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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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. 
   1. 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.
   2. 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 groups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org with any questions or concerns.

Agus is one of my favorite people I have ever worked with! Would recommend :) 

Quick take on Burnout

Note: I am obviously not an expert here nor do I have much first hand experience but I thought it could be useful for people I work with to know how I currently conceptualize burnout. I was then encouraged to post on the forum. This is based off around 4 cases of burnout that I have seen (at varying levels of proximity) and conversations with people who have seen significantly more.

• Different Conceptions of Burnout
  • Basic conception that people often have: working too hard until energy is depleted.
  • Yes, working too hard can lead to exhaustion, but there's a difference between exhaustion and burnout.
  • Exhaustion vs. Burnout
    • Exhaustion:
      • Result of working very hard/ a lot of hours. Possibly including sleep deprivation or just brain fog.
      • Can often be resolved with a short break or vacation (eg: one week)
    • Burnout:
      • More pervasive and affects many areas of life/work. While it shared many physical symptoms of exhaustion, it is deeper.
      • A short vacation isn't sufficient to resolve it.
• Core Feelings Tied to Burnout
  • Burnout is often tied to more core feelings like motivation, recognition, and feeling good about the work you're doing. It is more tied to your feelings of motivation and value than pure sleep deprivation or lack of rest. If someone is unsure of the value of their work and isn't super recognized, especially if they're also working really hard, that can really get into your brain and feels like a recipe for burnout.
• Importance of Motivation
  • This is why I stress the value of motivation so much
  • Nuance: we should distinguish motivation from being overly enthusiastic about programs.
    • Jessica take is that we should have set times for re-evaluating the value of programs. Having set evaluation times helps reduce constant worry about program value but still maintains our ability to have a critical eye toward making sure we are having a large impact.
  • To some extent motivation is a very moldable thing and if you want to try and get more motivated, you can (but it often includes help from others like your manager and team)
• Quick note
  • This isn’t me advocating for exhaustion because it isn’t burnout. I think exhaustion can be very counterproductive and leads to future hours being less productive. 

My main thing here is that I don’t think our LFG / work hard culture is the recipe for burnout. I think being uncertain of the value of our programs, facing many internal structural changes, and not being on top of motivation can be. This is part of why I am excited about the M&E work we are doing, people doing tour of duties, and people tracking motivation/actively valuing it. 

Jessica addition in Dec. 2024:

• Getting sick more often than usual is an indicator to be aware of. This can lead to a spiral of “Get sick, get less done, get more stressed and feel like you are not doing good enough/not feeling good about your work, that stress causing you to get more sick/get sick again”
  
  
  (I will add for the forum that right now I am feeling really good about the value of our programs but its always good to be approaching programs critically to ensure you are having the most impact :) ) 

Very quickly: I feel like it's useful to share that I did this survey and found it very hard, and a lot of other people did too. In particular, it did feel pretty rushed for such difficult questions that we didn't necessarily have a fully informed pre-existing take on. OP does mention this, but I wanted to stress that for people reading this post.

I still think it has a lot of useful information and is directionally very informative. I might get a chance to write up more thoughts here, but I am not sure I will be able to. I mostly wanted to give a quick additional flag :) 

Thanks for sharing this! The power of prompts and letting go of nice to haves have been things I've noticed in my work as well. Good luck with your future efforts here!

Thank you! And thank you so much for your podcasts - like I mentioned in the post I found them really helpful and relatable and am grateful for you sharing so much!

I'm on buproprion xl and generally they don't recommend taking it at night because it can cause insomnia but I'm really lucky and have never really had problems with that. Instead, I just found waking up in the morning extremely difficult - I often woke up sad and just wanted to stay in bed and keep sleeping (even if I had slept a really long time). Due to the extended release, taking it at night means that peak effects are now happening in the mornings when I was most sad / low motivation before. So that was honestly just really great for me.

This is super interesting! How do you do the experiments? Do you change one thing at a time and track?