I have been community building in Cambridge UK in some way or another since 2015, and have shared many of these concerns for some time now. Thanks so much for writing them much more eloquently than I would have been able to, thanks!

To add some more anecdotal data, I also hear the 'cult' criticism all the time. In terms of getting feedback from people who walk away from us: this year, an affiliated (but non-EA), problem-specific table coincidentally ended up positioned downstream of the EA table at a freshers' fair. We anecdotally overheard approx 10 groups of 3 people discussing that they thought EA was a cult, after they had bounced from our EA table. Probably around 2000-3000 people passed through, so this is only 1-2% of people we overheard.

I managed to dig into these criticisms a little with a couple of friends-of-friends outside of EA, and got a couple of common pieces of feedback which it's worth adding.

• We are giving away many free books lavishly. They are written by longstanding members of the community. These feel like doctrine, to some outside of the community.
• Being a member of the EA community is all or nothing. My best guess is we haven't thought of anything less intensive to keep people occupied due the historical focus on HEAs, where we are looking for people who make EA their 'all' (a point well made in this post).

Personally, I think one important reason the situation is different now to how it was some years ago is EA has grown in size and influence since 2015. It's more likely someone has encountered it online, via 80k or some podcast. In larger cities, it's more likely individuals know friends who has been to an EA event. I think we have 'got away with' people thinking it's a cult for a while because not enough people knew about EA. I like to say that the R rate of gossip was < 1, so it didn't proliferate. I feel we're nearing or passing a tipping point that discussing EA without EA members present becomes an interesting topic of conversation for non-EAs, since people can relate and have all had personal experiences with the movement.

In my own work now, I feel much more personally comfortable leaning into cause area-specific field building, and groups that focus around a project or problem. These are much more manageable commitments, and can exemplify the EA lens of looking at a project without it being a personal identity. Important caveats for the record, I still think EA-aligned motivations are important, and I am still a big supporter of the EA Cambridge group, and I think it is run by conscientious people with good support networks :-)

Hi, thank you for starting this conversation! I am an EA outsider, so I hope my anecdata is relevant to the topic. (This is my first post on the forums.) I found my way to this post during an EA rabbit hole after signing up for the "Intro to EA" Virtual Program.

To provide some context, I heard about EA a few years ago from my significant other. I was/am very receptive to EA principles and spent several weeks browsing through various EA resources/material after we first met. However, EA remained in my periphery for around three years until I committed to giving EA a fair shake several weeks ago. This is why I decided to sign up for the VP.

I'm mid-career instead of enrolled in university, so my perspective is not wholly within the scope of the original post. However, I like to think that I have many qualities the EA community would like to attract:

• I (dramatically) changed careers to pursue a role with a more significant positive impact and continue to explore how I can apply myself to do the "most good".
• I'm well-educated (1 bachelor's degree & 2 master's degrees)
• As a scientist for many years, I value evidence-based decision-making and rationality, both professionally and personally.
• I have professional experience managing multiple projects with large budgets and diverse stakeholders. This requires 3 of the six skills listed in the top talent gaps identified on your Leadership Forum (as mentioned in the original post).
• As a data scientist, I have practical & technical expertise in machine learning (related to the last talent gap in the list mentioned above).
• I'm open-minded. (No apparent objective evidence comes to mind. I suppose you'll have to talk to me and verify for yourselves. :-) )

If we agree that EA would prefer to attract rather than "turn off" people with these qualities, then the following introspections regarding my resistance to participating in the movement may be helpful:

• The heavy, heavy focus on university recruiting feels .... off.
  • First, let me emphasise that I understand all the practical reasons for focusing on student outreach. @Chris Long does a great job listing why this is an actionable, sensible strategy in this thread. I understand and sympathise with EA's motivations. My following points are from an "EA outsider" perspective and others who may not care enough to consider the matter more deeply than their initial impression.
  • Personally, 'cult' didn't immediately come to mind despite being a common criticism many of you encountered. Still, the aggressive focus on recruiting (primarily young) university students can seem a bit predatory. When there is a perceived imbalance in recruitment tactics, red flags can instinctively pop up in the back of people's minds.
• The EA community seems homogeneous - and not just demographically.
  • The homogeneity is a natural consequence of the heavy focus on university outreach. Whenever I encounter EAs, I'm generally the oldest ... and I'm only in my 30's! (Is there a place in this community if you're not fresh out of uni?) The youthful skew of the community contributes to an impression that there is a small group of influential figures dictating the vision/strategy of the movement and a mass of idealistic, young recruits eager to execute on it. People who get things done want to find other people who get things done. It's not reassuring if it feels like the movement is filled with young (albeit talented & intelligent) people who can barely be trusted with leading student groups (requiring scripts, strict messaging, etc.).
  • Since the aggressive university outreach focuses on prestigious institutions, the group can seem elitist. Again, I understand the cold realities of this world mean that there are practical considerations for supporting this approach. As an outsider, it isn't easy to discern if the pervasive mentions of top institutions are for practicality or for signalling. I also understand the importance of epistemic alignment. However, when the EA Global application requirement (as an example) is juxtaposed alongside aggressive recruitment at top universities, it starts to seem like EA is looking for "the right kind of people" to join their club in a less benign sense. Admittedly, I have a giant chip on my shoulder from my upbringing on the wrong side of the socio-economic tracks. Even with that self-awareness (and a Berkeley degree), some of my hesitancy to engage is the concern that my value to the community would not be judged mainly on the merit of my contributions but rather on my academic pedigree. I value my time and energy too much to play those games.
• Breaking into the hive mind
  • EAs seem uniformly well-informed and studied on a core body of seminal studies, books, websites, and influential figures. Objectively, it's a credit to your community that there is such high engagement and consistency in your messaging. To an outsider, it feels like a steep learning curve before being considered a "real EA". (Is there an admission exam or something? Do I need to recite Peter Singer from memory? :-) ) This is more of a compliment than anything. Maybe just be mindful of what you're trying to achieve when you name-drop, cite a study, or reference philosophy terminology in conversation. Is the motivation in doing so to communicate clearly or to posture? At best, EA newbies may feel intimidated. At worst, they/we may get defensive.
  • To a natural sceptic and critical thinker, the uniformity also feels a little like indoctrination. What are the areas of active constructive disagreement? Does the community accept (or even encourage) dissenting (but well-reasoned) opinions? What are the different positions? What are the caveats of the seminal studies? It's not apparent on the surface, and free-thinkers are generally repelled at the notion of conformity for the sake of belonging. (In the "Intro to EA" Virtual Program syllabus, I noticed that there is attention to EA critiques. I'm looking forward to experiencing how that conversation is facilitated.)
• Does EA care about anything other than AI safety nowadays?
  • I've read about all these significant EA initiatives tackling malaria, global poverty, factory farming, etc., during my first exploration of the movement a few years ago. But nowadays, it seems that all I hear about is AI safety. Considering how challenging it is to forecast existential risk, are you really so confident that this one cause is the most impactful, most neglected, and most tractable that it warrants overshadowing all the other causes? I agree that AI safety is an important cause that deserves attention. However, the fervour around it seems awfully reminiscent of the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" on the Gartner Hype Cycle. It's not so much that I have anything against AI safety, in particular. The impression of "hype" itself is not a great look if someone is seeking a community of critical thinkers to engage. Combined with the homogeneity of the community, it makes me suspicious of "group think".

