Rekindling the Fire: Principles-First EA Groups as a Path to Impact [Talk Transcript]

By jessica_mccurdy🔸 @ 2024-11-27T16:29 (+77)

This is a transcript of a talk given at EAG Boston 2024 by Jessica McCurdy^[1] (slides can be found here). This was written as a talk and has not been edited to read well as a post, but we were keen to get it out, especially as we are currently hiring for a Strategy Lead (application deadline: Dec. 2nd)

Talk Description: While we see enormous potential in principles-first community building (CB) roles, many talented individuals are hesitant to pursue them, viewing them as low-status or risky for career growth. This talk addresses these criticisms head-on, exploring why EA groups remain a powerful engine for impact. Jessica will highlight how these groups ignite ambition, guide top talent into high-impact careers, and offer a nuanced vision of their value for those considering leading them.

Rekindling the Fire: Principles-First EA Groups as a Path to Impact

Questioning my path

Over the past two years, I've spent a lot of time questioning my own path. I had been working in EA groups since 2017, but when FTX happened, I think a lot of us were left questioning whether this was right for us. At the same time, and even more destabilizing, AI was advancing at a really rapid pace, and as it was becoming more in the public consciousness, we were able to do more AI safety-specific field-building, like AI safety groups, and they were going very well.

So I had to ask myself: do I want to keep doing principles-first EA community building, or maybe switch into something more cause-specific? And to be honest, at the time, it kind of felt like EA was a bit low-status, and the fire around EA community building was dying out.

Ecosystem approach

So I spent some time talking to people in AI safety field-building, people at CEA and in the broader ecosystem, and I realized I wanted to take a more ecosystem-level approach. I realized that in this movement I want there to be both EA and AI safety field-building. And so I had to ask myself: “which of these do I want to do?”.

I think it’s important to think about what values are actually driving you and what your comparative advantage is. And I thought to myself that the EA community is this amazing and unique community that I’m really grateful for. And it has an amazing track record of doing good in the world. That was something really valuable, and I realized I wanted to be one of the people who stood up for it and stuck with it, and I’m really grateful that I did that.

I think it’s right for my comparative advantage, but I also think EA is so important it would be a shame if there wasn't more energy going towards it.

The Disconnect

Nowadays, we're actually in quite a different world. Now, I think there's a disconnect where grantmakers and stakeholders are really excited about principles-first EA community building, but the people who are on the ground actually doing the work are less so, or don't realize that these grantmakers are as excited.

The purpose of this talk is to try to bridge that disconnect a little bit. I'll talk to you about why I think community building -particularly at groups- is so valuable. I'll address some of your objections, though not all of them, because in any talk you can’t give enough nuance, so please add to the Q&A and I will dive a bit more. And then I’ll chat just a little bit about some reasons why you may not want to do this and what you can do if you do.

Why groups?

Why do I think that this is impactful? So I’m gonna go through three main areas here, basically explaining what I think groups do and what they are particularly good at in terms of impact. I’ll talk a little bit about the multiplier effect and I'll talk about the strong track record that groups have.

What groups do

I think that groups leverage repeated interactions to build relationships and get people into motivational states where they are willing to take action on the things they've been thinking about. Now, some of us can just read something on the internet and take action on that, but others of us might need a little bit more encouragement or support.

For example,  I was considering taking the Giving What We Can pledge, and it was something I thought was right. And I endorsed it internally but it wasn't until I saw group members taking the pledge and them talking about their experiences that I kind of went over the edge and decided to do it. I needed that social encouragement and seeing that these people that I respected and thought were taking it really seriously were doing the same.

How many of you in the conference right now came to this conference because somebody nudged you to come? I know for me, a lot of my first EA events—and some events still —I sometimes need an extra push to come to them. It's a lot of work to take time out of your busy schedule and maybe travel far away. And even if you really endorse doing it, sometimes you need an extra nudge, and I think that groups are a great place to cultivate this. A really good place for going from “this is interesting to” "this is something I want to take action on".

And importantly, I don't think groups are just doing this because of the social proof aspect and the motivation, but they’re empowering discussion spaces where people get to dig into these ideas and figure out what they believe, and what they value. Importantly, I think what groups are doing is helping people take action on their own values. I think it would be against the truth-seeking nature of EA to be pressuring people into doing things they don’t want to or aggressively recruit. I think it’s really important that people have opportunities to reflect on what their values are, such as by being in other communities. But, when they do reflect on their values and they do endorse certain actions, groups are a wonderful place to encourage them and give them the support to actually take those actions.

