Learnings from a day of walking conversations 

Yesterday, I did 7 one-hour walks with Munich EA community members. Here's what I learned and why I would recommend it to similarly extroverted community members:

Format

• Created an info document and 7 one-hour Calendly slots and promoted them via our WhatsApp group
• One hour worked well as a default timeframe - 2 conversations could have been shorter while others could have gone longer
• Scheduling more than an hour with someone unfamiliar can feel intimidating, so I'll keep the 1-hour format
• Walked approximately 35km throughout the day and painfully learned that street shoes aren't suitable - got blisters that could have been prevented with proper hiking boots

Participants

• Directly invited two women to ensure diversity, resulting in 3/7 non-male participants
• Noticed that people from timeslots 1 and 3 spontaneously met for their own 1-1 while I was busy with timeslot 2
• Will actively encourage more member-initiated connections next time to create a network effect

Conversations

• My prepared document helped skip introductions and jump straight into meaningful discussion
• Tried balancing listening vs. talking, succeeding in some conversations while others turned into them asking me more questions
• Expanded beyond my usual focus on career advice, offering a broader menu of discussion topics
• This approach reached people who initially weren't interested in career discussions
• One participant was genuinely surprised their background might be impactful in ways they hadn't considered
• Another wasn't initially interested in careers but ended up engaging with the topic after natural conversation flow
• 2 of 7 people shared personal issues where I focused on empathetic listening and sharing relevant parts of my own experience
• The remaining 5 discussions centered primarily on EA concepts and career-related topics

Results

• Received positive feedback suggesting participants gained either new information, decision-making help, or expanded horizons
• Sent follow-up resource links to most participants after our walks
• Scheduled specific follow-up meetings with two participants who wanted to continue our discussions
• Deepened community connections, which I view as an investment in motivation for both others and myself

Takeaway

• Thoroughly enjoyed the 1-1 interactions on a sunny day, exactly as I had hoped
• Found this volunteering format personally rewarding and well-aligned with my strengths
• Recommend to other community members who enjoy walking conversations - it's an accessible way to contribute

I think the main issue is that I was interpreting your point about the public forum's perception as a fear that people outside could see EA as weird (in a broad sense). I would be fine with this.

But at the same time, I hope that people already interested in EA don't get the impression from the forum that the topics are limited. On the contrary, I would love to have many discussions here, not restricted by fear of outside perception.

On a more personal level, but I think this is useful to report here, because I don't think I am the only one with this reaction: I've been part of this community for a decade and have built my professional life around it -- and I do find it quite alienating that, at a time where we are close to a constitutional crisis in the US, where USAID is in shambles and where the post WW2-order is in question, we aee not highlighting how to take better action in those circumstances but instead discussing a cause prioritization question that seems very unlikely to affect major funding. It feeds the critique of EA that I've previously seen as bad faith -- that we are too much armchair philosophers.

I do think it's a good chance to show that the EA brand is not about short-term interventions but principles of first thinking, being open to weird topics, and inviting people to think outside of the media bubble. At the same time, I would like to see more stories out there (very generally speaking) about people who have used the EA principles to address current issues (at EA Germany, we have been doing this every month for 2 years and were happy to have you as one of the people in our portraits). It's great that Founders Pledge and TLYCS are acting on the crisis, and Effektiv Spenden is raising funds for that. But I'm glad they are doing this with their brands, leaving EA to focus on the narrow target group of impartially altruistic and truth-seeking people who might, in the future, build the next generation of organizations addressing these or other problems.

I have the impression we have not learned from the communicative mistakes of 2022 in that we are again pushing arguments of limited practical import that alienate people and limit our coalitional options.

In my view, the mistakes of 2022 involved not being professional in running organizations and strategically doing outreach. Instead of the broad communication under their EA brand then, I'm much more positive about how GWWC, 80k, or The School for Moral Ambition are spreading ideas that originated from EA. I hope we can get better at defining our niche target group for the EA brand and working to appeal to them instead of the broad public.

Quickly:
> I agree with the approach's direction, but this premise doesn't seem very helpful in shaping the debate.

Sorry, I don't understand this. What is "the debate" that you are referring to? 

I just meant the discussion you wanted to see; I probably used the wrong synonym.

This is good to know. While mentioning MCF, I would bring up that it seems bad to me that MCF seems to be very much within the OP umbrella, as I understand it. I believe that it was funded by OP or CEA, and the people who set it up were employed by CEA, which was primarily funded by OP. Most of the attendees seem like people at OP or CEA, or else heavily funded by OP. 

I generally believe that EA is effective at being pragmatic, and in that regard, I think it's important for the key organizations that are both giving and receiving funding in this area to coordinate, especially with topics like funding diversification. I agree that this is not the ideal world, but this goes back to the main topic.

I want to see more discussion on how EA can better diversify and have strategically-chosen distance from OP/GV.

One reason is that it seems like multiple people at OP/GV have basically said that they want this (or at least, many of the key aspects of this). 

I agree with the approach's direction, but this premise doesn't seem very helpful in shaping the debate. It doesn't seem that there is a right level of funding for meta EA or that this is what we currently have. 