I want to explicitly state that I know that not all of these impressions are entirely true. I know that EAs aren't all out-of-touch, pretentious jerks. The 80,000 hours job board has several postings across many cause areas aside from AI safety. The impressions described above are primarily from my perspective before actively trying to vet my concerns. However, I imagine that others who share these impressions don't bother to validate their concerns before dismissing the movement.

So why did I go through the trouble of digging deeper? Well, probably because EA is the closest I've found to a community consistent with my own values, motivations, and interests. Despite my reservations, I really want my concerns to be wrong and for EA to work. More importantly, I've grown to trust the values, motivations, judgement, and competency of my significant other, who is committed to EA's mission. Through him, I've met other EAs who are also great people. Quality people tend to attract other quality people. For this reason, @Theo Hawking's imperative to pause and reflect on a)what EA considers a quality conversion and b)if current EA practices are attracting/repelling quality conversions is a worthy exercise.

On a final note, I suspect the comments about the free books or 10% tithing to charity heard from people to explain their "cult" label of EA are merely convenient justifications and don't address the core of their impression. After all, why would they bother investing effort to pinpoint and articulate the sources of their general negative feeling about the movement if they're already disengaged? I suspect that the "cult" feeling has more to do with the homogeneity and "group think" concerns I described above. To combat these negative impressions, I'd recommend:

1. Diversify your recruitment tactics. I particularly liked the suggestion about recruiting around specific cause areas mentioned by @Jamie Bernardi. I suspect this will also help with your talent gaps. Representation at adjacent conferences/events would also be a channel to reach established professionals. As I was exploring how I might do the most good before I heard of EA, I attended many events like the Data for Good Exchange 2019 (bloomberg.com) and would have been very receptive to hearing about EA there.
2. Emphasise the projects and the work. @Charles He hit the nail on the head. I would go even further than just aiming to have the best leaders in cause areas. Are EA orgs/work generally respected and well-regarded by other players in the cause area? In other words, does EA "play well with others", or are you primarily operating in your own bubble? Suppose EA is objectively and demonstrably doing great work. In that case, other major players should be open to adopting similar practices and further magnifying the impact. If that's not happening, does EA have the self-awareness to understand why and act upon it?
3. In conversations with outsiders, favour tangible issues/outcomes and actionable ideas instead of thought experiments. (My perspective skews to the practical, so feel free to discount my emphasis on this point depending on your role in EA.) If the aim is to get more people excited about doing the most good, then describe the success of the Against Malaria Foundation or the scale of impact specific government policies may have rather than using the trolley problem to discuss utilitarianism. Yes, thought experiments are both fun and valuable, but there is a time and a place.
4. Be accepting of varying styles of communication around ideas and issues. Not everyone interested in cause areas or doing "the most good" will be fluent in philosophy or psychology. If we can communicate concepts, thoughts, or ideas reasonably and productively, it's often unnecessary to derail the conversation on a pedantic tangent. Don't treat me like an unenlightened pleb if you have to explain the connection for why you name-dropped a researcher I hadn't heard of during our conversation. (This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. :-) )

I hope my diatribe will be received constructively because I am invested in seeing EA succeed regardless if I consider myself an EA at the moment. Anecdata is not rigorous, so who knows how generalisable my data point is. However, upon reading this thread, I realised that my complicated disposition towards EA is not uncommon and decided to share my viewpoint. Whatever that's worth. :-)

Hey Theo - I’m James from the Global Challenges Project :)

Thanks so much for taking the time to write this - we need to think hard about how to do movement building right, and its great for people like you to flag what you think is going wrong and what you see as pushing people away.

Here’s my attempt to respond to your worries with my thoughts on what’s happening!

First of all, just to check my understanding, this is my attempt to summarise the main points in your post:

My summary of your main points

We’re missing out on great people as a result of how community building is going at student groups. A stronger version of this claim would be that current CB may be selecting against people who could most contribute to current talent bottlenecks. You mention 4 patterns that are pushing people away:

1. EA comes across as totalising and too demanding, which pushes away people who could nevertheless contribute to pressing cause areas. (Part 1.1)
2. Organisers come across as trying to push particular conclusions to complex questions in a way that is disingenuous and also epistemically unjustified. (Part 1.2)
3. EA comes across as cult-like; primarily through appearing to be trying to hard to be persuasive, pattern matching to religious groups, coming across as disingenuously friendly (Part 1.3, your experience)
4. There aren’t as many ways for neartermist-interested EAs to get involved in the community, despite them being able to contribute to EA cause areas (Part 1.4)

My understanding is that you find patterns (2) and (3) especially concerning. So to elaborate on them, you’re worried about:

• EA outreach is over-optimising on persuasion/conversion in a way that makes epistemically rigorous and skeptical people extremely averse to EA outreach. You feel like student group leaders are trying to persuade people into certain conclusions rather than letting people decide for themselves.
• EA student group leaders are generally unaware and out-of-the-loop on how they are coming across poorly to other people.
• EA student group leaders are often themselves pretty new to EA, yet are getting funded to do EA outreach. This is bad because they won’t really how best to do outreach due to being so new.

You think these worrying patterns are being driven upstream by a strategic mistake of over-optimising for a metric of “highly engaged EAs”. This is a poor choice of metric because:

• A large fraction of people who could excel in an EA career won’t get engaged in EA quickly, but will be slow to come to arrive at EA conclusions due to their desire to reason carefully and skeptically. Thus you worry that these people will be ignored by EA outreach because they don’t come across as a “highly engaged EA”.

You then suggest some possible changes that student group leaders could make (here I’m just focusing on changes that SG leaders could do):

1. Don’t think in terms of producing “highly engaged EAs”; in general beware of over-optimising on getting people who quickly agree with EA ideas.
2. Try and get outside perspectives on whether what you’re doing might be off-putting to others.
3. Actively seek out criticisms and opinions of people who might have been put off by EA.
4. Seek to improve your epistemics; do the hard and virtuous thing of being open to criticism even though it’s naturally aversive.
5. Beware social dynamics that incentivise people to agree with conclusions in return for social approval.

Sorry that was such a long summary (and if I missed out key parts, please do let me know)! I think you’re making many great points.

Here are some of my thoughts in reply:

My thoughts in reply

Over-optimising on HEAs

• I agree with all of your specific pieces of advice in your final section. I think they're great heuristics that every person doing EA outreach should try and adopt.
• My overall impression is that many student group leaders also agree with the direction of your advice, but find it hard to implement in real life because in general it’s hard to do stuff right. My impression is that most student group leaders are super overstretched, have lots of university work going on, and are only able to spend several hours per week doing EA outreach work (and generally find it stressful and difficult to stay on top of things).
• I think the core failure mode of “getting the people who already initially express the most interest/agreement in EA” does go on, but I think that what drives it is a general tendency to do what’s easier (which is true of any activity) instead of necessarily over-optimising on an explicit metric. Since group leaders are so time-constrained, it’s easier for them to talk to and engage with people who already agree because they don’t have the time or patience to grapple with people who initially disagree.
  • If group leaders were feeling a lot of pressure to get HEAs from funding bodies, this would be super bad. I’m not sure to the extent that this is really going on that much: CEA’s HEA metric is kinda vague and I haven’t got an impression from group leaders I’ve talked to that people are trying to optimise super hard on it (would love to hear contrary anecdotes). In general I find most student groups to be small, somewhat chaotically run, and so not very good at optimising for anything in particular.
  • If this claim is true, then I think that would be an argument for investing more resources into student groups to get them to a state where they have more capacity to make better decisions and spend time engaging with Alice-types.

