Apologies, my comment was a bit flippant and easy to say when I'm not the one making the difficult trade-offs 😅 FWIW I think it sounded like the right call at the time and I'll be the first to admit that my misty-eyed nostalgia doesn't scale.
Delighted that my vibes based speculation bares out in the data - excited to read that report 👀
Giving significantly and effectively should be a norm - it's really exciting that you guys will have additional capacity for in-person support!!
I'm looking forward to working with whoever ends up in the London role!! (If it could be you - pls pls apply 👆🏻👆🏻)
So recruiting isn't capital expenditure because the entity does not own or control its employees. Employees can resign whenever and, unless they are also shareholders, they don't have a stake in maximising the profitability of the enterprise (beyond retaining their job).
Maybe my analogy isnt actually great here - maybe I'm the better analogy is shareholders. Or maybe I'm a hammer viewing everything as a nail 😂
I like Matt Reardons comparison to sports culture :
EA can learn a lot from sports culture, particularly the sense that everyone is on the same page in wanting the team to win no matter what. The primary aspect of this I’m drawn to is that sports fans very rarely ask “what’s in it for me, personally?” On this analogy, I think it’s a mistake for EA orgs to present themselves as recruiting players (direct workers) rather than fans (donors). If you focus on recruiting fans, the players recruit themselves! And you have fans instead of varyingly-disgruntled passed-over players.
He uses the term "recruiting" here but I don't think you need to recruit fans, you just need the sport to be enough fun to watch and for there to be existing fan infrastructure and culture to absorb new people.
I see my role as community builder as a someone building and maintaining infrastructure for other fans and giving them support if they're interested in going pro.
I saw my role in local GWWC organising as maintaining existing pledgers rather than recruiting new ones - keeping the people who inspired my own commitment connected to each other and to the community. That sat badly with GWWC's BHAG of a million 10% pledgers, and is part of why they stopped supporting local groups.
I am worried about their current direction. If the expected lifetime value of a pledge is to be maintained, people shouldn't be encouraged to rush into a commitment they won't follow through on. I always encourage a trial pledge first, then celebrate when someone makes the full commitment. The fact that GWWC seems to be pivoting toward being a fundraising organisation gives me the ick.
Maybe I just think it's too important as a community building tool. Having your name on the GWWC list used to be a signal of moral seriousness and thoughtfulness. If pledge retention among newer cohorts continues to worsen, that signal degrades. Maybe 10% pledge and GWWC are actually different products and I'm a GWWC pledge girlie (ie. 10% is the floor). It's perhaps not efficient for paid staff time to be spent on it.
Idk in the age of AI, is it more valuable to have a person who is serious about their commitment to think carefully about where they can do the most good with their money; or more money from lots of sources?
IMO the asset is the pledger, not their money. Money is fungible, people are not.
Tbf maybe this is just because I'm not a utilitarian and I'm too conservative in my approach. The meta trap is real and time spent looking inward is less valuable than time spent looking at the worlds problems. Idk things are looking weird and I'm probably naive and romantic about the community.
I've always been a volunteer CB on the side of a day job so I've never been financially dependent on CEAs evaluation of my work.[1] Because I've always been community building for free, I've been optimising for creating events that the people I admire and want to learn from would want to attend. Also trying to convince other people to run similar events because I wanted to attend but didn't always have capacity for organising. Tbf I was also running events that were useful for me - ie. quarterly review co-working to make time for EA planning outside of my day job.
My take is community building is not recruiting and it's not fundraising.
Both of these are services that rely on a 1 to many relationship with career changers/donors.
If you were to stop this work, there is limited residual value.
To use an analogy from accounting: recruiting and fundraising are operating expenditure. You need to make the investment every year to get the same returns. Community building is more like capital expenditure - you're investing in assets from which you expect future value to flow. There are ongoing maintenance/upgrade costs but building something implies an asset outside of your labour.
The test is: if you stopped tomorrow, does anything exist if you stop working? Were you a single point of failure? If so, you are maybe more service provider than community builder.
