Whilst it does provide evidence in favour of it being possible to make EA enormous, I actually think that it reduces the case for this overall, since it means that this "gap in the market" is now mostly being addressed^[1]. Attempting to compete with the School of Moral Ambition for broad appeal would likely involve watering down elements of EA and I'd much prefer a world where we have these two different movements pursuing two different theories of impacts, instead of two movements pursuing mostly the same theory of impact.

1. ^{^}

   Not completely, since there are differences, but the gap in the market is now much smaller

The biggest issue here is that Bregman downplays AI.

Agreed.

I think there's far more people who'd put their hand up to facilitate an intro course vs. handling the logistics.

I organised some iterations of the fundamentals course for AI Safety Australia and New Zealand and the scheduling was rather painful even though it honestly didn't take that long in terms of hours. As the saying goes, Beware Trivial Inconveniences.

I suspect that country groups would benefit the most from this, then city groups and finally university groups. In-person cohorts provide the most benefit to university groups where many people are on campus anyway (making the trade-off is more significant), then next is city groups where everyone could at least potentially attend an in-person group even if inconvenient and last is country groups.

A final thought on why this might be more impactful than it seems at first glance: Ideally you'd want your group to hit a critical mass where this kicks off a virtuous cycle of growth. Lowering the barrier to achieving this could potentially significantly increase the number of local groups that are able to reach this level.

I don't know exactly what markets you're referring to, but have you considered that they could be right? 

And maybe it's worth the trade-off, but if you're consistently applying the principle of "more information is always good", you should want to know when people are annoyed or angry with you (although it might turn out that when you reflect you conclude that there are limits on this principle).

Maybe I'm missing something, but I think it's a negative sign that mirror bacteria seems to have pretty much not been discussed within the EA community until now (that said, what really matters is the percent of biosecurity folk in the community who have heard of this issue).

Your AI timelines would likely be an important factor here.

This is amazing. I expect this to noticably increase the number of links included in articles.

Does scaling make sense with a principles-first strategy? My intuition would be that with a principles-first strategy it makes more sense to focus on quality over quantity.

Must have been a bug showing it twice then.