Here are some of my thoughts on EA coming across as cult-like:

• I agree that EA can come off as weird and cult-like at times. I think this is because: (i) there’s a lot of focus on outreach, (ii) EA is an intense idea that people take very seriously in their lives.
• I think it’s such a shame that EA comes across this way. At its core I think it’s because it’s so unusual to have communities that are this serious about things. To give a personal anecdote, when I was at university I felt pretty disillusioned and distant from my peers. I felt that things were so messed up in the world and it made me sad that many of my friends didn’t seem to notice or care. When I first met EAs I found it so inspiring how they were so serious about taking personal responsibility for making the world better; no matter what society’s default expectations were.
• When I was first getting into EA I was really fervent about doing outreach, and I think I did a pretty bad job. It seemed so important to me that everyone should agree with EA ideas because of the huge amount of suffering that was going on in the world. I found it confusing and disheartening when many of those I talked to simply didn’t agree with EA or who seemed to agree but then not do anything about it. I would argue back in an unconvincing way, which made little progress. Because EA conclusions seemed obvious to me, I didn’t get how people didn’t immediately also agree.
• With all that in mind, here is a quick guess of additional heuristics (beyond your suggestions) that student leaders could bear in mind:
  • It’s not your job to make someone an EA: I think a better framing is to view your responsibility as making sure that people have the opportunity to hear about and engage with EA ideas. But at the end of the day, if they don’t agree it’s not your job to make them agree. There’s a somewhat paradoxical subtlety to it - through coming to peace with the fact that some people won’t agree, you can better approach conversations with a genuine desire to help people make up their own minds.
  • Look at things from an outsider's perspective: I don't have immediately thoughts on tactical decisions like how to use CRMs (although I do find the business jargon quite ugh) or book giveaways. It seems to me that there are good ways and bad ways to do these sorts of things. But your suggestion of checking in with non EA-s about whether they'd find it weird seems great and so I just wanted to doubly reiterate it here!
  • Embrace the virtue of patience: I think it’s important to approach EA outreach conversations with a virtue of patience. It can be difficult to embrace because for EAs outreach feels so high-stakes and valuable. However if you don’t have patience then you’ll be tempted to do outreach in a hurry, which leads to sloppy epistemics or at worse deceitfulness. A patient EA carefully explains ideas, a hurried EA aims to persuade.
  • I think it would be a shame if we lost the good qualities of EA that make it so unique in the world - that it’s a community of people who are unusually serious about doing the most good they can in their lives. But I think we can do better as a community in not coming across cult-like by being more balanced in our outreach efforts, being mindful of the bad effects of aiming for persuasion, and coming to a peace with the idea that some people just won’t be that into EA and that’s okay (and that doesn’t make them a bad person).

Other strategy suggestions which I think could improve the status quo:

• I’d be excited to see more EA adjacent and cause specific outreach. I think having lots of different brands and sub-communities broadens the appeal of EA ideas to different sorts of audiences, and lets people get involved in EA stuff to different extents (so that EA isn’t as all-or-nothing). I’d be keen to see people restart effective giving groups, rationality groups, EA outreach focused on entrepreneurs, and cause specific groups like animal welfare and AI alignment.

Thanks again for taking the time to write the post - it seems like it's generated great discussion and that its something that a lot of people agree with :)

Thanks for this post. If true, it does describe a pretty serious concern. 

One issue I've always had with the "highly engaged EA" metric is that it's only a measure for alignment,* but the people who are most impactful within EA have both high alignment and high competence. If your recruitment selects only on alignment this suggests we're at best neutral to competence and at worst (as this post describes) actively selecting against competence. 

(I do think the elite university setting mitigates this harm somewhat, e.g. 25th percentile MIT students still aren't stupid in absolute terms). 

That said, I think the student group organizers I recently talked to are usually extremely aware of this distinction. (I've talked to a subset of student group organizers from Stanford, MIT, Harvard (though less granularity), UPenn (only one) and Columbia, in case this is helpful). And they tend to operationalize their targets more in terms of people who do good EA research, jobs, and exciting entrepreneurship projects, rather than in terms of just engagement/identification. Though I could be wrong about what they care about in general (as opposed to just when talking with me).

The pet theory I have for why people focus on "Highly Engaged EAs" as the metric most openly talked about as opposed to (e.g.) "Highly Engaged and Very Competent EAs" is that it looks more fair/egalitarian (at least in theory, anybody can become highly engaged, but very few people can become as smart as X or as good at operations as Y). 

Some quick questions:

1. Can you define what you mean in your article by "Pascal’s Mugging?" I think you're not using the formal definition but as a metonym for something else (which is totally fine, but I'm not sure what idea or cluster of ideas you're exactly pointing to that's more specific than "vaguely shady").

2. Your critiques seem to mostly come from the LessWrong/rationality cluster. Do you have a sense of whether these critiques are shared (though expressed in different cultural languages) from people with good epistemics but from other cultural clusters? 

*and of course, like all metrics it's an imperfect measure for alignment, and can be gamed.

I feel a desire to lower some expectations:

• I don't think any social movement of real size or influence has ever avoided drawing some skepticism, mockery, or even suspicion,
• I think community builders should have a solid and detailed enough understanding of EA received wisdom to be able to lay out the case for our recommendations in a reasonably credible way, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to be domain experts in every domain, and that means that sometimes they aren't going to be able to seem impressive to every domain expert that comes to us.
• To be frank, it isn't realistic to be able to capture the imagination of everyone who seems promising even if we make the best possible versions of our arguments. Some people will inevitably come away thinking we "just don't get it", that we haven't addressed their objections, that we're not serious about [specific concern X] and therefore our point of view is uninteresting. Communication channels just aren't high-fidelity enough, and people's engagement heuristics aren't precise enough, to avoid this happening from time to time.
• When some people are weirded out by the way we behave or try to attract new members, it seems to me like sometimes this is just reasonable self-protective heuristics that they have, working exactly as intended. People are creeped out by us giving them free books or telling them to change their careers or telling them that the future of humanity is at stake, because they reason "these people are putting a lot into me because they want a lot out of me". They're basically correct about that! While we value contributions from people at a wide range of levels of engagement and dedication, the "top end" is pretty extreme, as it should be, and some people are going to notice that and be worried about it. We can work to reduce that tension, but I don't think it's going away.

Obviously we should try our best on all of these dimensions, progress can be made, we can be more impressive and more appealing and less threatening and more welcoming. But I can't imagine a realistic version of the EA community that honestly communicates about everything we believe and want to do and doesn't alienate anyone by doing that.

I think it will be really important for EAs to engage in more empirical work to understand how people think about EA. Of course you don't want people to feel like they're being fed the results of a script tested by a focus group (that's the whole point of this post), but you do want to actually know in reliable ways how bad some of these problems are, how things are resonating, and how to do better in a genuine and authentic way. Empirical results should be a big part of this (though not all of it), but right now they aren't, and this seems bad. Instead, we frequently confuse "what my immediate friends in my immediate network think about EA" with "what everyone thinks about EA" and I think this is a mistake.

This is something Rethink Priorities is working on this year, though we invite others to do similar work. I think there's a lot we can learn!

