there are important downsides to the “cause-first” approach, such as a possible lock-in of main causes

I think this is a legitimate concern, and I’m glad you point to it. An alternative framing is lock-out of potentially very impactful causes. Dynamics of lock-out, as I see it, include:

• EA selecting for people interested in the already-established causes
• Social status gradients within EA pushing people toward the highest-regarded causes, like AI safety^[1]
• EAs working in an already-established cause having personal and career-related incentives to ensure that their cause is kept as a top EA priority

A recent shortform by Caleb Parikh, discussing the specific case of digital sentience work, feels related. In Caleb’s words:

I think aspects of EA that make me more sad is that there seems to be a few extremely important issues on an impartial welfarist view that don’t seem to get much attention at all, despite having been identified at some point by some EAs.

1. ^{^}

   Personal anecdote: Part of the reason, if I’m to be honest with myself, for my move from nuclear weapons risk research to AI strategy/governance is that it became increasingly socially difficult to be an EA working on nuclear risk. (In my sphere, at least.) Many of my conversations with other EAs, even in non-work situations and even with me trying avoid this conversation area, turned into me having to defend my not focusing on AI risk, on pain of being seen as “not getting it”.

Thanks for writing this. After reading this, I want EA to be even more "cause first". One of the things that I worry about for EA is that it becomes a fairly diffuse "member-first" movement, not much unlike a religious group that comes together and supports each other and believes in some common doctrines but at the end of the day, doesn't accomplish much. 

I look at EA now and am nothing short of stunned at how much it is accomplishing. Not in dollars spent. But in stuff done. The EA community was at the forefront of pushing AI safety to the mainstream. It has started several new charities. It's responsible for a lot of wins for animals. It's responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives. It's about the only place out there that measures charities, and does so with a lot of rigor. It's produced countless reports that actually change what gets worked on. It creates new charities every year. It changes what it works on pretty well.

I think caring about its members is an instrumental goal to caring about causes. The members do, after all, work on the causes. EA does recognize this though and with notable exceptions, I think it does a very good job of it.

Thanks Edo, I really like this distinction. In particular, your table helped me understand a bunch of seemingly-unrelated disagreements I tend to have with "mainstream EA" - I tend to lean member-first (for reasons that maybe I'll write about one day). 

Thank you for writing this post. Even without agreeing with the exact distinction as it's made on the table, I think this is a good framing for an important problem. Specifically, I think the movement underestimates the importance of having a mismatch between how it presents itself and its exact focus.

The way I think about it is:
(1) An individual encounters the movement and understands that the value they're going to gain from it is X → (2) they decide to get involved because they want X → (3) it takes quite a while (months to years, depends on their involvement) to understand that the movement actually does Y OR sees they don't get the value X they expected → (4) There's a considerable they're not as interested in Y and doesn't get as involved as they originally thought they would.

It means that the movement: (1) Missed many people who would've been interested in Y, (2) invested its resources sub-optimally on people who seek X instead of people who seek Y.

I've experienced this on a weekly basis in EA Israel before we focused our strategy and branding on something that sounds like a members-focused approach. Even after doing that, I have dozens of stories of members being disappointed that the movement doesn't offer them concrete tools for their own social action (as much as it offers tools on how to choose a cause area), or disappointed that the conferences are mostly about AI safety and biosecurity. 
Even with a strong member-first approach, the movement could still invest considerable resources into organizing AI safety conferences and biosecurity conferences - which would also attract professionals from outside the movement. And the movement could still be constructed in a way that gets people from the EA movement to these other conferences and communities. 

I'm a bit time limited at the moment, but would be happy to discuss this with people working on this topic. I wrote before about this mismatch as a branding problem, tried to address this through better ways to explain what EA is, and got the chance to present EA Israel's member-first approach at conferences (linked above) since CEA was interested in some different community-building results that came out of EA Israel. If you're working on this topic and think I might be helpful, feel free to get in touch!

