Should Community Builders Experiment More?

By Richard Annilo, Ville Skoglund @ 2022-09-11T11:52 (+19)

[Epistemic status: a shower thought]

Main question: Do we have a list of most promising interventions for local group organizers and other community builders to try out? If not, why not?

What’s the issue?

As widely discussed in EA, the impact of efforts to do good seems to be fat-tailed - most of the donations in EA come from a few billionaires; the best global health interventions can be 60 times more cost-effective than the median [1]; the wide differences in the number of citations indicate that some research has much more impact than other etc. Likely, the same distribution applies to the cost-effectiveness of community building interventions, which seems to have important implications for strategy.

Despite this, it seems like there has been little talk about exeprimentation and efforts to find the few most impactful opportunities in the field of community building. Is this not a missed opportunity?

What could be done about it?

Finding ideas

How do we find the most cost-effective intervention ideas in community building?

• We could incentivise community builders to run new experiments that they think could be cost-effective.
• We could run a competition to generate ideas.
• We could make a list of high-potential community building interventions.
  • Either find or combine existing lists.

Or have a small team create one themselves. They could copy the methods Charity Entrepreneuship uses to look for most promising charity ideas [3].

What do you think?