Thank you for writing this. I worry a lot about university groups being led by inexperienced people who have only heard of EA recently, especially given the huge focus on university groups (so, so much more focus than on regional groups or professional groups)! EA seems to be really banking on universities**, so much so that we are kinda screwed if it is done poorly, and turning people off. Some thoughts and theories:

1. Experience of organizers:

I bet the mentorship and training in the new University Group Accelerator Program will help, but also I am not sure how much time a mentor will have, and that still assumes only 25 hours of engaging with EA content. From the website:

"The program is designed for groups that... have at least two interested organizers where... at least one has engaged with high-quality EA ideas for at least 25 hours (e.g. completed an intro fellowship or equivalent) and is comfortable facilitating group discussions or could be with training"

I realize a low amount of hours is a given for this role if you want it to happen at all, but still. That could be enough for someone who is a natural conversationalist to integrate a lot of key lessons and have a deep understanding and mental infrastructure, but for a lot of people it won't be enough that they can field concerns well and not sound like cultists (repeating things rather rote rather than being conversational).  And tbh, some people won't know what high quality content is. Is 25 hours with no focus on animal welfare enough? What about that being the almost sole focus? Or what about if most of those hours are topical discussion with other inexperienced fellows?

I would love to see the training materials for the UGAP program made public on the forum or on request to dedicated EAs, for red-teaming. Red-teaming community building is a great idea!

2. Conversationality and critiques

I absolutely agree about interfacing with people who are naturally critical and them being some of the best prospective members. This also reduces the cult vibe.. organizers should ideally be people who have thought through the problems deeply and definitely didn't just grab onto the first thing or go with authority. Frankly, I don't think this personality trait/intellectual inclination is something organizers can or should fake, and it is possible that student organizers should be interviewed for this ability. My heuristic is something like "If they couldn't hang at a rat or EA group house late-night discussion, they shouldn't be publicly teaching EA". (at risk of sounding strict, these are very friendly situations!)

I would love to see some training to uni organisers on how to field rebuttals. Eg, "hm, I actually can't answer that with the confidence I think it deserves. But I recommend you message X about it!" (are there people who can just field questions? Ask a forum librarian?) or "Just because of time limitations, I really want to circle back to this later with you.. can we chat after the session or over [messenger app]?"

3. On Cults

The cult thing is really problematic. Here are some known aspects of cults we don't technically fit, but could do to ensure all EAs, especially organizers, are leaning more outside of:

-Zealots: Don't be one.

-Separation from friends and loved ones: Happens accidentally due to value changes. Mentioning other people and commitments in your life other than EA might go a long way.

-The cult's philosophy is the one great truth: Stress moral uncertainty and the different approaches to doing good within the movement. Discuss how EA has changed and how the philosophy doesn't have any prescriptions written in stone except that the community welcomes people who try to do their best for the good of others using evidence and reason.

-One magical leader: No idolizing and err toward being open if you disagree with an expert. Emphasize the decentralized origin of ideas in EA.  Also, if you bring up one expert, it is good to bring up others, eg why just peter singer, toby ord, will macaskill, or rob wiblin? Surely you can find a second person to support their claim? Or just say "some well-respected figures think X because Y" and don't namedrop anybody unless requested.

-Tithes and pushing self-denial or frugality to increase the ability to tithe more: Why is this even promoted among broke college students when the community has funds for a good few years? I'd approach it as something EA ideals have pointed to in the past, and something some people still do. Let them hear about GWWC if they ask. Move on quickly to talking about direct work. EA initially had bad publicity because of talks about money, and we can thank our lucky stars that it isn't a moral imperative to "fundraise" anymore! It's great that people have been and are still donating, and thanks to them, organizers are free to use so many other framings in outreach and pitch other things that will be less unpopular and more impactful. So please do!

-Promising a great afterlife or great eventual reward: Immortality via simulation, cryonics, and utopian simulation are probably things to steer a beginner-friendly discussion away from if it happens to go there.

Additionally, I'd love to see some training on how young EAs can talk to their families.. I recently met a wannabe student organizer who told me how tenaciously he was talking to his (Mormon) parents about EA, and cult bells were ringing even in my head. I gave him some advice, but the odds are there are more prospective-organizers out there doing that. As an ex-young-vegan, I get it. But EA really  doesn't need parents lobbying their child's university that the EA student group is a cult and should be shut down. Nor do we need well-meaning parents posting on social media or sending emails warning their parent friends or religious leaders about EA student groups corrupting their kids.

4. CRM

CRM seems good, but it should be used transparently. Just ask people what opportunities they would like information about and what their favorite cause areas are, and anything else about them they'd like you to know. Say you will keep this information for now, but it can be deleted any time on request. It is so you can send them things like job and fellowship opportunities they will really like, or interesting events and intellectual pieces they will really like. Be clear that you are not affiliated with any opportunities, but just doing it as a helpful service to your members.

5. Maybe we can all can help

A good volunteer opportunity for EAs might be to reach out to your university organizers and try to mentor them a bit. Send them good pieces or teach them how to proactively use the forum and subscribe to the community-building topic tag. Invite them to the slack and facebook groups and share newsletters with them they might not know about. You could even show up to the first or last day of their fellowships if the student organizers think it would help. I am doing a bit of mentoring for University of Texas organizers slightly , but this post makes me want to do moreso.


**Side note, I really don't get the focus on student outreach in general. At least 4 of the 6 bottlenecks named seem better sourced from professionals and regional connections (management, ability to really figure out what matters most and set the right priorities, skills related to entrepreneurship / founding new organizations, and one-on-one social skills and emotional intelligence) than from universities. Plus young people are probably better at spreading cultural memes, so we might have a bigger reputational risk with them.

I've been speaking to a number of people in university organizing groups who have been aware of these issues, and almost across the board the major issue they feel is that it seems too conflict-generating/bad/guilt-inducing to essentially tell their friends and peers in their or other universities something like "Hey, I think the thing you're doing is actually causing a lot of harm, actually."

I would be very in favor of helping find ways to facilitate better communication between these groups that specifically targets ways they can improve in non-blaming, pro-social and supportive ways.

I wonder if the suggestion here to replace some student reading groups with working groups might go some way to demonstrating that EA is a question.

I don't even think the main aim should be to produce novel work (as suggested in that post); I'm just thinking about having students practice using the relevant tools/resources to form their own conclusions. You could mentor individuals through their own minimal-trust investigations. Or run fact-checking groups that check both EA and non-EA content (which hopefully shows that EA content compares pretty well but isn't perfect...and if it doesn't compare pretty well, that's very useful to know!)

This is a great post! Upvoted. I appreciate the exceptionally clear writing and the wealth of examples, even if I'm about 50/50 on agreeing with your specific points.

I haven't been involved in university community building for a long time, and don't have enough data on current strategies to respond comprehensively. Instead, a few scattered thoughts:

I was talking to a friend a little while ago who went to an EA intro talk and is now doing one of 80,000 Hours' recommended career paths, with a top score for direct impact. She’s also one of the most charismatic people I know, and she cares deeply about doing good, with a healthy practical streak.

She’s not an EA, and she’s not going to be. She told me that she likes the concept and the framing, and that since the intro talk she’s often found that when faced with big ethical questions it’s useful to ask “what would an EA do”. But she’s not an EA.

I don't like using "EA" as a noun. But if we do want to refer to some people as "EAs", I think your friend has the most important characteristics described by that term.

Using EA's core ideas as a factor in big decisions + caring a lot about doing good + strong practical bent + working on promising career path = yes, you are someone who practices effective altruism (which seems, to me, like the best definition of "an EA"). You don't have to attend the conferences or wear the t-shirts to qualify.

Second, despite some pushback, current EA community building doctrine seems to focus heavily on producing ‘Highly Engaged EAs’ (HEAs). It is relatively easy to tell if someone is a HEA. 