Multiplier effect

Now I find multiplier effects to be a very compelling argument for community building. There is a lot of difficulty to try and figure out counterfactuals around how much credit you actually get when you get somebody involved in EA, it's hard. But I still think the basic principle stands. When I was considering going into meta EA work community building, or going on doing object level myself, I thought that I could spend my career going into this job and doing high-impact work, or I could get multiple other people to go into high-impact careers, and do that work, thus multiplying my impact that I could have.

And in fact, I've seen people that I've encouraged to go into high impact careers that are now doing careers as impactful or more impactful than mine. And that's really rewarding; I think it’s a really big deal and I think that that scales a lot.

But this is EA, and we want to see the data on things. Luckily, we have a little bit now.

Data on groups

In 2022, Rethink Priorities did a survey on what helped people get involved in EA and they found that 36.8% of people cited an EA group—that’s over a third of the people that they asked this question to.

Source: EA Survey 2022: How People Get Involved in EA

That’s a really impressive track record there.

But even more impressive than that, is some data that has come out even more recently,  and actually hasn’t quite been released yet. Open Philanthropy ran this big survey on people that they thought were really in high-impact careers and they asked them to name the top 4 things that were important to their trajectory. People named things like 80,000 Hours, or Peter Singer's work.

University groups were the number one listed thing on that survey. And city and national groups also ranked highly in the top 10.

This is an amazing track record for groups that people are really accrediting their groups to going into these high-impact careers. I find that incredibly motivating with the amount of talent that’s available here and the amount of potential we can have.

Why principles-first EA?

So not all of those groups were EA groups, but many of them were, and I think the question still stands: should I do EA groups? Or should I do cause-specific groups? And I think it would be bad if you left thinking that I didn’t think cause-specific groups were good. I actually spent a lot of the last year incubating an org for AI Safety groups support specifically, and I think that things like the Alternative Protein Project and One for the World are really great options, especially if that’s your comparative advantage.

But I think that something that EA does really well is update based on new information. And as these new advances in AI were coming into play, and we were getting positive signals on the value of AI safety field-building,

I think that people overcorrected a little bit too much and on the margin. Nowadays, I think it’s worth us putting a little bit of extra effort into the EA community building specifically.

Eli Rose, a senior program associate at Open Philanthropy currently leading the Global Catastrophic Risk Capacity Building team, and he said:

 “In my work at Open Phil I've spent mid-hundreds of hours trying to determine what drives the careers that drive real change in the world on e.g. AI policy, animal welfare, and global health. I found it greatly surprising (at the time) that in many cases, the main driver of these people's careers seemed to be EA and related ideas”.

EA has a really awesome track record of doing lots of great things in the world and big wins, and seeing things ahead of the game. We were really on pandemic preparedness and emerging technologies like AI, before the rest of the world was paying attention. And in addition, EA is this amazing force that is quite flexible. A great thing about EA is people are open-minded and willing to pivot with new information in the world, and it spans a bunch of different cause areas and professions.

Even if you just look around in this room you'll see people of so many different skills and backgrounds. In an ever-changing world where anything can happen and we might learn there is a new cause that we want to work in, or maybe just a new approach to causes that we really care about now, the EA movement is a valuable source of people willing to take action in those situations.

Why now?

Why is now a good time to be working on this?

I'm actually particularly excited right now, for several reasons.

1. We have new leadership. You can ask anyone at the Centre for Effective Altruism or at various EA organizations how they feel about Zach coming and being the new CEO of CEA, and they will tell you how excited they are.

2. We have spent time reflecting on mistakes and lessons learned over the past few years.

3. We have many new exciting plans. For instance, Giving What We Can is aiming for 10,000 pledges this year, and I heard that their pledge rate doubled in July. That’s a really exciting time with a lot of momentum.

I think we are preparing for a time of growth within EA. Specifically, I think that the EA movement right now is ready for this growth, in a way that was not necessarily before. I think there’s a lot more foundations in place, there’s talent accelerators, there are more job openings, there’s better upskilling programs, and we are really ready to absorb that talent that groups can provide. And I think there’s more opportunities and support for doing that than ever before.

