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Welcome 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: Community Builders Spend Too Much Time Community Building, published by emmawilliamson on June 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. For helpful comments I thank Koji Flynn-Do, Abie Rohrig, Harry Taussig, Emma Abele, Sabrina Chwalek, Matt Burtell, Trevor Levin, Jemima Jones, Michel Justen, Caleb Parikh, and Max Daniel. Some of my observations come from my experience grantmaking with the EA Infrastructure Fund. I am contributing in a personal capacity however, not as an EAIF assistant fund manager. (In particular, you are welcome to apply for EAIF funding if your plans mostly consist of the kind of activities I’m questioning in this post.) All views are my own. Epistemic Status: In this post I’m mainly referring to university group community builders. It’s possible that a lot of what I say will still apply to city / country / other groups, but I’m less confident of this. In my problem section, I give some percentage estimates of how much organizers are marketing (defined later) and how much they should be marketing. This is based off of some rough estimates, which I’m not confident in. I’d love to see someone better estimate this or run a survey. Advisory Note: If you’re only going to read one section of this post, I encourage you to read the TLDR and the Solutions section. TLDR: There are significant downsides to the current model of community building, which involves organizers spending a large portion of their time marketing EA, doing (often menial) operations work for EA, and explaining to other EAs how to market EA: It trades off against some of the most promising EA students skilling up themselves It means that EA groups aren’t actually learning about object-level EA issues, and instead are learning things about small-scale marketing and club organization, which is significantly less important. It can give EA a “Ponzi scheme” vibe on campus, because EA groups are disproportionately focused on growing their group as opposed to skilling up and tackling object-level issues. Instead, many group leaders should think about what would be most useful for them, and then invite others to join them in the activity they’re doing. For examples of this, skim the solutions section. Outline: The Problem (in 4 Claims) Solutions Caveats and Why I Might be Wrong The problem The problem is that organizers and others at university EA groups (and possibly other EA groups) are spending too much time marketing EA and doing basic operations work when they should be skilling up. I think this is bad for the organizers, the epistemics of the group, the members of the group, and the external view of the group. By skilling up - also referred to as skill building - I mean taking action to improve one’s epistemics, knowledge of key global problems, or career. Most of the actions that fall under skilling up involve cognitively intensive learning. Some actions that fall within the category of skill building would be extremely useful for some and trivial for others (e.g. doing an ML bootcamp may be great for someone looking to do AI safety research, but useless for someone interested in GPR). For the rest of this essay, I will define marketing as “marketing EA, doing (often menial) operations work for EA, and explaining to other EAs how to market EA”. I recognize this is a broader definition of marketing than is generally used. However, I want to be able to simply point at the issue I’m talking about, which is when individuals - often top organizers - spend too much time doing activities like: running fellowships, advertising at club fairs, creating marketing materials (posters, emails, websites, etc), pitching EA to others, 1:1 outreach, and some events. Note: Some parts of organizing an event would be included in my definition of marketing and some would not. If hosting an event involves a ...