Not sure about current doctrine, but my impression is that "HEA" isn't meant to be a binary category. Based on your statement:

Is one EA in government policy worth more than a hundred civil servants who, though not card-carrying EAs, have seriously considered the ideas and are in touch with engaged EAs who can call them up if need be? What about great managers and entrepreneurs?

I'd be surprised if even the most literal interpretation of any community-building advice would have an organizer favoring "one person in policy" over "one hundred policy people being interested in EA" (feels an order of magnitude off, maybe?).

Bolding for emphasis:  People often overestimate how important "full-time EA people are" to the movement, relative to people who "have seriously considered the ideas and are in touch". 

That’s largely because people who discuss EA online are frequently in the first group. But when it comes to impactful projects, a massive amount of work is done by people who are very focused on their own work and less interested in EA qua EA. 

When I see my contacts excitedly discussing a project, it often looks like "this person who was briefly involved with group X/is friends with person Y is now pursuing project Z, and we think EA played a role". The person in question will often have zero connection with "the EA community" at large, no Forum account, etc.

You see less of this on the Forum because “this person got a job/grant” and “this person has started a new project” aren’t exciting posts unless the person in question writes them. And the non-Forum-y people don’t write those posts!

I asked around, and quickly stumbled upon some people who confidently told me that EA was an organisation that wanted to trick me into signing away my future income to them in exchange for being part of their gang. 

I got this reaction a lot when I was starting up Yale EA in 2014, despite coming up with all my messaging alone and having no connection to the wider EA community. Requests to donate large amounts of money are suspicious!

I'd expect to see less of this reaction now that donating and pledge-taking get less emphasis than in 2014, especially in college groups. But I think it's hard to avoid while also trying to convey that the things we care about are really important.

 (Doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but I wouldn't see the “donations are a scam” perspective as strong evidence that organizers are making the wrong choices.)

If better epistemics trades off against getting more alignment researchers, maybe you think it’s not worth doing. However, it’s not clear at all that this is the case.

Almost everyone I've interacted with in EA leadership/CB is obsessed with good epistemics — they value them highly when recruiting/evaluating people, much more than with any other personal trait (with rare exceptions, e.g. strong technical skills in roles where those are crucial).* 

My impression is that they'd be happy to trade a bunch of alignment for epistemic skill/virtue at the margin for most people, as long as alignment didn't dip to the point where they had no interest in working on a priority problem.

This doesn't mean that current CB strategy is necessarily encouraging good epistemics. (I'm sure it varies dramatically between and within groups.) It's possible for a group’s strategy not to achieve the ends they want — and it's easier to Goodhart on alignment than epistemics, because the former is easier to measure.

But I am confident that leaders' true desire is "find people who have great epistemics [and are somewhat aligned]", not "find people who are extremely aligned [and have okay epistemics]".

*To clarify my perspective: I've seen discussion of 100+ candidates for jobs/funding in EA. Alignment comes up often, but mostly as a checkbox/afterthought, while "how the person thinks" is the dominant focus most of the time. Many terms are used — clear thinking, independent thinking, nuanced thinking — but they point to the same cluster of traits.

You should expect there to be whole types of reason (like ‘you guys seem way more zealous than I’m comfortable with’) which you’ll be notably less likely to hear about relative to how much people think it, especially if you’re not prioritising getting this kind of feedback.

This is very true! 

One good way to hear a wider range of feedback is to have friends and activities totally separate from your EA work who can give you a more "normal" perspective on these things. This was automatic for me in college; our EA group was tiny and there wasn't much to do, so we all had lots of other stuff going on, and I’d been making friends for years before I discovered EA. 

I gather that EA groups are now, in some cases, more like sports teams or music groups — things that can easily consume most of someone's non-class hours and leave them in a place where most of their friends are in the same club. It’s good to have a close-knit group of altruistic friends, but spending all of your time around other people in EA will limit your perspective; guard against this! 

(Also, having hobbies not related to your life's central purpose seems healthy for a lot of reasons.)

Assume that people find you more authoritative, important, and hard-to-criticise than you think you are. It’s usually not enough to be open to criticism - you have to actually seek it out or visibly reward it in front of other potential critics.

Also very true! 

Flagging this because it is very hard to account for properly, I've had to adjust my expectation of how hard-to-criticize I am several times (especially after I started getting jobs within EA).

Fwiw, my intuition is that EA hasn't been selecting against, e.g. good epistemic traits historically, since I think that the current community has quite good epistemics by the standards of the world at large (including the demographics EA draws on). Of course, current EA community-building strategies may have caused that to change, but, fwiw, I doubt it.

I also think that highly engaged EAs may generally be substantially more valuable, meaning that focusing on that makes sense, but would be interested in empirical analyses from community-builders.

He recently described something to me as ‘too EA’. When I pushed him to elaborate, what he meant was something like ‘has the appearance of inviting you to make your own choice but is not-so-subtly trying to push you in a specific direction’.

This reminds me of Bible Study groups where there where discussion was encouraged but never approved of, some of which I led (badly).  I have empathy for those leading these.

As a leader, it is a genuinely hard to balance:

• allowing discussion
• staying on topic
• pointing out the best answers
• allowing a safe space for disagreement
   

I agree with the author on criticisms but I have let a lot of group discussions and I do find it really hard.

My suggestion here is to have 2 people leading the group, one who will take the role of moderator - to ask questions and move the group on. And one who will argue the EA point of view, and at times be shut down by the moderator.

The comment below is made in a personal capacity, and is speaking about a specific part of the post, without intending to take a view on the broader picture (though I might make a broader comment later if I have time).

Thanks for writing this.  I particularly appreciated this example:

A friend of mine at a different university attended the EA intro fellowship and found it lacking. He tells me that in the first session, foundational arguments were laid out, and he was encouraged to offer criticism. So he did. According to him, the organisers were grateful for the criticism, but didn’t really give him any satisfying replies. They then proceeded to build on the claims about which he remained unconvinced, without ever returning to it or making an effort to find an answer themselves.

I'm pretty worried about this. I got the impression from the rest of your post that you suspect some of the big picture problem is community builders focusing too much on what will work to get people into AI safety,  but I think this particular failure mode is also a huge issue for people with that aim. The sorts of people who will hear high-level/introductory arguments and immediately be able come up with sensible responses seem like exactly the sorts of people who have high potential to make progress on alignment. I can't imagine many more negative signals for bright, curious people than someone who's meant to be introducing an idea not being able to adequately respond* to an objection they just thought of.

Though, to be fair, 'hang on a sec, let me just check what my script says about that objection' might actually be worse...


*To be clear, 'adequately responding' doesn't necessarily mean 'is so much of an expert that will just come up with a perfect response on the spot'. It's fine to not know stuff, and it's vital to be able to admit when you don't. Signposting to a previous place the question has been discussed, or knowing that it will be covered later (if e.g. this comes up in a fellowship) if that is the case, both seem useful. It seems important to know enough about common questions, objections, and alternative viewpoints to be able to do this the majority of the time. If it's genuinely something that the person running the session has never heard, this is exactly the time to demonstrate good epistemics - being willing to seriously engage, ask follow-up questions, and trying to double crux.

Very interesting. I haven't come into contact with any student groups, so can't comment on that. But here's my experiences of what's worked well and less well coming in as a longtime EA-ish giver in my late 30s looking for a more effective career:

Good

(Free) books:  I love books - articles and TED talks are fine for getting a quick and simple understanding of something, but nothing beats the full understanding from a good book. And some of the key ones are being given away free! Picking out a few, the Alignment Problem, The Precipice and Scout Mindset give a grounding in AI alignment, longtermism/existential risk and rational thinking techniques, and once you have a handful under your belt you're in a solid place to understand and contribute to some discussions. They're good writers too; it's not just information transfer. The approach of 'here's a free book, go away and read it, here's some resources if you want to research further' sounds like the polar opposite of what's described above. It worked well for me. Maybe a proper 'EA book starter list' would help it work even better (there's a germ of this lurking halfway down the page here, but surely this could be standalone and more loved...)