One last thought - I think that @Will Aldred's framing in the comments is correct in describing a connection between how this approach could shape the structure of the movement. Moreover, l think this goes even beyond incentive structures - for instance, the mismatch described above between X and Y could be a good explanation for why community building efforts leans toward "multi-session programs where people are expected to attend most sessions". This is because the current branding requires us to gradually move people from wanting X to understanding that Y is actually more important. This is kind of the opposite of product-market fit.

I'm not saying that either of the approaches is incorrect, but I think this mismatch is harmful. I hope this is resolved either way. 

Thanks for writing this post, I've been thinking about this framing recently. Although more because I felt like I was member-first when I started community building and now I am much more cause-first when I'm thinking about how to have the most impact.

I don't agree with some of the categorisations in the table and think there are quite a few that don't fall on the cause/member axis. For example you could have member first outreach that is highly deferential (GiveWell suggestions) and cause-first outreach that brings together very different people that disagree with EA.

Also when you say the downsides of cause-first are that it led to lock in or lack of diversification I feel like those are more likely due to earlier on member-first focus in EA.

I like your attempt to draw a distinction between two different ways to view community building, however some parts of the table appear strange.

When people say that they want EA to stay weird, they mean that they want people exploring all kinds of crazy cause areas instead of just sticking the main ones (in tension with your definition of cause-first).

Also: one the central arguments for leaning more towards EA being small and weird is that you end up with a community more driven by principle because a) slower growth makes it easier for new members to absorb knowledge from more experienced ones vs. from people who don't really understand the philosophy very well themselves yet b) lower expectations for growth make it easier to focus on people with whom the philosophy really resonates vs. marginally influencing people who aren't that keen on it.

Another point, there's two different ways to build a member first community:

• The first is to try to build a welcoming community that best meets the needs of everyone who has an interest in the community.
• The second it to build a community that focuses on the needs of the core members and relies on them to drive impact.

These two different definitions will lead to two different types of community.

To build the first you'd want to engage in broach outreach with diverse messaging. With the second, it would be more about finding the kinds of people who most resonate with your principles. With the first you try to meet people where they are, with the second you're more interested in people who will deeply adopt your principles. With the first, you want engagement with as many people as possible, with the second you want enagement to be as deep as possible.

Really grateful for the focus on construction instead of destruction. It might not be as dramatic or exciting, but it's still kind of messed up that damaging large parts of EA count as costly signals to signal credibility, even though people other than the poster are the ones who carry the entire burden of the costs.

I think another dimension of interest for cause-first vs member-first is how much faith you have in the people who make up the causes. If you think everyone is dropping the ball then you focus on the cause, whereas you focus on the people if you trust their expertise and skill enough to defer to them.

Note: I'm writing this comment in my capacity as an individual, not as a representative of CEA, although I do work there. I wouldn’t be surprised if others at CEA disagree with the characterization I’m making in this comment. 

I want to provide one counterexample to the conception that most of mainstream EA is leaning “cause-first” in the status quo. CEA is a large organization (by EA standards) and we definitely invest substantial resources in “member-first” style ways.^[1] 

To be specific, here is a sampling of major programs we run: 

• Groups
  • University Groups (mostly focused on the University Group Accelerator Program currently, which is a scaled program targeting a broad range of mostly non-top unis)
  • City & National Groups (most of the funds go towards our top 15 city-national groups, but we also fund a long tail of other groups all around the world.)
  • Virtual Programs (designed to be accessible, available globally, focused on EA fundamentals principles, although it also covers causes.)
• Events
  • EAGs and EAGx are designed to help members coordinate, and EAGx in particularly is held around the world and fairly "big tent"
• Community Health / Online
  • Services offered by these programs (e.g. this forum) are basically infrastructure for community members

Some important caveats: there’s other things we do, we think seriously about trying to capture the heavy-tail and directing people towards specific cause areas (including encouraging groups we support to do the same), and we definitely shifted some content (like the handbook) to be more cause-area oriented. CEA is also only one piece of the ecosystem. 

Overall though, I do think much of CEA's work currently represents investment that intuitively seems more "member-first", (whether or not this is the correct strategy), and we're a reasonably large part of the CB ecosystem. 

