What high-level change would you make to EA strategy?

I've sometimes wondered whether it would be good for there to be a distinct brand and movement for less hardcore EA, that is less concerned with prestige, less elitist, more relaxed, and with more mainstream appeal. Perhaps it could be thought of as the Championship to EA's Premier League. I think there are already examples, e.g. Probably Good (alternative to 80,000 Hours), TLYCS and OFTW (alternatives to GWWC), and the different tiers of EA investing groups (rough and ready vs careful and considered). Places where you feel comfortable only spending 5 minutes editing a post, rather than agonising about it for hours; where you feel less pressure to compete with the best in the world; where you are less prone to analysis paralysis or perfect being the enemy of the good; where there is less stress, burnout and alienation; where ultimately the area under the impact curve could be comparable, or even bigger..? Perhaps one of the names mentioned here could be used.

[Note I expect pushback on this,  and considered posting anonymously, but I'm posting in the spirit of the potential broader movement. Apologies if I've offended anyone by insinuating they are "only" Championship material. That was not my intention - the Championship is still a very high standard in absolute terms!]

I'm planning on doing research not too far off this! 

Specifically - researching previous/current social movements (climate, anti-nuclear, civil rights, etc.) and trying to understand how effective mass social movement organisations are or could be. My research will be focused more on the use of protest within movements but I can imagine there will be some overlap. Some things I'm hoping to find are:

• Does increasing public attention lead to increased public support?
• Does increasing public support lead to positive policy change?
• When to be a mass-movement vs when to stay more targeted 
• The role of different actors (activists, policymakers, NGOs) at different times
• What are some internal and external factors that might dictate movement success?
• What is the base rate for a successful mass movement?

Going to post some research I've been doing on Extinction Rebellion and the climate movement in the next couple of weeks so stay tuned! 

I agree that questions in this vicinity seem worth someone doing more work on. 

Some relevant prior discussion can be found in the Bibliography, tagged posts, and "Discussion" page here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/value-of-movement-growth 

This might actually vary by cause area. If it did, I wonder if it would be possible for different causes to adopt different stances or whether that's just not going to be possible.

You can buy think tanks?

Is there a historical precedent for social movements buying media? If so, it'd be interesting to know how that influenced the outlet's public perception/readership.

As of now, it seems like movements "merely" influence media, such as the NYTimes turning more leftward in the last few years or Vox employing more EA-oriented journalists.

Stefan, can you use the link in the top right hand corner to turn this into an answer (not a comment) so that people are more likely to see it.

Certainly funding current think tanks to write more EA articles seems cheaper than I expected. I reckon you could get significant shifts for like $50k for small think tanks.

Is there evidence/theoretical reason to believe that not experimenting in governance leads a movement to become slow over time?

1. I don't know that I'd want to see complete centralisation but I'd like to see an org which allows EAs to apply once to many application processes at once.

Great ideas. I definitely think that EA could gain a lot of credibility by successfully responding to major crises.

2. This seems like a really good idea that would avoid bad outcomes.

Have you had any support calls with CEA's groups team and/or referenced the resources on the EA Hub? They have a large repository of best practices, a big speaker database, etc.

Clubs mostly had to start from scratch ~5 years ago, but these days, there's so much more collective experience that you should be able to find good advice on just about anything.

Caveat: I work in Biosecurity.

I agree with the last point. Based on Ben Todd's presentation at EAG,

• 18% of engaged EAs work on AI alignment, while
• 4% work on Biosecurity.

Based on Toby Ord's estimates in the Precipice,  the risk of extinction in the next 100 years from

• Unaligned artificial intelligence is ∼ 1 in 10, while
• the risk from engineered pandemics is ∼ 1 in 30.

So, the stock of people in AI is 4.5x higher than Biosecurity, while AI is only  3x as important.

There is a lot of nuance missing here, but I'm moderately confident that this dysbalance warrants more people moving into Biosecurity. Especially now that there we're in a moment of high traceability concerning pandemic preparedness.