Hey Harri, thanks for writing this, and thanks to everyone engaging with it.
I lead the growth pillar at CEA, so I'll just speak to that (as opposed to diversifying funding or improving the brand, which are the other outward-facing pillars of CEA's 2025-26 strategy). Within talent growth, I am not going to be able to respond to every point made in your post or in the comments.
I won't pretend the answers here are obvious. Together with my team, I think about growth and its tradeoffs a lot, and one of the few things we’re sure about is that there are real opportunity costs in either direction, whether we take a more growth-centric approach or we don't. I think reasonable people can come to different conclusions about what's right to prioritize and to what degree.
An important part of my own model is that EA's question-nature matters, but a question that never gets acted on doesn't help anyone. The acting is where impact comes from. That's something we try to capture in our metrics, and part of why I think it's important to have metrics at all, to track whether impactful actions are being taken, not just whether the ideas are alive. That being said, there are no perfect metrics, they all come with downsides and risk of goodharting.
Our growth team, not to mention the rest of CEA, think it's really important that the EA community stays healthy. I am keen for people to share with us any data or evidence suggesting there are places where our actions are undermining the health of the community (e.g. not meeting established quality bars), so we can factor it into our strategy or tactics.
We recently wrote more on why we value growth and the risks that we're tracking in this post. And you can see more on how we think about maintaining quality with growth in this section (with more information on our G.R.O.W. principles here).
That is great! I also found this book really helpful, but maybe a bit less engrossing than Rory found it, haha - in general, I feel like it has a bit of a slow burn that, when you make it through the full thing, does a good job at really lodging a way of thinking into your brain. So I would recommend sticking with it even if it seems like you are not immediately getting tons of insights :)
Something I've reflected on a lot this year is that having a real strategy means the things you let go of should hurt (because they were really valuable). The non-monetary support side of the CBG program is a case where both things are true: this is the right direction for CEA's focus, and something real is being lost. I'm grateful to Naomi for guiding us through this difficult decision, and for naming that honestly in this post.
Thank you for sharing this! I think it is a really great and helpful read and highlights some important values that I identify with. I have already shared it a few times :)
Thanks for sharing your experiences and reflections here — I really appreciate the thoughtfulness. I want to offer some context on the group organizer situation you described, as someone who was running the university groups program at the time.
On the strategy itself: At the time, our scalable programs were pretty focused from evidence we had seen that much of the impact came from the organizers themselves. We of course did want groups to go well more generally, but in deciding where to put our marginal resource we were focusing on group organizers. It was a fairly unintuitive strategy — and I get how that could feel misaligned or even misleading if it wasn’t clearly communicated.
On communication: We did try to be explicit about this strategy — it was featured at organizer retreats and in parts of our support programming. But we didn’t consistently communicate it across all our materials. That inconsistency was an oversight on our part. Definitely not an attempt to be deceptive — just something that didn’t land as clearly as we hoped.
Where we’re at now: We’ve since updated our approach. The current strategy is less focused narrowly on organizers and more on helping groups be great overall. That said, we still think a lot of the value often comes from a small, highly engaged core — which often includes organizers, but not exclusively.
In retrospect, I wish we’d communicated this more clearly across the board. When a strategy is unintuitive, a few clear statements in a few places often isn’t enough to make it legible. Sorry again if this felt off — I really appreciate you surfacing it.
Thank you for thoughtfully engaging! On the growth team side, Angelina is unfortunately ill right now, but we plan on responding to this in a few days when she gets back :)
You could argue that growth mechanisms to find these people would still lead to the movement having weaker commitment to the principles. I address some adjacent points in my response to Neel’s comment here.
Thanks Neel! I’ve jotted down some quick clarifications below.
Overall: as I mentioned in my previous comment, I don’t think growth is obviously good and there are a lot of various risks to be aware of. I also think that even though it is only one of four strategy pillars at CEA it is a somewhat easier pillar for us to contribute to as we have more foundations for it. That could mean us unintentionally prioritizing it too much, and that is something I am trying to track. So, overall, I am sympathetic to a lot of your concerns but generally am more optimistic about this direction (as I’ll discuss below).
Some more specific clarifications:
We are trying to grow EA over time, not just during this year. Growing over time will require doing things like working on brand, foundation building, and rehabilitation. We are serious about the “sustainable” part of growth and growth itself is only one of our four major strategy pillars this year.
We are not optimizing for growth — our vision is currently to aim for moderate, sustainable growth (versus growth at all costs). We think growth over time will be important for EA to reach its full potential, but optimizing for it would likely be counterproductive to impact goals for various reasons, as you say.
We are trying to grow the number of people involved in EA across the entire funnel, not just at the top. So part of growth is helping people become more high context/helping high context people progress in their involvement and impact.
I think that retention of people already energized by EA is an important part of growth (if people leave or become demotivated this is of course bad for growth!) — part of this project is thinking about how to double down and revitalize the existing community, and not just about how to bring in new people.
