There's this ACX post (that I only skimmed and don't have strong opinions about) which mostly seems to do this, minus the "pushing" part.

Fab, congratulations on receiving the grant from GiveWell!!

Hey @AnonymousEAForumAccount, I’m sorry for not responding to this earlier, and thank you as always for your thoughtful engagement with our strategy. I genuinely appreciate your deep engagement here. As context, I work closely with Jessica on coordinating the growth pillar within CEA.

Going through your comments line by line:

Prioritizing high-value community assets.

As Toby and Sarah have mentioned, I’m really excited that we’re prioritizing work to improve the quality of these programs and expand their reach! I won’t say more since I think my colleagues have covered it.

Creation of good, public growth dashboards.

Thanks for your bids here — responding by category:

• Re: the existing CEA dashboard:
  • I’m glad it has been a valuable product, and apologize that it has not been always consistently kept up to date. We’ve been unusually short staffed on the technical capacity needed to maintain this data in the last few months (in part because I've moved into a more generalist role), but are working on finding it a consistent owner internally.
  • I’m also excited about the value of this dashboard for helping the community track growth in CEA’s products!
• Re: a public dashboard for EA growth as a whole:
  • I agree that if there were a well maintained and easily interpretable dashboard of EA relevant growth metrics, this would be a major win. I wouldn’t rule out prioritizing a project like this, but right now we are prioritizing doing the foundational investigation work ourselves.
  • From past experience with running similar projects, I expect this project would be a major time investment, both to keep the data fresh, and to coordinate many external stakeholder concerns. If we report core growth metrics for many orgs (especially if this includes metrics that weren’t previously made public which is IMO where the main value add would be), I think we want to do so responsibly and accurately — which takes time!
  • This is all to say I’d want to think hard about the capacity tradeoffs on our side, and am not immediately convinced it is worth prioritizing, but I’d be excited to revisit this down the line.

Thoughtful reflection on growth measurement.

To take a step back, I think we'd broadly agree that much less effort historically has been put into investigating the question of “How much is EA growing and in what ways?” than we both would like. This is still a very shallow research area relative to where I’d like the EA community to be, and while I think we have made important progress in the last few years, I’d be interested in more work here.

In terms of the specific analysis you point to, we’ve stopped relying on this exact methodology internally so haven’t prioritized following up on it, although if someone wanted to try grading our line-by-line predictions based on e.g. our dashboard + public information (some linked from the post), I’d be pretty excited about that.

I have some quibbles around how “obviously off” the analysis is in retrospect (my confidence intervals around the top line numbers were pretty wide, and the analysis was importantly not just tracking growth in principles-first EA community building projects which I think changes its interpretation), but I won’t dive deep into these for sake of time.

Transparency about growth strategy and targets

Thanks for prompting us for this! For transparency, our top priority right now remains making sure we endorse and are able to reach our growth targets, and I expect this will take up the majority of our growth-specific attention in Q2-Q3. I think that’s appropriate for solidifying our work internally, and am excited for us to share more in due course.

I was extremely surprised to see the claim in the OP that “Growth has long been at the core of our mission.”

I wonder if we are talking past each other here (I’m surprised at your surprise!), although perhaps this wording could also have been clearer. As a community building org, a major way I think CEA has become more successful over time is in building up our programs. For instance I think of the growth in our EAG and EAGx portfolio from pre- to post-pandemic times, and the scaling in our Ongoing Support Program for university group organisers as two emblematic examples of programs finding their product-market-impact fit and then scaling up to achieve more impact over time.

I think what's new here is that after a period of being focused on building foundations internally (in part to prepare for growth), we are now back towards a more unified growth-focused strategy across CEA.

Nice! I've been enjoying your quick takes / analyses, and find your writing style clear/easy to follow. Thanks Mo! (I think this could have been a great top level post FWIW, but to each their own :) )

Wow, your highlighted grants seem like really great giving opportunities. Thank you for writing this up!

I found a bunch of this really interesting, thanks for sharing this! I'd be pretty curious whether this resonates with anyone who now thinks of themselves as "EA adjacent" in part because of FTX fallout :) (although maybe those folks aren't, y'know, on the EA Forum 🤷🏻‍♀️)

FWIW, I appreciated reading this :) Thank you for sharing it!

We had a bit of a tragedy of the commons problem because a lot of people are risk-averse and don't want to be associated with EA in case something bad happens to them but this causes the brand to lose a lot of good people you'd be happy to be associated with.

I so agree! I think there is something virtuous and collaborative for those of us who have benefited from EA and its ideas / community to just... being willing to stand up and say simply that. I think these ideas are worth fighting for.

I'm a proud EA.

<3

Nice. You're such a fast writer! Very helpful, thank you!

From this post:

They’re now sequencing wastewater from eight sewersheds across four metropolitan areas, with the addition of Riverside CA (in collaboration with Jason Rothman) in December.

In Fall 2023 we partnered with CDC’s Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program and Ginkgo Biosecurity to collect and sequence both pooled airplane lavatory waste and municipal wastewater influent and sludge. We’ve submitted a full set of aliquots to MIT’s BioMicroCenter for high-throughput library preparation, and will be sending the libraries to Broad Clinical Labs for sequencing later this quarter.

I see, that answered some of my questions. I still feel confused how big a sewershed is relative to a city, and how much that matters from the perspective of early detection. But no pressure to engage, was just curious. Exciting!

Wow, this is so exciting!! Thanks for sharing, and congratulations team!

To this end, we're pleased to share that Open Philanthropy has granted $3M to the NAO over one year to fund a significant scale-up of our wastewater sequencing, targeting three NovaSeq X 25B runs weekly.

Wow 😍. That's great. And if I read footnote 2 right, the implication is that by end of 2025, you'd aim to be able to detect a pathogen that sheds like Influenza A in cities you monitor before 2% of the population is infected? Or is that not quite right because you're targeting 3 such runs weekly across all cities (maybe I should say "sewersheds"?) so you wouldn't quite be able to hit that point yet?

I had some other basic / not-an-expert questions but no pressure to engage :)

• Which cities are you monitoring again?
• It sounds like from this notebook you're still trying to figure out how valuable monitoring one city is from the perspective of catching any global pandemic, so I assume one weakness of this approach is in the geographic restrictions. Although I've vaguely heard of wastewater monitoring in a network of airports / aircrafts as a way to get around this (I can't tell if that's just an idea right now or if it's already being implemented, though.)
• Was the 2% threshold chosen for a particular reason?