CB Metrics I'd actually want to track:
* Number of connections within EA that someone would feel comfortable talking to about donations, career changes, or volunteering (similar to EAG metrics)
* Confidence talking through their reasoning and motivations with non-EA friends and family
* Quality of community infrastructure maintained by the group, and time this saves individual organisers - newsletters, event platforms, mailing lists
* Community experiments supported even when you're skeptical - giving people the chance to test something they're passionate about, coaching them through the pivot if it doesn't land
* "Elder" or "inactive" EAs who feel connected enough to be an asset: willing to do 1-on-1s, sit on boards, talk about their pledge
I'm now on the board of EA UK and have been frustrated with the lack of guidance on what they expect. The UK specifically is weird because CEA has a presence here
Thanks for sharing. I've been thinking about Frankenstein a lot recently and I hadn't read Percy Shelley's work.
Arguably, the scientist ran away in horror before the work was done. There's a plot line that gets cut from a lot of adaptations where the creature kills someone and a servant girl gets blamed. Frankenstein knew it was likely the monster yet says nothing, allowing the girl to be executed for the murder.
In the book, there's surprisingly little time spent on the creation of the creature, he does it quickly and unthinkingly as a student. Whereas the lab scenes are the main event in movie adaptations.
Perhaps helpful context about Mary and Percy Shelley:
A year before writing the short story that became Frankenstein, the Shelleys' first daughter died at 10 days old. Mary reported having recurring dreams of rubbing the cold baby by the fire until it lived - she was 17.
Percy was a radical advocating for free love, atheism, republicanism and vegetarianism. Values which Mary shared. His father cut him off because of these values and he had to escape to continental Europe to avoid creditors.
Mary was pregnant when Percy's wife back in England gave birth to his second child. Mary and Percy got married after his first wife drowned herself in the Serpentine.
Mary would have an additional 3 children with Percy. One died of malaria at 3, one died in infancy and the final survived into adulthood.
Percy died at 29 in a poorly prepared-for boating accident.
This post inspired a long back and forth with my nature fan friend. We definitely understand each other better now. She was quite angry with this first post but enjoyed your second one (as did I!). It might just convince her to make an EA Forum account 👀👀
My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages.
The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse.
I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee.
There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true.
But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.
Thanks for organising @Mick
Thanks for this, James!
Apologies, my comment was a bit flippant and easy to say when I'm not the one making the difficult trade-offs 😅 FWIW I think it sounded like the right call at the time and I'll be the first to admit that my misty-eyed nostalgia doesn't scale.
Delighted that my vibes based speculation bares out in the data - excited to read that report 👀
Giving significantly and effectively should be a norm - it's really exciting that you guys will have additional capacity for in-person support!!
I'm looking forward to working with whoever ends up in the London role!! (If it could be you - pls pls apply 👆🏻👆🏻)
Great clarification question
So recruiting isn't capital expenditure because the entity does not own or control its employees. Employees can resign whenever and, unless they are also shareholders, they don't have a stake in maximising the profitability of the enterprise (beyond retaining their job).
Maybe my analogy isnt actually great here - maybe I'm the better analogy is shareholders. Or maybe I'm a hammer viewing everything as a nail 😂
I like Matt Reardons comparison to sports culture :
https://open.substack.com/pub/frommatter/p/12-theses-on-ea?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=diohx
He uses the term "recruiting" here but I don't think you need to recruit fans, you just need the sport to be enough fun to watch and for there to be existing fan infrastructure and culture to absorb new people.
I see my role as community builder as a someone building and maintaining infrastructure for other fans and giving them support if they're interested in going pro.
The infrastructure and the culture is the asset.
Lol, IMO this comment is kinda rude and disrespectful.
What is "effective" or "altruistic" about it?
This isn't LessWrong. Dumb people can do good effectively if they are disciplined, thoughtful and careful. Haven't you ever asked a stupid question?
It might not be the best use of your time to be kind, helpful and supportive to people trying to do good better. But if not, why are you here?
Tangent on GWWC fundraising/CB
I saw my role in local GWWC organising as maintaining existing pledgers rather than recruiting new ones - keeping the people who inspired my own commitment connected to each other and to the community. That sat badly with GWWC's BHAG of a million 10% pledgers, and is part of why they stopped supporting local groups.