I think it’s appropriate that some EA community building programs have some context level barrier to entry (for instance in-person EA Global events have an admissions policy), whereas some don’t (the EA Newsletter is designed to be a no-barrier intro to EA). My general take is that different spaces should continue to optimize for people with different levels of context. For many of the context-restricted programs, I am actively fighting for “lowering the bar” to be off the table as a growth strategy.
Quick response to another piece:
I think Reflections and lessons from Effective Ventures is a nice example of some of the post morteming etc. I am not saying this is /enough/ but wanted to flag the example as writing it took a fair amount of capacity and shows some work in this area.
Hi, I'm Jessica, and I lead the growth pillar of CEA’s strategy. I’m excited about the potential for the EA community to grow and for EA ideas to reach more people, and I wanted to share how we’re thinking about that growth.
Our main goal is the same as EA’s: to help others as effectively as possible. We believe that growing the EA community can help us achieve more of the good we want to see in the world. While the community isn’t perfect, I’m proud of its accomplishments. I believe it can help many more people increase their impact—while the EA community can benefit from new perspectives, experiences, and domain knowledge..
That said, we’re very aware that growth comes with risks. As the post mentions, we’re not trying to grow EA at all costs. Growth isn’t our only goal, and we’ve put internal principles in place to avoid compromising our core values in pursuit of scale. I feel pretty good about where we are on that.
Other concerns are harder to track, like increased risk from risky actors joining our community, scandals, or undesired change in community culture, ambition, or epistemics leading us to be less effective overall. There’s also the concern that our strategies could lead to many people getting involved in EA, but their involvement is not overall positive (either for them or the world, e.g., if they feel they don’t have good ways to contribute immediately).
These are real concerns, and we’re actively tracking them. I used to be more skeptical about EA growth myself. But overall, I’m excited about aiming for moderate, sustainable growth at the current margin—moving the trajectory upward while managing risks carefully. We want and need the community’s help in spotting those risks early.
I also lead the Groups Team, and I want to briefly speak to group organizers: I could imagine someone reading this update and making major changes to their group strategy based on CEA’s growth focus. Please don’t over-update based on this. We continue to advocate for advertising your programs broadly at the start of the semester (and specific points in the year for non-uni groups) and then focusing on a smaller group of people who are taking the ideas most seriously. If our advice changes, we’ll share that clearly through our usual channels (Slack, newsletter, advising calls, etc.).
The guidance in our existing materials—like this advice post, my EAG talk on common pitfalls in community building, and our Resource Center —still stands. We think groups trying to grow too much can be counterproductive to their goals. We care deeply about more than just numbers, that hasn’t changed under our new strategy.
Finally, I may not have time to engage much in comments, but please do reach out to [email protected] with any questions or concerns.
Hey Harri, thanks for writing this, and thanks to everyone engaging with it.
I lead the growth pillar at CEA, so I'll just speak to that (as opposed to diversifying funding or improving the brand, which are the other outward-facing pillars of CEA's 2025-26 strategy). Within talent growth, I am not going to be able to respond to every point made in your post or in the comments.
I won't pretend the answers here are obvious. Together with my team, I think about growth and its tradeoffs a lot, and one of the few things we’re sure about is that there are real opportunity costs in either direction, whether we take a more growth-centric approach or we don't. I think reasonable people can come to different conclusions about what's right to prioritize and to what degree.
An important part of my own model is that EA's question-nature matters, but a question that never gets acted on doesn't help anyone. The acting is where impact comes from. That's something we try to capture in our metrics, and part of why I think it's important to have metrics at all, to track whether impactful actions are being taken, not just whether the ideas are alive. That being said, there are no perfect metrics, they all come with downsides and risk of goodharting.
Our growth team, not to mention the rest of CEA, think it's really important that the EA community stays healthy. I am keen for people to share with us any data or evidence suggesting there are places where our actions are undermining the health of the community (e.g. not meeting established quality bars), so we can factor it into our strategy or tactics.
We recently wrote more on why we value growth and the risks that we're tracking in this post. And you can see more on how we think about maintaining quality with growth in this section (with more information on our G.R.O.W. principles here).
That is great! I also found this book really helpful, but maybe a bit less engrossing than Rory found it, haha - in general, I feel like it has a bit of a slow burn that, when you make it through the full thing, does a good job at really lodging a way of thinking into your brain. So I would recommend sticking with it even if it seems like you are not immediately getting tons of insights :)
Something I've reflected on a lot this year is that having a real strategy means the things you let go of should hurt (because they were really valuable). The non-monetary support side of the CBG program is a case where both things are true: this is the right direction for CEA's focus, and something real is being lost. I'm grateful to Naomi for guiding us through this difficult decision, and for naming that honestly in this post.