My perception is that OP has specific goals, one of which is to reduce GCR risk. As there are not so many high absorbency funding opportunities and a lot of uncertainty in the field, they focus more on capacity building, of which EA has proven to be a solid investment in talent pipeline building.

If this is true, then the level of funding we are currently seeing is downstream from OP's overall yearly spending and their goals. Other funders will come to very different conclusions as to why they would want to fund EA meta and to what extent.

If you're a meta funder who agrees with GCR risks, you might see opportunities that either don't want OPs' money, that OP doesn't want to fund, or that want to keep OPs' funding under a certain bar. These are more neglected, but they are more cost-effective for you as they are not as fungible.

At the last, MCF funding diversification and the EA brand were the two main topics, but to me, meta-funding diversification seems much harder, especially for areas under the EA brand.

As someone who heard from EA at age 40 and is now 50, this question comes up often in discussions with more experienced professionals. I wrote about my personal journey, which I couldn't have done without the luxury of much free time to learn and explore in this space. A recent post by Jim Chapman also describes the effort that can be needed to transition into the space.

In my local group, I'm mostly the oldest participant, as many other people my age don't feel very welcome in a group of younger people. They mostly also see donations as their pathway to contributing, which doesn't require the level of involvement in the community that people with career ambitions have. The group is simply less useful in an instrumental way; the same applies to EA conferences.

In organizations, the hiring process can sometimes be more focused on younger candidates. Some organizations prioritize a strong alignment of values, which involves cultivating hard-to-fake signals such as investing in networking, volunteering, attending conferences and retreats, and making a pledge that may present a significant challenge for individuals with family responsibilities. 

The first time I applied for jobs was in my late 40s in EA organizations, as I was previously accustomed to networking and receiving invitations for work opportunities. Completing work trials under time pressure often seemed tailored to those with more fluid intelligence, which is typically higher in younger individuals, as opposed to the crystallized intelligence that develops later in life. 

Sometimes, experienced professionals will vent how they were invited to a job and then had to start at the first stage, how they were treated unprofessionally in the hiring process, or even when they start how their expertise is not valued in an organization led by people with little prior leadership experience. This can lead to losing out on more experienced people. (At Successif, we help mid-career and more senior people navigate these challenges in the area of AI risk).

This leads me to the question if EA is the right place for more senior people. When I talk to people my age about impact, I'm more likely to recommend the donation opportunities at Effektiv Spenden, the 10% Pledge, or the book Moral Ambition for career inspiration than the global or national EA websites. While I often enjoy being the oldest person and spending much time in deep discussions with philosophically minded people 20 years my junior, I expect this to be the exception. People with families and busy jobs are probably looking for a quick way to shift their focus and connect to people. at a similar point in their life Other services and brands are probably now better suited to cater to this need than EA.

This seems directionally correct, but I would add more nuance.

While OP, as a grantmaker, has a goal it wants to achieve with its grants (and they wouldn't be EA aligned if they didn't), this doesn't necessarily mean they are very short term. The Open Phil EA/LT Survey seems to me to show best what they care about in outcomes (talent working in impactful areas) but also how hard it is to pinpoint the actions and inputs needed. This leads me to believe that OP instrumentally cares about the community/ecosystem/network as it needs multiple touchpoints and interactions to get most people from being interested in EA ideas to working on impactful things.

On the other side, we use the term community in confusing ways. I was on a Community Builder Grant by CEA for two years when working at EA Germany, which many call national community building. What we were actually doing was working on the talent development pipeline, trying to find promising target groups, developing them and trying to estimate the talent outcomes. 

Working on EA as a social movement/community while being paid is challenging. On one hand, I assume OP would find it instrumentally useful (see above) but still desire to track short-term outcomes as a grantmaker. As a grant recipient, I felt I couldn't justify any actions that lacked a clear connection between outcomes and impact. Hosting closed events for engaged individuals in my local community, mentoring, having one-on-ones with less experienced people, or renting a local space for coworking and group events appeared harder to measure. I also believe in the norm of doing this out of care, wanting to give back to the community, and ensuring the community is a place where people don't need to be compensated to participate.

The fellowships you mention want to have impact-focused people working in mainly nonimpact-focused organizations or starting new ones. The MCF question was about people working within the movement. Communications is also a broad field, with a strategist having different skill requirements than someone working in PR or also in digital marketing. So, I'm not sure if the comparison works.

That said, I could see a version of this where experienced people from different communications backgrounds get introduced to EA ideas to be better prepared for applying to organizations within the field. At Successif, we have some experienced communication people in our advising program whom we help to navigate the AI Risk field and get introduced to ideas and organizations. We're also planning an advocacy fellowship based on our existing media course. Perhaps something like this could also be useful in the EA space. I'm happy to share our experiences if anyone wants to work on this.

Thanks for recommending Successif! Our homepage might be a better starting point as it has more information on our focus on helping people reduce AI risk. That being said, the profile of the OP fits our program very well, and we would be glad to get an application.

I would have preferred working groups especially for the questions around monetary value of talent which seemed especially hard to get a sense for.