Building effective altruism refers to the family of interventions aimed at growing, shaping, or otherwise improving effective altruism as a practical and intellectual community.

Examples of building effective altruism include starting student groups and local groups, writing articles, and organizing social gatherings for people interested in effective altruism.

An influential model in effective altruism community building is the Awareness/Inclination model, developed by Owen Cotton-Barratt.^[1] Awareness and inclination are both limiting factors for movement growth: in order to join effective altruism, a potential new member both needs to know what the movement is (awareness) and have a positive impression of it and desire to be involved (inclination). Ideally, EA movement-building work would increase both awareness and inclination, but there is sometimes a trade-off between the two. For instance, some social movements draw attention to themselves by generating controversy, which increases awareness while decreases inclination.

There has been debate about the value of growing the effective altruism movement. A larger movement means more people trying to do good effectively, but there may also be downsides to a larger movement. For example, it may be more difficult to have nuanced discussions, protect key effective altruism priorities, or coordinate.

Evaluation

80,000 Hours rates building effective altruism a "highest priority area": a problem at the top of their ranking of global issues assessed by importance, tractability and neglectedness.^[2]

Further reading

Bachmann, Michael (2018), Start with who

Centre for Effective Altruism (2017, updated 2021), The fidelity model of spreading ideas

Cotton-Barratt, Owen (2015), How valuable is movement growth?

Duda, Roman (2018) Building effective altruism, 80,000 Hours, March (updated July 2020).

Whittlestone, Jess (2017) Building an effective altruism community, Effective Altruism, November 16.

Related entries

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Cotton-Barratt (2015) How valuable is movement growth?, Effective Altruism.org
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80,000 Hours (2021) Our current list of the most important world problems, 80,000 Hours.

How we promoted EA at a large tech company