1. ^{^}

   Also, although I think the member/cause distinction is useful, it's also sufficiently vague and "vibes-y" enough that many programs and organizations, like CEA, could probably be construed as focusing on either one. 

Nice post, Edo!

One seemingly important factor to decide whether to lean cause-first or member-first is whether impact varies more across causes or interventions. 80,000 Hours thinks the variation across causes is larger, so it leans cause-first. This recent analysis from Ben Todd suggests variations across causes are not as large as previously thought.

I'd be interested in more examples and better linking with existing written opinions on these topics. So I invite whoever is reading this to suggest some more ideas, or better - contact me to get editing permissions on the post (and co-authorship if you wish).

I really liked the axis that you presented and the comparision between a version of the community that is more cause oriented vs member oriented.

The only caveat that I have is that I don't think we can define a neutral point in between them that allows you to classify communities as one type or the other. 

Luckily, I think that is unnecesary because even though the objective of EA is to have the best impact in the world and not the greatest number of members, I think we all think the best decision is to have a good balance between cause and member oriented. So the question that we should ask is should EA be MORE big tent, weird, or do we have a good balance right now?

And to achieve that balance we can be more big tent in some aspects, moments and orgs and weirder in others.

I'd love to see the results of a good experiment in in the member-first approach.

I'm leaning more towards the cause-first approach, but possibly for the wrong reasons. It's easier to measure, it's impact is easier to communicate and understand, the funnel feels shorter and more straight-forward, the activities and tools to achieve impact are there for me to use, I don't need to invent anything from skratch. This all might be a streetlight fallacy.

The strongest for the member-first approach for me would be:

• After your members take the job in a high-impact position, they will continue to make decisions. Decisions at their work, decisions about where to work next, etc. If they are not well equipped with tools and knowledge about how to make good decisions independently which optimize for impact, their choices might be far from optimal.
• By delegating cause prioritization to a few small groups of researchers, we might succumb to effects of echo chambers, fail to identify important mistakes in our reasoning and even more effective causes.
• The impact from a member-first approach might be >10-100x larger than that of a cause-first approach. It's the difference between motivating a few people to work on AI safety vs changing the societal norms themselves to be more impact-focused when doing career planning.

I feel like this post introduces a helpful contrast. 

I am personally partial to the member-first approach. A cause-first approach seems to place a lot of trust into the epistemics of leaders and decision-makers that identify the correct cause. I take this to be an unhealthy strategy generally - I believe a vibrant community of smart, empirically-minded individuals can be trusted to make their own calls, and I think this may often challenge the opinion of leadership or the community at large in a healthy way. Even if many individual calls end up leading to suboptimal individual behaviour, I'd expect the epistemic benefits of a diversity of opinions and thought to outweigh this downside in the long run, even for the centrally boosted causes, which benefit from having their opinions challenged and questioned from people that do not share their views, and having the likelihood of groupthink significantly reduced. 

On a more abstract level, I think EA is pretty unique as a community because of its open epistemics, where a variety of views can be pitched and will receive a fair hearing, often leading to positive interventions and initiatives. I worry that a cause-first approach will endanger this and turn EA into "just another" cause-specific organization, even if the selection of the cause is well-motivated at the initial point of choice.

However, there are important downsides to the "cause-first" approach, such as a possible lock-in of main causes

I'm surprised by this point - surely a core element of the 'cause-first' approach is cause prioritization & cause neutrality? How would that lead to a lock-in?

Thanks for the post, it was an interesting read!

Responding to one specific point: you compare

Community members delegate to high-quality research, think less for themselves but more people end up working in higher-impact causes

to

Community members think for themselves, which improves their ability to do more good, but they make more mistakes

I think there is actually just one correct solution here, namely thinking through everything yourself and trusting community consensus only insofar as you think it can be trusted (which is just thinking through things yourself on the meta-level).

This is the straightforwardly correct thing to do for your personal epistemics, and IMO it's also the move that maximizes overall impact. It would be kind of strange if the right move was for people to not form beliefs as best they can, or to act on other people's beliefs rather than their own?

(A sub-point here is that we haven't figured out all the right approaches yet so we need people to add to the epistemic commons.)