I am worried about their current direction. If the expected lifetime value of a pledge is to be maintained, people shouldn't be encouraged to rush into a commitment they won't follow through on. I always encourage a trial pledge first, then celebrate when someone makes the full commitment. The fact that GWWC seems to be pivoting toward being a fundraising organisation gives me the ick.
Maybe I just think it's too important as a community building tool. Having your name on the GWWC list used to be a signal of moral seriousness and thoughtfulness. If pledge retention among newer cohorts continues to worsen, that signal degrades. Maybe 10% pledge and GWWC are actually different products and I'm a GWWC pledge girlie (ie. 10% is the floor). It's perhaps not efficient for paid staff time to be spent on it.
Idk in the age of AI, is it more valuable to have a person who is serious about their commitment to think carefully about where they can do the most good with their money; or more money from lots of sources?
IMO the asset is the pledger, not their money. Money is fungible, people are not.
Tbf maybe this is just because I'm not a utilitarian and I'm too conservative in my approach. The meta trap is real and time spent looking inward is less valuable than time spent looking at the worlds problems. Idk things are looking weird and I'm probably naive and romantic about the community.
Thank you for writing this - my thoughts
I've always been a volunteer CB on the side of a day job so I've never been financially dependent on CEAs evaluation of my work.[1] Because I've always been community building for free, I've been optimising for creating events that the people I admire and want to learn from would want to attend. Also trying to convince other people to run similar events because I wanted to attend but didn't always have capacity for organising. Tbf I was also running events that were useful for me - ie. quarterly review co-working to make time for EA planning outside of my day job.
My take is community building is not recruiting and it's not fundraising.
Both of these are services that rely on a 1 to many relationship with career changers/donors.
If you were to stop this work, there is limited residual value.
To use an analogy from accounting: recruiting and fundraising are operating expenditure. You need to make the investment every year to get the same returns. Community building is more like capital expenditure - you're investing in assets from which you expect future value to flow. There are ongoing maintenance/upgrade costs but building something implies an asset outside of your labour.
The test is: if you stopped tomorrow, does anything exist if you stop working? Were you a single point of failure? If so, you are maybe more service provider than community builder.
CB Metrics I'd actually want to track:
* Number of connections within EA that someone would feel comfortable talking to about donations, career changes, or volunteering (similar to EAG metrics)
* Confidence talking through their reasoning and motivations with non-EA friends and family
* Quality of community infrastructure maintained by the group, and time this saves individual organisers - newsletters, event platforms, mailing lists
* Community experiments supported even when you're skeptical - giving people the chance to test something they're passionate about, coaching them through the pivot if it doesn't land
* "Elder" or "inactive" EAs who feel connected enough to be an asset: willing to do 1-on-1s, sit on boards, talk about their pledge
I'm now on the board of EA UK and have been frustrated with the lack of guidance on what they expect. The UK specifically is weird because CEA has a presence here
Thanks for sharing. I've been thinking about Frankenstein a lot recently and I hadn't read Percy Shelley's work.
Arguably, the scientist ran away in horror before the work was done. There's a plot line that gets cut from a lot of adaptations where the creature kills someone and a servant girl gets blamed. Frankenstein knew it was likely the monster yet says nothing, allowing the girl to be executed for the murder.
In the book, there's surprisingly little time spent on the creation of the creature, he does it quickly and unthinkingly as a student. Whereas the lab scenes are the main event in movie adaptations.
Perhaps helpful context about Mary and Percy Shelley:
Wonderfully put!
This post inspired a long back and forth with my nature fan friend. We definitely understand each other better now. She was quite angry with this first post but enjoyed your second one (as did I!). It might just convince her to make an EA Forum account 👀👀
Excited to read this series!
Anecdotally, I've had a few conversations with folks that had been put off EA because of its lack of concern for Nature/Biodiversity.
I personally don't feel strongly about it so I struggled to empathize. I'm looking forward to learning more
I just loved this from @Kelsey Piper on Twitter 🥺🥺 it's so true and I never appreciated it before EA.
I really appreciate you all 🙏🏻
https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/2031989126522945761?s=20
--
My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages.
The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse.
I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee.
There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true.
But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.