Introductions culture:  People seem happy to give their time up to talk to you after exchanging a couple of messages. After meeting people they're eager to introduce you to others you might be a good 'match' with or at least give leads. Apart from its obvious benefits this is really good for keeping spirits up early on when it might be a bit daunting otherwise.

80k careers guides:  Pretty obvious but very well-written and a good starting point.

Jobs boards e.g. 80k, Work on Climate, Facebook/LinkedIn groups:  Well-curated and give a clear view of what's available in the sector and particular roles are generally well-written. On ones where people post their own jobs they almost always follow community norms. Not entirely free from the usual problems (hype, jobs without posted salaries) but better than most. I've seen some jobs that are what I want but in other countries, which makes me hopeful I'm looking in the right place, especially if I can also start meeting some more people. Talking of which...

This forum:  Smart discussion, some key people on here writing and listening to feedback, seemed welcoming and receptive when I just rocked up and started writing some comments.


Less good

Occasionally, apparent coldness to immediate suffering:  I've only seen this a bit, but even one example could be enough to put someone off for good. I can see what motivates it, but if a person says 'I think x is one of the most pressing current problems', and the response is what seems like a dismissive 'well, x isn't a genuinely existential risk so it's not a priority', it can come across as a lack of empathy or, at worst, humanity. It's not the argument itself, as I've no issue with ranking charities or interventions and producing recommendations, but more the apparent absolutism and lack of compassion involved (even if, ironically, it could be produced by compassion for an imagined future greater good). 

Processes that don't seem fit for the scale of EA:  I've bigged up 80k above so I'll use them as an example here. Ordered a free book, it arrived, got an email later saying 'ah looks like we have distribution problems, here's a digital copy while you're waiting'... then another one saying 'oops forgot to attach it, here it is'. Signed up to 1:1 careers advice, heard nothing for 3 weeks, then 'sorry, we can't do you', with no explanation. They did connect me with a local organiser, which was great, but didn't pass on the responses I'd taken some time to think about, so we ended up covering some ground again. 

Occasionally insular worldview:  This comes from being concentrated in a small number of cities and often graduating from top universities. I linked this piece in another post, but it's very good, so I'm linking it again.


Neutral but interesting

'Eccentric' billionaires:  Media seem to like this angle but it doesn't really hold up in practice. The presence of the narrative did lead me to investigate the funding of EA in ways that I might not otherwise have done.

I'm still here, so clearly the good outweighs the rest!

I'm curious whether community size, engagement level, and competence might matter less than the general perception of EA among non-EAs. 

Not just because low general positive perception of EA makes it harder to attract highly engaged, competent EAs. But also because general positive perception matters even if it never results in conversion. General positive perception increases our ability to cooperate with and influence non-EA individuals and institutions.

Suppose an aggressive community building tactic attracts one HEA, of average competence. In addition, it gives a number of people n a slightly negative view of EA -- not a strongly felt opposition, just enough of a dislike that they mention it in conversations with other non-EAs sometimes. What n would we accept to make this community building tactic expected value neutral? (This piece seems to suggest that many current strategies fit this model.)

Thank you for the labor of writing this post, which was extremely helpful to me in clarifying my own thinking and concerns. I plan to share it widely.

"I think it would be tempting to assume that the best of these people will already have intuited the importance of scope sensitivity and existential risk, and that they’ll therefore know to give EA a chance, but that’s not how it works." This made my heart sing. EA would be so much better if more people understood this.

I found this post really useful (and persuasive), thank you!

One thing I I feel unconvinced about:

"Another red flag is the general attitude of persuading rather than explaining."

For what it's worth, I'm not sure naturally curious/thoughtful/critical people are particularly more put off by someone trying to persuade them (well/by answering their objections/etc.) than by them explaining an idea, especially if the idea is a normative thesis. It's weird for someone to be like "just saying the idea is that X could have horrific side effects and little upside because [argument]. Yes I believe that's right. No need to adopt any beliefs or change your actions though!" That just makes them seem like they don't take their own beliefs seriously. I'd much rather have someone say "I want to persuade you that X is bad, because I think it's important people know that so they can avoid X. OK here' goes: [argument]."

If that's right, does it mean that maybe the issue is more "persuade better"? e.g. by actually having answers when people raise objections to the assumptions being made?

At the opening session [Alice] disputes some of the assumptions, and the facilitators thank her for raising the concerns, but don’t really address them. They then plough on, building on those assumptions. She is unimpressed.

Seems like the issue here is more being unpersuasive, rather than too zealous or not focused enough of explaining.

I like this criticism, but I think there are two essentially disjoint parts here that are being criticized. The first is excess legibility, i.e., the issue of having explicit metrics and optimizing to the metrics at all. The second is that a few of the measurements that determine how many resources a group gets/how quickly it grows are correlated with things that are not inherently valuable at best and harmful at worst. 

The first problem seems really hard to me: the legibility/autonomy trade-off is an age-old problem that happens in politics, business, and science, and seems to involve a genuine trade-off between organizational efficiency and the ability to capitalize on good but unorthodox ideas and individuals.

The second seems more accessible (though still hard), and reasonably separable from the first. Here I see a couple of things you flag (other than legibility/"corporateness" by itself) as parameters that positively contribute to growth but negatively contribute to the ability of EA to attract intellectually autonomous people. The first is "fire-and-brimstone" style arguments, where EA outreach tends to be all-or-nothing, "you either help save the sick children or you burn in Utilitarian Hell", and the second is common-denominator level messaging that is optimized to build community (so things like slogans, manufactured community and sense of purpose; things that attract the people like Bob in your thought experiment), but not optimized to appeal to meta-level thinkers who understand the reasoning behind the slogans. Both are vaguely correlated with EA having commonalities with religious communities, and so I'm going to borrow the adjective "pious" to refer to ideas and individuals for which these factors are salient.

I like that you are pointing out that a lot of EA outreach is, in one way or another, an "appeal to piety", and this is possibly bad. There might be a debate about whether this is actually bad and to what extent (e.g., the Catholic church is inefficient, but the sheer volume of charity it generates is nothing to sneer at), but I think I agree with the intuition that this is suboptimal, and that by Goodhart's law, if pious people are more likely to react to outreach, eventually they will form a supermajority. 

I don't want to devalue the criticism that legibility is in itself a problem, and particularly ugh-y to certain types of people (e.g. to smart humanities majors). But I think that the problem of piety can be solved without giving up on legibility, and instead by using better metrics, that have more entanglement with the real world. This is something I believed before this post, so I might be shoe-horning it here: take this with a grain of salt. 

But I want to point out that organizations that are constantly evaluated on some measurable parameter don't necessarily tend to end up excessively pious. A sports team can't survive by having the best team spirit; a software company will not see any profit if it only hires people who fervently believe in its advertising slogans. So maybe a solution to the problem of appeals to piety is to, as you say, reduce the importance of the metric of "HEA" generation in determining funding, clout, etc., but replace it with other hard-to-fake metrics that are less correlated with piety and more correlated with actually being effective at what you do. 

