Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One makes the distinction between a one to N process and a zero to one process. Going from one to N just involves creating more of something that already exists. This could look like starting a company in an established industry or selling a product worldwide instead of just locally. Going from zero to one, by contrast, involves coming up with something entirely new. This could be a leap forward in technology, like the invention of the transistor, or a leap forward in ideas, like a written constitution. In both the original book and my understanding of it, zero to one ideas are clearly much more valuable than one to N processes. It’s not hard to scale or extend something that already exists, and firms and organizations do it all the time. But how many people ever come up with a genuinely new idea?
While not everything can be productively viewed through this frame, it seems useful to occasionally rise out of our myopia and look around for any good zero to one ideas. Here, I’ll try to use this frame to think about EA university community building.
One to N ideas in university community building might look like scaling existing programs, or making improvements to existing programming. Zero to one ideas would instead have the potential to substantially change the dynamics of university organizing. Since EA university groups have only existed for less than two decades, there may be lots of zero to one ideas out there. Here are two places I think you could find them.
My first and best guess of where to find zero to one ideas is in figuring out how to professionalize uni groups. The outcomes from groups are impressive enough to justify spending much more money making them better and pay for a professional to directly support a single group or small set of groups, but it’s unclear what exactly this professional should do. Right now, there are professional EA organizers for Oxford and Cambridge, and a few other small experiments have been tried before or are ongoing. These efforts have explored very little of the search space. Maybe the professional organizer helps a lot with outreach at the start of the year, and then does something else? Maybe they provide intensive mentorship or managerial support? Do they have to be present on campus all of the time, or can they just visit regularly? There are a lot of questions here, and almost none of them have very clear answers right now.
While this post isn’t really trying to provide concrete advice, I do think skilled university organizers should spend some time thinking about how they could help groups as a professional, or how their group could be helped by a professional. If you feel particularly inspired, I recommend you apply to Kairos’ regional organizer posting or submit an expression of interest to CEA.
My second guess for how to go zero to one is more general. I think the current popular modes of outreach and programming in uni groups are pretty good and adaptive to their context, but maybe there’s some very different approach to university organizing that could dramatically improve the fortunes of at least some university groups. I’m focused on genuinely novel ideas here, and I’m skeptical anything popular deserves the label of “zero to one”. NEST has espoused a different model of EA community building, but it seems like everyone kind of already agrees with them, and many groups and organizers were heading in this direction anyway.
Ideas that many people are unsure about are more promising. Middlebury EA is unlike any other EA group I’m aware of, in that it mostly focuses on GWWC pledge outreach first and other types of regular programming second. I’ll let them describe whether this has been successful, but it could be worth looking into. Variations on the theme of “Do some activity that isn’t talking about the ideas first and then talk about the ideas second” could more broadly be a source of fundamentally new approaches to organizing.
More generally, it seems like current EA groups only use a limited set of social technologies. Groups mainly use ideas from the clusters of “philosophy discussion club” and “career club”, while large and successful clusters like “fraternity”, “single project club”, or “sport club” remain untouched. There are good reasons for this, to be sure, and I am not claiming it would be easy to start an EA frat or otherwise chart an entirely new course for EA groups. But someone should try.
My suggestion to maybe think about starting an EA frat could be seen as an example of an EA giving neglectedness driven advice. If no one is thinking about something, then maybe that’s an extra incentive to take it seriously. In Zero to One, Thiel talks about some ideas as being secrets and draws on some of the same intuitions as neglectedness. While there's some power in literal secrets, where you have an idea and then don’t tell people about it, he’s more interested in the ideas that remain secret because no one would find it reasonable to think about them. Ideas that are outlandish or at odds with existing institutions or incentives might be secret not because nobody else knows about them, but instead because only a small group of people are willing to really believe in them. Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near was by no means a secret in 2005, but if you believed it, you were in some sense privy to a secret.
Coming from a man who thinks EA is the Antichrist, this idea of a secret is a pretty good description of EA's focus on neglectedness, and I think further application of it could be very fruitful for the movement. What ideas are those around you less likely to consider, given their disposition, outlook, and incentives? What do you believe in more than your peers? This doesn’t have to be something deeply controversial. The biggest secrets are probably seen as too benign and boring to be of any interest. I have a theory that university organizers unintentionally keep secrets by not describing how their groups actually work, even though this would be very useful. If you’re an organizer and you write something, it’s much more likely to be about organizing or EA in general, and not about the particular things you do to make your group successful.
I’ve tried to push against this with my descriptions of board structure and outreach, but I think there’s much more to be done here, and I’d be excited to see more from other organizers about how exactly they do what they do. More broadly, I’m a fan of books like High Rise, which zoom into a particular project or group of people and give you a sense of how they actually do their job. How well can people understand your job from what’s written online? You may be privy to a lot of secrets, even if you don’t think about them that way.
Secret or not, it does seem like there are ideas out there waiting for a university organizer to take them from zero to one. It’s possible the university groups of the future will look rather different than those today, and it’s up to us to find out how.
