science of human rationality, but they were still much more “contentful” and about making progress than most community building interventions are.
I strongly agree with this. (I wrote a post about it years ago.[1])
Even of the people who were not “in early”, of the ones who I most respect, and who seem to me to be doing the most impressive work that I’m most grateful to have in the world, 0 of them needed hand-holding or “outreach” to get them on board.
Writing the sequences was an amazing, high quality intervention that continues to pay dividends to this day. I think writing on the internet about the things that you think are important is a fantastic strategy, at least if your intellectual taste is good.
The payoff of most of the “movement building” and “community building” seems much murkier to me. At least some of it was clearly positive, but I don’t know if it was positive on net (I think a smaller and more intense EA than the one we have in practice probably would have been better).
There’s selection bias in kinds of community building I observed, but it seems to me that community building was more effective to the extent that it was “just get together and try to do the thing” instead of “try to do outreach to get other people on board”.
eg
The best MIRIx groups > CFAR workshops[2] > EAGs > EA onboarding programs at universities.
The HP:MoR wrap parties seem to have pretty notably impactful though, and those were closer to outreach.
I keep thinking that I should crosspost this to LessWrong and the EA forum, but haven’t yet, since I need to rename it well.
If you, dear reader, think that I really should do that, bugging me about it seems likely to make it more likely to happen.
To be clear, CFAR workshops were always community building interventions, and fell far short of the standard that I would expect of a group working to seriously develop a science of human rationality, but they were still much more “contentful” and about making progress than most community building interventions are.
Your post is great, I encourage you to repost it.