What are current problems with EA?

• Evaporative cooling
  • Whereas once EA was the place for smart people to talk, now many former leaders are distancing themselves from the brand
  • Brain drain into AI safety, specifically
  • EA Forum no longer feels like a good place to talk about things; average comment or post quality is lower than LessWrong; EAGs no longer feel like the best place to meet people
• Loss of cohesion — AI safety vs animal welfare vs GHD vs earning to give are pretty different in terms of the kind of person who works in that
  • Also: vibes-wise, Bay Area EA feels pretty different than London EA, and imo it’s a problem that much of the community stuff is governed by London EA (80k, CEA)
• Retention — if you’re earning to give or just EA-adjacent, there’s not much keeping you engaged
• Insularity — Constellation is great, but has some ivory-tower-ness to it: hard for people to come in, hard for ideas to flow out

Interesting things to try

• Copying social technology of how religious groups retain members:
  • Small groups: sets of 5-10 people who come together weekly and share a meal and talk about EA-y things
    • different than a “meetup” in how close the members are — I vividly remember my college Christian small group leader going out of his way to deliver groceries to our house
    • explicitly not trying to grow beyond a certain size
  • Volunteering, service: once upon a time, the meme was “earn to give”; then “direct work”; but something is lost when people don’t put in their own labor into making a thing better
    • volunteering at events like EAG is good, but not regular/consistent
  • Proselytizing! Why is this considered just a university thing?
  • Mass service: regular meeting point for the local congregation
    • What would EA solstice look like?
• Stronger leadership
  • I think it’d be fun to elect a “President of EA” to be the face of the movement
• More clear boundaries on whether someone is in/out
  • EA membership cards, renewing yearly
• Better communication/organization among members
  • A single Slack that every EA is on
• Generator question: what are technologies that are used within large (1k-10k ppl) orgs? Could we adopt those within EA?

Things that EA does uniquely well, compared to other movements

• Collections of group houses and hubs, having physical places to congregate
• Great writers, serving as top-of-funnel for EA ideas and philosophy
• Having a lot of money
• Professionalized recruitment (?)
• Events (?)