On top of that, there's a lot of demand for EA growth from people in the community. I spent a couple months working on this project on EA growth and talking to stakeholders within the community on how fast we should grow and should we grow, and I found overwhelmingly positive sentiment towards right now is the time when we want to go bigger.

We aren’t just rekindling the flame, as my presentation title suggests, but I think that we're launching into something really big, and I think that we would not be able to launch into that big thing without all the people in this room.

Addressing objections

I know you guys are all in EA - you have a lot of things going on in your head; objections, things that I have not raised, and I’ve heard a lot of objections when I talk with people about whether they should go into community building. I’m hoping to address a few of those and then a little bit more afterwards.

Some things that I’ve heard lately:

Objection 1: "The EA brand is so bad, it’s ruined!"

I get why people feel this way. It’s true that FTX and the following events did have a negative impact on our brand, and I know that it can be especially salient for people who are working on the ground trying to promote this cause when they get this negative feedback from the people they interact with.

The thing is, broad awareness of EA is still really low—around 2%.  This was from research that was done last summer as part of a working group between Rethink Priorities and CEA, and Breakwater. They found even though in specific groups that we care about, like some elite circles, it might be higher on the whole awareness of EA, it’s just still very low.

So I think there’s hope for, not just beginning again, but reimagining what our brand can be. The EA brand isn't dead; it's really just beginning. The people in this room are the ones who are able to shape that going forward. I think there’s a lot more effort being put into comms within EA, and we have a lot of room to go there.

I do want to stress that I really do sympathize with people, it’s so salient even if one in a hundred people you talk to has some really negative impressions of EA. Those particular encounters are just going to have a big effect on you, and that’s just being human. I want to recognize that but I also think we should have a lot of hope and optimism going forward.

Objection 2: “Reputation Risk”

It’s somewhat similar, sort of related to the brand.

One concern that people have is “if I do community building that may be bad on my resume”. Now this is a valid thing that you should consider, and I actually think it would be quite bad if a bunch of people rushed into community building without paying attention to this at all.

In particular, If you're considering going into policy careers, I think you should talk to people in those careers about their opinions here. Just like any other affiliation group where you have certain beliefs and certain ideas tied to it, people might pay attention to that. I think it’s worth considering, but people often underestimate the additional value of you associating yourself with EA and taking those risks. I think that people overestimate how bad it would be on their resume.

As we saw, only about 2% of people know what EA is, so not that many people are going to recognize it and then there’s some real opportunity cost with not doing the community building. There’s a very fair consideration that you may say that is “I want to keep my options open and I want option value. Maybe I want to go into policy, so I should probably stay back”. That’s fair, but:

1. You'd be missing out on a very large amount of impact that we talked about before and that potential.

2. One way we can consider EA is as a common good. A lot of people in this room get a lot of benefits from EA, whether that’s free career advising, or coming to this conference, a great community and infrastructure—and we need more people positively displaying themselves with EA to build a positive reinforcement loop of these benefits.

If people don't associate with EA, we risk losing some of that common good.

Objection 3: “Community Building Isn't Good Career Capital”

My first reaction to this is pointing to the amazing track record of people who did community building that are now in really important careers.

• Ajeya Cotra: Leads technical AI safety grant-making at Open Philanthropy, formerly ran Berkeley EA

• Kelsey Piper: At Vox Future Perfect, previously ran Stanford EA

• Haven King-Nobles: At the Fish Welfare Initiative

• Ryan Kidd: Founded MATS, an upskilling program for people going into AI safety

• Eirin Evjen: at the forethought foundation, who now works in a think tank in technical AI policy, previously ran EA Norway

• Dewi Erwin: Runs Blue Dot Impact, which offers large courses in biosecurity and AI safety for hundreds of people (maybe in the thousands), used to run EA Cambridge

As you can see, there’s a pretty strong track record of people who are doing community building and then going into really high-impact careers. Those people also say that doing community building was useful for those careers.

Dewi said that:

“doing community building for 1-2 years is an insanely good way to spend time doing "product discovery", understanding people's problems, and testing different solutions. And that can then be the springboard to start a new company that scales and improves a solution to an important problem that you discovered”.

He did exactly this: BlueDot actually came out of his work at Cambridge EA.

So I think that spending time doing community building can be a way of building these really valuable skills. I personally felt that. I learned so much about people management, project management, entrepreneurship, operations just from my time trying to build my group.