Quick Pitch for Using Toggl
Thank you for sharing this! I think it is a really great and helpful read and highlights some important values that I identify with. I have already shared it a few times :)
Thanks for sharing your experiences and reflections here — I really appreciate the thoughtfulness. I want to offer some context on the group organizer situation you described, as someone who was running the university groups program at the time.
On the strategy itself:
At the time, our scalable programs were pretty focused from evidence we had seen that much of the impact came from the organizers themselves. We of course did want groups to go well more generally, but in deciding where to put our marginal resource we were focusing on group organizers. It was a fairly unintuitive strategy — and I get how that could feel misaligned or even misleading if it wasn’t clearly communicated.
On communication:
We did try to be explicit about this strategy — it was featured at organizer retreats and in parts of our support programming. But we didn’t consistently communicate it across all our materials. That inconsistency was an oversight on our part. Definitely not an attempt to be deceptive — just something that didn’t land as clearly as we hoped.
Where we’re at now:
We’ve since updated our approach. The current strategy is less focused narrowly on organizers and more on helping groups be great overall. That said, we still think a lot of the value often comes from a small, highly engaged core — which often includes organizers, but not exclusively.
In retrospect, I wish we’d communicated this more clearly across the board. When a strategy is unintuitive, a few clear statements in a few places often isn’t enough to make it legible. Sorry again if this felt off — I really appreciate you surfacing it.
Thank you for thoughtfully engaging! On the growth team side, Angelina is unfortunately ill right now, but we plan on responding to this in a few days when she gets back :)
I just want to quickly note that I think there are a lot of people who would resonate with the principles of EA but haven't heard about it. Very few people have heard of EA, and while there are some methodological nuances to be had with this study, it suggests that the number of EA-sympathetic students on NYU’s campus is over 5x the number of students who were sympathetic and familiar with EA. So generally, I think there is a lot of potential growth available of people who do strongly align to EA principles.
You could argue that growth mechanisms to find these people would still lead to the movement having weaker commitment to the principles. I address some adjacent points in my response to Neel’s comment here.
Thanks Neel! I’ve jotted down some quick clarifications below.
Overall: as I mentioned in my previous comment, I don’t think growth is obviously good and there are a lot of various risks to be aware of. I also think that even though it is only one of four strategy pillars at CEA it is a somewhat easier pillar for us to contribute to as we have more foundations for it. That could mean us unintentionally prioritizing it too much, and that is something I am trying to track. So, overall, I am sympathetic to a lot of your concerns but generally am more optimistic about this direction (as I’ll discuss below).
Some more specific clarifications:
Quick response to another piece:
I think Reflections and lessons from Effective Ventures is a nice example of some of the post morteming etc. I am not saying this is /enough/ but wanted to flag the example as writing it took a fair amount of capacity and shows some work in this area.
Hi, I'm Jessica, and I lead the growth pillar of CEA’s strategy. I’m excited about the potential for the EA community to grow and for EA ideas to reach more people, and I wanted to share how we’re thinking about that growth.
Our main goal is the same as EA’s: to help others as effectively as possible. We believe that growing the EA community can help us achieve more of the good we want to see in the world. While the community isn’t perfect, I’m proud of its accomplishments. I believe it can help many more people increase their impact—while the EA community can benefit from new perspectives, experiences, and domain knowledge..
That said, we’re very aware that growth comes with risks. As the post mentions, we’re not trying to grow EA at all costs. Growth isn’t our only goal, and we’ve put internal principles in place to avoid compromising our core values in pursuit of scale. I feel pretty good about where we are on that.
Other concerns are harder to track, like increased risk from risky actors joining our community, scandals, or undesired change in community culture, ambition, or epistemics leading us to be less effective overall. There’s also the concern that our strategies could lead to many people getting involved in EA, but their involvement is not overall positive (either for them or the world, e.g., if they feel they don’t have good ways to contribute immediately).
These are real concerns, and we’re actively tracking them. I used to be more skeptical about EA growth myself. But overall, I’m excited about aiming for moderate, sustainable growth at the current margin—moving the trajectory upward while managing risks carefully. We want and need the community’s help in spotting those risks early.
I also lead the Groups Team, and I want to briefly speak to group organizers: I could imagine someone reading this update and making major changes to their group strategy based on CEA’s growth focus. Please don’t over-update based on this. We continue to advocate for advertising your programs broadly at the start of the semester (and specific points in the year for non-uni groups) and then focusing on a smaller group of people who are taking the ideas most seriously. If our advice changes, we’ll share that clearly through our usual channels (Slack, newsletter, advising calls, etc.).
The guidance in our existing materials—like this advice post, my EAG talk on common pitfalls in community building, and our Resource Center —still stands. We think groups trying to grow too much can be counterproductive to their goals. We care deeply about more than just numbers, that hasn’t changed under our new strategy.
Finally, I may not have time to engage much in comments, but please do reach out to [email protected] with any questions or concerns.