EA - Should the EA community be cause-first or member-first? by EdoArad

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Should the EA community be cause-first or member-first?, published by EdoArad on May 29, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.It's really hard to do community building well. Opinions on strategy and vision vary a lot, and we don't yet know enough about what actually works and how well. Here, I'll suggest one axis of community-building strategy which helped me clarify and compare some contrasting opinions.Cause-firstWill Macaskill's proposed Definition of Effective Altruism is composed of:An overarching effort to figure out what are the best opportunities to do good.A community of people that work to bring more resources to these opportunities, or work on these directly.This suggests a "cause-first" community-building strategy, where the main goal for community builders is to get more manpower into the top cause areas. Communities are measured by the total impact produced directly through the people they engage with. Communities try to find the most promising people, persuade them to work on top causes, and empower them to do so well.CEA's definition and strategy seem to be mostly along these lines:Effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.It’s both a research field, which aims to identify the world’s most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good.andOur mission is to nurture a community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.Member-firstLet's try out a different definition for the EA community, taken from CEA's guiding principles:What is the effective altruism community?The effective altruism community is a global community of people who care deeply about the world, make helping others a significant part of their lives, and use evidence and reason to figure out how best to do so.This, to me, suggests a subtly different vision and strategy for the community. One that is, first of all, focused on these people who live by EA principles. Such a "member-first" strategy could have a supporting infrastructure that is focused on helping the individuals involved to live their lives according to these principles, and an outreach/growth ecosystem that works to make the principles of EA more universal.What's the difference?I think this dimension has important effects on the value of the community, and that both local and global community-building strategies should be aware of the tradeoffs between the two.I'll list some examples and caricatures for the distinction between the two, to give a more intuitive grasp of how these strategies differ, without any clear order:Leaning cause-firstLeaning member-firstKeep EA Small and WeirdBig Tent EACurrent EA Handbook (focus on introducing major causes)2015's EA Handbook (focus on core EA principles)80,000 HoursProbably GoodWants more people doing high-quality AI Safety work, regardless of their acceptance of EA principlesWants more people deeply understanding and accepting EA principles, regardless of what they actually work on or donate to.Targeted outreach to students in high ranking universitiesBroad outreach with diverse messagingEncourages people to change occupations to focus on the world's most pressing problemsEncourages people to use the tools and principles of EA to do more good in their current trajectoryRisk of people not finding useful ways to contribute to top causesRisk of not enough people who want to contribute to the world's top causesThe community as a whole leads by example, by taking in-depth prioritization research with the proper seriousnessEach individual is focused more on how toimplement EA principles in their own lives, taking their personal worldview and situation into account ...