EA Strategy Fortnight (June 12-24)

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Motivation and what this is(n’t)

I feel (and, from conversations in person and seeing discussions on the Forum, think that I am not alone in feeling) like there’s been a dearth of public discussion about EA strategy recently, particularly from people in leadership positions at EA organizations.

To help address this, I’m setting up an “EA strategy fortnight” — two weeks where we’ll put in extra energy to make those discussions happen. A set of folks have already volunteered to post thoughts about major strategic EA questions, like how centralized EA should be or current priorities for GH&W EA.

This event and these posts are generally intended to start discussion, rather than give the final word on any given subject. I expect that people participating in this event will also often disagree with each other, and participation in this shouldn’t imply an endorsement of anything or anyone in particular.

I see this mostly as an experiment into whether having a simple “event” can cause people to publish more stuff. Please don't interpret any of these posts as something like an official consensus statement.

Some people have already agreed to participate

I reached out to people through a combination of a) thinking of people who had shared private strategy documents with me before that still had not been published b) contacting leaders of EA organizations, and c) soliciting suggestions from others. About half of the people I contacted agreed to participate. I think you should view this as a convenience sample, heavily skewed towards the people who find writing Forum posts to be low cost. Also note that I contacted some of these people specifically because I disagree with them; no endorsement of these ideas is implied.

People who’ve already agreed to post stuff during this fortnight [in random order]:

Habryka - How EAs and Rationalists turn crazy

MaxDalton - In Praise of Praise

MichaelA - Interim updates on the RP AI Governance & Strategy team

William_MacAskill - Decision-making in EA

Ardenlk - On reallocating resources from EA per se to specific fields

Ozzie Gooen - Centralize Organizations, Decentralize Power

Julia_Wise - EA reform project updates

Shakeel Hashim - EA Communications Updates

Jakub Stencel - EA’s success no one cares about

lincolnq - Why Altruists Can't Have Nice Things

Ben_West and 2ndRichter - FTX’s impacts on EA brand and engagement with CEA projects

jeffsebo and Sofia_Fogel - EA and the nature and value of digital minds

Anonymous – Diseconomies of scale in community building

Luke Freeman and Sjir Hoeijmakers - Role of effective giving within E

kuhanj - Reflections on AI Safety vs. EA groups at universities

Joey - The community wide advantages of having a transparent scope

JamesSnowden - Current priorities for Open Philanthropy's Effective Altruism, Global Health and Wellbeing program

Nicole_Ross - Crisis bootcamp: lessons learned and implications for EA

Rob Gledhill - AIS vs EA groups for city and national groups

Vaidehi Agarwalla - The influence of core actors on the trajectory and shape of the EA movement

Renan Araujo - Thoughts about AI safety field-building in LMICs

ChanaMessinger - Reducing the social miasma of trust

particlemania - Being Part of Systems

jwpieters - Thoughts on EA community building

MichaelPlant - The Hub and Spoke Model of Effective Altruism

Quadratic Reciprocity - Best guesses for how public discourse and interest in AI existential risk over the past few months should update EA's priorities

OllieBase - Longtermism

Peter Wildeford and Marcus_A_Davis - Past and future of Rethink Priorities

If you would like to participate

If you are able to pre-commit to writing a post: comment below and I will add you to this list.

If not: you can publish a post normally, and then tag your post with this tag.

And include the following at the bottom of your post:^[1]

This post is part of EA Strategy Fortnight. You can see other Strategy Fortnight posts here.

How to follow posts from this event

Posts will be tagged with this tag. As there is no formal posting schedule, you might want to subscribe to the tag to be notified when new posts get made.

If you want to start reading now, the Building Effective Altruism tag has a bunch of already-published posts on this subject.

^{^}

Thanks to @Vaidehi Agarwalla for suggesting people do this

Jason

I'm not convinced it would be net positive this time in the absence of several less well-known people expressing intent to post and preference for a special setup. I think there would be some downsides to each way the idea could be implemented a few days prior to start, so I'd wanted to see specific evidence that less well-known people would be more likely to post before endorsing a special setup this time.

Documenting the vision, my theory was that setting aside time for lesser-known voices (which basically means asking the well-known voices not to post at certain times) would mitigate concerns by less well-known voices that their contributions would "be completely steamrolled by a flurry of posts by people with higher status." (quoting Jacob, the original commenter above).

I agree that the effects here shake out in different directions -- though I hypothesize that the positive effect on a engagement with a given post comes more from general awareness of something bringing people to the Forum (e.g., there's a new scandal, it's Strategy Fortnight, etc.). In contrast, I speculate that the negative "cannibalizing" effect comes more from specific posts (look, there are fresh posts by X, Y, and Z with active engagement). Thus, I speculate that -- by judicious management of post timing -- we could capture much of the positive effect of the special event bringing in readers while mitigating the effect of prominent voices crowding other voices out. Of course, I could be wrong!

After thinking about it some more, it would probably be best to set aside space for lesser-known voices either at the beginning of an event or in a multi-day interlude in the middle of the event. Setting aside time at the very end of the event risks people having already had their fill of strategy talk; setting random days aside offers relatively limited isolation. However, most people who just learned about Strategy Fortnight wouldn't be ready to publish in the first few days, and I think it's too late to ask people who have already agreed to write for the event not to publish their post for a multi-day period.

So I think the best ways to test/implement the idea are off the table for this go-round.