Me and @Lily Curry launched an EA group at Binghamton University (a SUNY school with no prior EA presence) in August 2026. In two weeks we went from zero to ~500 Instagram followers, got 100+ tabling sign-ups, 59 people in our GroupMe, and ~40 people at our first general interest meeting. Our Instagram is now larger than the established EA groups at Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, and NYU. This post is primarily about the factors we think led to our success.
James C. Scott's has this idea called legibility. Essentially, the part relevant to recruiting is the reversal of Scott's idea. Scott's idea is essentially that institutions have to be able to abstract a complicated social reality into discrete categories that it can analyze and act upon. So, for example, an institution can't remember “Micah, who is sort of like this in this context but actually completely different when he is around these people and has this weird specific relationship to these three other people.” It needs to have information like: Micah Zarin, age 18, resident of X, income Y, student, etc. In doing so, it removes important particular details of individuals. After all, the word abstract comes from the same latin word as subtract: trahere, meaning to draw or pull away. To abstract, therefore, is to pull away, or to subtract certain details.
If I have five friends, I don't really need to quantify which ones are reliable. But, if I run an organization with 50,000 people, I do. And even if one supervisor knows ten employees incredibly well, that still doesn't not solve the problem, because the supervisor has to tell their supervisor, who has to compare those ten employees with another hundred employees they have also never met, and then maybe somebody three levels above them has to decide who gets promoted. So the information has to travel. And messy information does not travel very far. And so institutions must abstract. They also have to abstract almost by definition. After all, an institution is basically just a thing that has to act on people it will never meet.
You'll see how this is related to recruiting in a moment. James Burnham had this idea of the Managerial Revolution that says that once organizations become sufficiently complicated, the people whose comparative advantage is managing those abstractions essentially become a class of their own. In fact, he argued that the winner of the 20th century wouldn't be communism or capitalism, but rather. managerialism.
And the values a managerial system selects for are almost the opposite of the values you'd want in a friend. It is essentially optimizing for legibility. “Sarah is incredibly good when something unexpected happens, but only if you give her autonomy, and she's mediocre at routine work, and she tends to clash with people who need lots of structure” is useful if I personally know Sarah. But, it is much less useful if I need to compare Sarah to 4,000 people. So you have to just write something like “performance rating: 4.2.” Of course, you lose almost everything important about Sarah, but now it can fit in a spreadsheet, and now somebody who has never met Sarah can act on it.
I think what we noted, which helped us a lot, is that we're not an institution. I think one of the biggest things we did right was just not pretending otherwise. Most club recruiting has this weird reflexive tendency for people to start acting like an institution before there even really is one. For example: you walk past a table and someone goes “Hey! Do you want to join the EA club?” in basically the same voice somebody from the Accounting Society or some pre-law club would use. If you don't know what EA is, usually your instinct is just no. Mostly because it sounds boring! The interaction is dead! The person has no... personhood. They're just “club officer.” And, of course, I get why people do that, because it feels serious or official or whatever, but when you’re starting a club that’s backwards. The one thing you have that a giant organization doesn’t is that you can actually just be a specific person talking to another specific person.
Institutions need all the standardized stuff because they’re huge. If you have 50,000 employees, you can’t know them all personally. You need some simplified version of them that can move around the organization. But if you’re two people standing behind a folding table, none of that applies yet. There’s no reason for me to turn into “Binghamton EA President Micah” and start speaking like a brochure. I can just be Micah.
You should bring your full self. I mean don’t split yourself into “the version of me that recruits people” and “the actual me that they get to meet later.” If you’re goofy and serious, be both. If you actually disagree with someone, disagree. If they make a good point, tell them they made a good point. If they change your mind a little bit, let them see that. If something is funny, laugh. If you fucked up the pitch, whatever, you fucked up the pitch. Because the person isn’t joining some abstract thing called Binghamton EA. At least at the beginning, they’re joining something that is mostly just us and the people around us. You're not an institution.
Congrats on the great sign up results! Do you mind giving some more examples of what you did differently? Those could be helpful for other groups to learn from.
For instance, you noted "For example: you walk past a table and someone goes “Hey! Do you want to join the EA club?” " as an example of what you wouldn't to-- what would you do to get attention when tabling?
Some people might give us trash but we often said “Yo join the goodmaxxing club.” Or we would say “join this club it’s the best club on campus.” Something goofy like that. You could still say “wanna join the EA club?” but it’s more about how you say it, if that makes sense.