I used to agree more with the thrust of this post than I do, and now I think this is somewhat overstated. 

[Below written super fast, and while a bit sleep deprived]

An overly crude summary of my current picture is "if you do community-building via spoken interactions, it's somewhere between "helpful" and "necessary" to have a substantially deeper understanding of the relevant direct work than the people you are trying to build community with, and also to be the kind of person they think is impressive, worth listening to, and admirable. Additionally, being interested in direct work is correlated with a bunch of positive qualities that help with community-building (like being intellectually-curious and having interesting and informed things to say on many topics). But not a ton of it is actually needed for many kinds of extremely valuable community building, in my experience (which seems to differ from e.g. Oliver's). And I think people who emphasize the value of keeping up with direct work sometimes conflate the value of e.g. knowing about new directions in AI safety research vs.  broader value adds from becoming a more informed person and gaining various intellectual benefits from practice engaging with object-level rather than social problems. 

Earlier on in my role at Open Phil, I found it very useful to spend a lot of time thinking through cause prioritization, getting a basic lay of the land on specific causes, thinking through what problems and potential interventions seemed most important and becoming emotionally bought-in on spending my time and effort on them. Additionally, I think the process of thinking through who you trust, and why, and doing early audits that can form the foundation for trust, is challenging but very helpful for doing EA CB work well. And I'm wholly in favor of that, and would guess that most people that don't do this kind of upfront investment are making an important mistake. 

But on the current margin, the time I spend keeping up with e.g. new directions in AI safety research feels substantially less important than spending time on implementation on my core projects, and almost never directly decision-relevant (though there are some exceptions, e.g. I could imagine information that would (and, historically, has) update(d) me a lot about AI timelines, and this would flow through to making different decisions in concrete ways). And examining what's going on with that, it seems like most decisions I make as a community-building grantmaker are too crude to be affected much by additional info at the relevant level of granularity intra-cause, and when I think about lots of other community-building-related decisions, the same seems true. 

For example, if I ask a bunch of AI safety researchers what kinds of people they would like to join their teams, they often say pretty similar versions of "very smart, hardworking people who grok our goals, who are extremely gifted in a field like math or CS".  And I'm like "wow , that's very intuitive, and has been true for years, without changing". Subtle differences between alignment agendas do not, in my experience, bear out enough in people's ideas about what kinds of recruitment are good that I've found it to be a good use of time to dig in on. This is especially true given that places where informed, intelligent people who have various important-to-me markers of trustworthiness differ are places where I find that it's particularly difficult for an outsider to gain much justified confidence.

Another testbed is that I spend a few years spending a lot of time on Open Phil's biosecurity strategy, and I formed a lot of my own, pretty nuanced and intricate views about it. I've never dived as deep on AI. But I notice that I didn't find my own set of views about biosecurity that helpful for many broader community-building tradeoffs and questions, compared to the counterfactual of trusting the people who seemed best to me to trust in the space (which I think I could have guessed using a bunch of proxies that didn't involve forming my own models of biosecurity) and catching up with them or interviewing them every 6mo about what it seems helpful to know (which is more similar to what I do with AI).  Idk, this feels more like 5-10% of my time, though maybe I absorb additional context via osmosis from social proximity to people doing direct work, and maybe this helpful in ways that aren't apparent to me. 

(Weakly-held view)

It seems like my job for the past 4 years (building software for the EA community, for most of that, the EA Forum) has been pretty much a "Community Building" track job.

You might argue that I should view myself as primarily working on a specific cause area, and that I should have  spent 20% of my time working on it (for me it would be AI alignment), but that would be pretty non-obvious. And in any case, I would still look radically different from someone primarily focused on doing alignment research directly.

You might call this a quibble and say you could fit this into a "one-camp" model, but I think there's a pretty big problem for the model if the response is "there's one camp, just with two radically different camps within the one camp".

I don't really disagree with a directional push of this post, that a substantial fraction of community builders should dramatically increase the amount they try to learn relatively in-the-weeds details of object-level causes.

I appreciate this post's high info to length ratio, and I'd be excited about more EAs taking actions along the lines of your corollaries at the end.

On another note, I find it interesting that for the amount of time community builders should be spending skilling up for direct work / doing direct work / skilling up in general:

• You say roughly 20%
• Emma Williamson says >50% (in her post from yesterday)

Largely agree with Owen's post here. I would just add one point.

There's a danger of developing a cadre of specialist or semi-professional 'community-builders' in EA, which is that they could easily become a recruitment bottleneck, a selection filter, a radicalized activist subculture, and a locus of ideological control and misguided norm-enforcement -- just as Human Resources (HR) departments have often become in corporations and academia. 

For example, in many companies that become politically radicalized by younger workers, the HR department tends to be in the vanguard of radicalization -- partly because already-radicalized workers know that HR is where the power is (to recruit, select, promote, and discipline other workers, and to enforce certain ideological norms), and partly because highly rational systematizers don't tend to be very interested in joining the people-centered HR world.

My nightmare scenario is that a smallish clique within EA could take over the 'community-building function', and nudge the community-building in certain politicized directions that are contrary to the  nonpartisan principles of EA.  This is unlikely to go in the direction of making EA more Republican, conservative, or religious than it is -- it seems much more likely that semi-professional community-builders in EA could push EA recruitment, selection, and outreach in a politically Democratic, liberal, progressive, or woke direction. This is not idle speculation. We have seen this happen again and again in corporations, universities, non-profits, foundations, churches, community groups, and other organizations. 

This is captured in Robert Conquest's 'Second Law of Politics': "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing". Not that EA should be explicitly right-wing. Rather, it should be staunchly, fiercely EA -- which is to say, non-partisan, and highly skeptical about allowing any organizational subcultures to develop that would be vulnerable to a woke/progressive takeover.

Of course, it would be great for more EAs to cultivate skills in public outreach, recruitment, marketing, communication, media, conference hosting, podcasting, youtubing, networking, and specific forms of community building. I'm just giving a personal caveat that we should be quite wary of creating an HR-style cadre of specialist 'community-builders' -- because that would be very delectable and low-hanging fruit for political activists to try to take over.

I think 20% might be a decent steady-state but at the start of their involvement I think I'd like to see new aspiring community builders do something like six months on intensive object-level work/research.