I haven't thought much about what the best metrics would be and am probably not qualified to make recommendations, but I just for plausibility's sake here are a couple of examples of things that I think would be cool (if not necessarily realistic): 

1. First, it would be neat (though potentially expensive) if there were a yearly competition between teams of EA's (maybe student groups, or maybe something on a larger level) to use a funding source to create an independent real-world project and have their impact in QALY's judged by an impartial third party.
2. Second, I think it would be nice to make "intramural" forms of existing competitions, such as the fiction contest, Scott Alexander's book review contest, various super-forecasting contests, etc., and grading University groups on success (relative to past results). If something like this is implemented, I'd also like to see the focus of things like the fiction competition move away from "good messaging" (which smacks of piety) and towards "good fiction that happens to have an EA component, if you look hard enough".

I think that if the funding culture becomes more explicitly focused on concentration of talent and on real-world effects and less on sheer numbers or uncritical mission alignment, then outreach will follow suit and some of the issues that you address will be addressed.

Thanks for this post! I used to do some voluntary university community building, and some of your insights definitely ring true to me, particularly the Alice example - I'm worried that I might have been the sort of facilitator to not return to the assumptions in fellowships I've facilitated.

A small note:

Well, the most obvious place to look is the most recent Leader Forum, which gives the following talent gaps (in order):

This EA Leaders Forum was nearly 3 years ago, and so talent gaps have possibly changed. There was a Meta Coordination Forum last year run by CEA, but I haven't seen any similar write-ups. This doesn't seem to be an important crux for most of your points, but thought would be worth mentioning.

When I came to university I had already read a lot of the Sequences ... 

You'd read the Sequences but you thought we were a cult? Inconceivable! 

(/sarcasm)

Oddly, while I agree with much of this post (and strong upvoted), it reads  to me as evidencing many of the problems it describes! Almost of the elements that make EA seem culty seem to me to hail from the rationality side of the movement: Pascalian reasoning, in-group  jargon, hero worship, or rather epistemic deferral to heroes and to holy texts, and eschatology (tithes being the one counterexample I can think of), all of which I see in the OP. 

I don't know what conclusion one is supposed to draw from this, but it disposes me both toward agreeing with your critique and toward greater scepticism that following your recommendations would do much to fix the problem.

I also don't have any great answers, but I do strongly feel that one can be an extremely valuable EA without having heard of the sequences. I understand the efficiency of jargon, but I think in 90% of EA conversations where I hear it used, communicating more literally would have outweighed the efficiency loss - and that's without considering the improved social signal eschewing jargon.

As a side note, I wondered while reading this if targeting people at university with such high priority could in itself be a core part of the problem, regardless of how it's done. What other types of social group have relatively old leaders but primarily target under-20s? I think the answer is 'plenty of fairly harmless ones', such as sports enthusiasts, but if that was all I knew about a group it would certainly increase my prior that they were sinister. So maybe another approach worth looking into more is greater recruitment efforts towards older people. I doubt it's as cost effective unless you think GAI is at most a decade or two away, but it might send an important signal that we're not just about preying on teenagers.

Thanks for writing this - this resonates a lot with my experience, as I was also exposed to and very put off from EA in college! But have eventually, slowly, made my way back here :)

I want to add that many of the "disconcerting" tactics community builders use are pretty well-established among community organizers (and larger student groups, like Greek life). So my sense is that the key problem lies in EA using well-proven community building tactics, but implementing them poorly. Having a scripted 1:1, a CRM, intro talks; making leadership asks of younger and newer members; measuring success by gaining new members; and trying our best to connect someone's interests to the values and goals of our community are all very standard practice in community organizing. (They're also very sales-y tactics, which is probably why they feel off-putting and slimy. I think most policy and entrepreneur types would be aware of this as long as they had some experience in the field, but perhaps students might not be.)

I'm not sure what exactly EA is doing wrong, or where the line between "wholesome supportive community" and "creepy cult" is, and I'd love to think about this more. My intuition is that EA student groups are fighting an uphill battle; the EA movement is somewhat unique in that it (1) already attracts a certain non-normative niche group of people; (2) asks people to change their careers without any clear offering in return (other than the resources available to help you... change your career); (3) espouses unusual beliefs. 

Most of the students I've talked to name the community as one of the main reasons they stay in EA, and I wonder if EA would be better off leaning into community-building messaging over cause-area and career messaging, at least on campus.

(Context: I'd consider myself new to the EA community, but I've been doing community building and community organizing for ~5 years, including, as a student, teaching student community organizing fellowships and running recruitment for a sorority. I'm also a recovering hyperrationalist of the sort that once would have found EA to be extremely appealing.)

Thanks so much for writing this. As someone interested in starting to do community building at a university, this was helpful to read, especially the Alice/Bob example and the concrete advice. I do really think that EA could stand to be less big on recruiting HEAs. I think there are tons of people who are interested in EA principles but aren't about to make a career switch, and it's important for those people to feel welcome and like they belong in the community.

I was going to write "I kind of wish this post (or a more concise version) were required reading for community builders," and then I thought better of it and took actions about it -- namely, sent the link as feedback to the EA Student Group Handbook and made an argument that they should incorporate something like this into their guide for student groups.

A bunch of disorganized thoughts related to this post:

• Fast growth still does lots of good, especially if you have short AI timelines. If the current policy of growth brings lots of adverse selection, the optimal policy might change to double the number of top AI safety researchers every 18 months, rather than double the number of HEAs every  12 months.
• I think more potential top people are put off by EA groups having little overlap with their other interests, than are suspicious of EA being manipulative. This can be mitigated by focusing more on the object level, like discussion of problems in alignment, altpro, policy, or whatever.
• People are commonly made uncomfortable by community-builders visibly optimizing against them. But we have to optimize. I think the solution here is to create boundaries so you're not optimizing against people. When talking about career changes, I think it's good to help the person preserve optionality so they're not stuck in an EA career path with little career capital elsewhere. I've also found it helpful to come at 1-1s with the frame "I'll help you optimize for your values".
• The "Scaling makes them worse" section implies a tension between two causes of epistemic harm. Less variation in culture makes EA more insular, but more variation causes this selection effect where the faster-growing groups might have worse epistemics.
• I think pushing people into donations / GWWC pledges by default is a pretty obvious mistake. Pledges can be harmful and have pretty limited impact anyway.

introducing people to EA by reading prepared scripts

Huh, I'm not familiar with this, can you post a link to an example script or message me it?

I agree that reading a script verbatim is not great, and privately discussed info in a CRM seems like an invasion of privacy.

My intuitive understanding of the Alice personality type (independent, skeptical, etc.) is that they are often very entrepreneurial (a skill EA desperately needs), but not usually "joiners". I have no doubt that a lot could be improved about community building, but there may always be some tension there that is difficult to resolve. 

It may be that the best we can hope for in a lot of those cases are people who understand EA ideas and use them to inform their work, but don't consider themselves EAs. That seems fine to me. Like person 1 in your real life example seems like a big win, even if they don't consider themselves EA. If the EA intro talk she attended helped get her on that track, then it "worked" for her in some sense. 

I'm definitely going to change my attitude to community building, to the extent I am involved with it, as a result of reading this. Making sure that criticisms are addressed to the satisfaction of the critic seems hugely important and I don't think I had grasped that before.

Thanks for posting this - it was an interesting and thoughtful read for me as a community builder. 