And lastly is the legibility of community building, and we are going back to the resume thing a bit here. To this, I’ll share that I have plenty of hiring managers within EA that reach out to me, specifically to ask me to seek recommendations for group organizers who might be a good fit for those roles. And they say specifically that group organizers are often a good fit for these roles. In my time at CEA, I’ve sent over 50 lists of recommendations of group organizers to hiring managers.

For example, Claire Zabel whose also at Open Philanthropy shared that:

“In my experience, people who run student groups will often gain a degree of experience in core skills like management, delegation, recruiting, and running events that's rare for their career stage, making them exciting hiring prospects who are often able to handle more complex tasks more autonomously compared to their peers”.

So hiring managers are noticing this and seeing this as a positive thing on people’s resume.

Claire also added (because she used to be a part of a student group):

 “I'm about 10 years out from being part of an EA student group, and I truly still benefit from the connections I made there, and I'm grateful to the original organizers that made it possible. I think it caused me to enter my EA career faster and stronger".

Is Community Building for you?

So, hopefully, I addressed at least a few objections that you may have, whether that’s around brand or what's gonna do to your resume or what skills you can build, and now maybe you are thinking, “I’ll consider it”. I think it’s worth actually considering if this is right for you. It wouldn’t be right unless I told you about all the bad things involved in it.

• A lot of group organizing often involves doing a lot of work independently, without direct management. And by doing it independently you are also not part of a large organization with ops capacity and other people to learn from.

• It's really difficult to know if you're doing a good job. Community building has pretty long feedback loops—a lot of times there's about two years between an intervention and someone entering a high-impact career. Honestly, today I find myself surprised by interventions I did 2 years ago and now it’s popping that these people are doing these high impact careers.  And even though we have those anecdotes, that's not that rigorous of data in the same way that you might get from something that you can run RCTs on. And that is a truth about community building in our current state that is worth being aware of.

• It's hard. You can ask anyone here who is a community builder about volunteer management or what it feels like when not many people show up to an event you've publicized. I think it takes a lot of grit.

• Other reasons that you may not want to do it:

  • It may not be your comparative advantage whether that is because you are less comfortable interacting with different types of people or maybe you have a comparative advantage in doing things like research.

  • A very common one is that sometimes people should learn more about EA before jumping in. I think it’s quite common that people get very excited about EA, when they first hear about it and one of the easiest ways to contribute to EA is to jump right into community building. I think we should be cautious about it because community builders are representatives of the community. You want to make sure that when people are coming and interacting with you, they’re getting an accurate and nuanced version of what it actually is. It’s really valuable to know more about EA before jumping into these roles.

  • Opportunity cost is real. You might be in a position where there’s a really time-sensitive offer somewhere else and I think it’s worth comparing them.

What can you do?

You listened to this list of bad things and you still want to do it. What can you do?

• You can volunteer with a group around you. There’s plenty of groups all over the world and on the EA Forum there’s a list and a very fun map where you can see all the groups are.

• Found a group if there’s none in your area or at your university. We have a lot of resources on starting groups on the EA Groups Resource Center. You can contact CEA's groups team and we can assist with a call.

• Run a group, maybe join a leadership team and really test what it is like on the ground.

Those are volunteering things.

• You could also work full-time for a group. So there are city and national groups that have full time organizers at them. There’s a couple universities, Oxford and Cambridge,  that have full time organizers as well.  

• Lastly, you could go even more meta and join a CEA (we are hiring now) to support all the other group organizers.

Final thoughts and next steps

Stepping back, I think it’s really hard to know what to do and it’s easy to feel alone in trying to figure out what’s the most impactful path for you to take. But you guys are not alone. We are really excited about you all and really excited about groups and principles first community building in particular.

In fact, when I reached out to the people for quotes for this talk, I was overwhelmed with positive responses, so many that I was not able to put them all in this talk so I added a few here:

So people within the community, there’s a demand for this. Now, you might be in a position like I was in the past couple of years— where you might be deciding whether to go into cause-specific work, EA community building, or something else entirely. I  wish someone had given this talk to me last year, and maybe it can serve as a useful signal for you that we believe this work is exciting and impactful.

Together, we can keep this fire alive—not just for ourselves, but for everyone our work impacts. I’m excited to enter this new age of principles-first EA groups with you.

1. ^{^}

    To cut down on event costs, we opted out of professional recording. The quality is less than ideal but works at a very small fraction of the cost :)