This summarised some thoughts I've had on this topic previously, and the implications on a large scale are concerning at the very least. In my experience, EAs growth over the past couple of years has meant bringing on a lot of people with specific technical expertise (or people who are seeking to gain this expertise) such as those working on AI safety/biorisk/etc, with a skillset that would broadly include mathematics, statistics, logical reasoning, and some level of technical expertise/knowledge of their field. Often (speaking anecdotally here) these would be the type of people who:

1. are really good at working on detailed problems with defined parameters (eg. software developers)
2. are very open to hearing things that challenge or further their existing knowledge, and will seek these things out
3. will be easily persuaded by good arguments (and probably unlikely to push back if they find the arguments mostly convincing)

These people are pretty easy for community builders to deal with because there is a clear, forged pathway defined in EA for these people. Community builders can say, “Go do a PhD in biorisk,” or “There’s a job open at DeepMind, you should apply for it,” and the person will probably go for it. 

On the other hand, there are a whole range of people who don’t have the above traits, and instead have one (or more) of the following traits:

1. prefer broader, messier problems (eg. policy analysts) and are not great at working on detailed problems within defined parameters (or maybe less interested in these types of problems)
2. are somewhat open to hearing things that challenge or further their existing knowledge, but might not continue to engage if they initially find something off-putting
3. can be persuaded to accept new arguments, but are more likely to push back, hold onto scepticism for longer, and won't accept something simply because it is the commonly held view, even if the arguments for it are generally good

These people are harder for community builders to deal with as there is not a clear forged pathway within EA, and they might also be less convinced by the pathways that do exist. (For example, maybe if someone has these traits a community builder might push them towards working in AI policy, but they might not be as convinced that working in AI policy is important, or that they personally can make a big difference in the field, and they won’t be as easily persuaded to apply for jobs in AI policy.) These people might also feel a bit lost when EAs try to push them towards high-impact work - they see the world in greyer terms, they carry more uncertainty, and they are more hesitant to go "all in" on a specified career path. 

I think there is a great deal of value that can be derived if EA can find ways to engage with people with these traits, and I also think people with at least one of these traits are probably more likely to fall into the categories that you highlighted in your post – government/policy experts, managers, cause prioritizers (can’t think of a better title here), entrepreneurs, and people with high social/emotional skills. These are people who like big, messy, broad problems and who may generally take more time to accept new ideas and arguments. 

In my community-building role, I want to attract and keep more of these people! I don't have good answers for how to do this (yet), but I think being aware of the issue and trying to figure out some possible ways in which more people with these skills can be brought on board (as well as trying to figure out why EA might be off-putting to some of these people) is a great start. 

"If it’s also sufficiently likely that some people could figure this out and put us on a better path, then it seems really bad that we might be putting off those very people."

Here! When I was twelve, I spent four years finding the best way to benefit others, then I developed my skill-set to pursue a career in it... 26 years ago. So, I might qualify as one of those motivated altruists who is turned-off by the response they've gotten from EA. I think I'm one of the people you want to listen to carefully:

I don't need funding - I already devote 100% of my time as I choose, and I'm glad to give it all to each cause. I am looking to have the 1-to-2 hour long, 2-to-5 person thoughtful conversation, on literally dozens of existing and EA-adjacent topics. I am not looking for a 30min. networking/elevator-pitch at a conference, because I'm not trying to get hired as a PA. I am not looking for the meandering, noisy, distracted banter at a brief social event. This forum, unfortunately, has presented me with consistent misrepresentations and fallacies, which the commentators refuse to address when I point them out. Slack is similarly incapable of the deeper, thoughtful conversations, with members and outsiders, that fosters insight and understanding.

There are numerous ideas, opportunities, methods, that are going un-noticed because of the barriers placed in front of thoughtful dialogue. It is a burden that should rest upon those EAs who are dismissive of deeper conversation, instead of being the "price I have to pay, to prove myself, before anyone will listen", as I was most recently told on this Forum.

Thank you for writing this post! I recently had a discussion with some EA intro fellowship participants who experienced that EA is very demanding with expectations on changing your career etc and that it gives a very cultish or religious impression. Some said they are interested in EA and implementing some tools and mindsets in their life but that's it. I think we should embrace that too

Thanks so much for this extremely important and well-written post, Theo! I really appreciate it.

My main takeaway from this post (among many takeaways!) is that EA outreach and movement-building could be significantly better. I’m not sure yet on the clear next steps, but perhaps outreach could be even more individualized and epistemically humble.

One devil’s-advocate point on your point that “while it may be true that there are certain characteristics which predict that people are more likely to become HEAs, it does not follow that a larger EA community made up of such people would automatically be better than this one.” Despite Goodhart’s Law, I think that there is some definition of HEA such that maximizing the number of HEAs is the best practical strategy for cooperative movement-building. Having a lot of dedicated people in a cooperative group is very important, perhaps the most important factor in determining the success of the group. More complicated goals/guidelines for movement-builders are harder to use, both for individuals and for group coordination.

Can confirm that other groups/subcultures have begun to see EA as a deceitful cult because of stuff like this

Assume that people find you more authoritative, important, and hard-to-criticise than you think you are. It’s usually not enough to be open to criticism - you have to actually seek it out or visibly reward it in front of other potential critics.

Chapter 7 in this book had a number of good insights on encouraging dissent from subordinates, in the context of disaster prevention.

Great post. I appreciate the framing around the real gaps in human capital. One additional concern I have is that aesthetics might play a counterproductive role in community building. For example, if EA aesthetics are most welcoming to people who are argumentative, perhaps even disagreeable, then the skill set of "one-on-one social skills and emotional intelligence" could be selected out (relatively speaking). 

As a community builder, I've lately thought about how much you can or should push and support other volunteers and new participants to engage more with EA. That could be offering 1-1 calls, sending private and group messages about specific opportunities and asking for help in organizing events among else. For context, this is mostly a reflection on what I think we (the other organizers and I) should maybe do in EA Finland.

Arguments for more pushing: 
I obviously believe what we're doing as a community is important and want more people to engage more in EA. My group is competing for the participants' time with other student groups and free-time activities. If we put effort into it, I think we could ask for more of the community members' time, by creating more pleasant activities and clear projects and actively encouraging people to join conferences, programmes and more. I can come up with many less impact-driven student or hobby groups that are successful at that. If you together create motivation and momentum and get people to prioritize EA activities I'm pretty sure they will find the needed time. I might sometimes err to the side of being "too respectful" of people's time when people might be happy to help out and want to be reminded of an upcoming event or need to be encouraged to pursue something difficult.

Against pushing people:
I want people to feel they can engage with EA ideas on their own terms without feeling they are more or less valued based on their commitment. Some people are also genuinely busy and too kind to say no to volunteering even when they should. I think the post also had many great examples of failed attempts to engage people.

I'm eager to get results, and HEA is a relatively easy metric, but it should not come at the expense of the participants' well-being or rule over their interests. When you're in the mode of growing your group, you might forget to treat people as individuals and adapt to the circumstances of the discussion.

Some of these problems were discussed in part 4 of Hear This Idea podcast with Andres Sandberg. As far as I remember, he claimed that the growth of EA may slow down because the utilitarian framework may put off people with different ethical fundamentals.

https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/anders

Hi! I personally am interested in EA from the standpoint of government policy as well as social and emotional skills. If anyone has any suggestions on how I can get more involved let me know.

The groups I floated in were a mix of EAs and non-EAs, but eventually it rubbed off on me. And I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t encountered EA in university it would have rubbed off a lot sooner.

What does "it rubbed off on me" mean here? I'm puzzling over this passage, and I keep thinking of the common usage in which "an idea rubs off on one" means that one adopts that idea. Do you use "it rubbed off on me" to mean that you lost agreement with "it"? What is "it"?