Yes, learning how to recognize (and fund) good stewardship is a hard skill.

But I feel that (some) genuinely committed, longer-term EAs are exactly the kind of people who may actually be able to sit down with each other to do that.

I am speaking with experience of being a Quaker (the other seeking-focused moral ambition cult I hang out in), and the answer the Quakers have is to fund administrators, not pastors. That is, the people who take salaries for community building essentially take direction from the volunteer community organisers and get all the niggly administrative bits sorted out to ensure that the "job" of a voluntary community organiser remains fun and meaningful rather than overly stressful. It also means it costs a lot less - you don't need that many administrators.

I could see this model working fairly well for a longer-term EA group. And it's basically how the EA Forum works: paid administrators keep the platform going and enforce basic discipline standards, "volunteer" EAs post whatever they're working on. And one could argue most of EAG works like this too: CEA hosts the space and food and Swapcard and enforces basic conduct standards for 1:1s, and leaves the EAs to all get on with EA-ing.

It shouldn't be such a hard sell. Why, when well stewarded meta-EA is such a ridiculously high-impact giving opportunity, and EA is full of givers searching for impact, do so few of us give to EA infrastructure?

Ultimately I think this is going to have to come from individual pledgers / EtGers who take control of their local groups via donations and reshape them into something that works for people in EA for the long haul.

Also I don't think we're disagreeing on the core point, which is that people who really want to improve the world effectively should come to an EAG and try to figure out how.

I'm glad you had a good experience!

Ending global extreme poverty via evidence-backed targeted cash transfers would be roughly $300 billion a year https://cega.berkeley.edu/end-of-poverty/

I don't think that's "every conceivable project that will make the world better", that's basically via GiveDirectly which a lot of EAs contribute to and is consistently estimated to be within the EA GHD funding bar sphere and does joint projects with GiveWell, part of "the main portfolio" if you will. Not to even start on the funding gaps in other bits of GHD, in animal welfare, in governance improvement, etc.

I understand that $50 billion sounds like a lot, and I'm really happy EA will be allocating more money effectively, but relative to both the scale of critical global need and the scope of possible global funding (shown via defense budgets) it's still tiny. We are a fraction of a shard of the size we "need to be".

(It's *roughly* $1 billion a year EAs have to allocate, whereas NATO spends about $1.5 trillion a year)

I have to disagree with you on one point. EA is and has always been critically short of funding. It is that way before Anthropic, it will be that way after Anthropic, and everyone who ever complains that EA hasn't managed to fix all the problems in the world yet needs to compare EA's total funding level to the total NATO defense budget and truly understand why that is - the world's central decision makers misallocate global financial priorities towards preparations for war rather than eradications of the root causes of war.

That's why we need the people who can do the very best work with the funding we have to come and network with us and learn there they might fit in. We are critically short of funding, and always in triage, but some things are triaged as worth it.

An absolutely critical point of building an EA community that works for established members is

•  the established members contribute financially to this community infrastructure
• the established members accept a "slightly less than professional" experience that costs less money to organize
• the established members give useful critical feedback to the organisers about what they want to see in their group, accepting that they are essentially employing the community builder to steward them

• the organisers, being funded and guided via existing members who attend the group, adopt a design habit of welcoming newcomers who find their way there, and being open to more people joining, but not making the whole of the community for them. In particular it doesn't compromise on its epistemics or seeking discipline for outreach purposes, except in notably newcomer-focused spaces.

  These kind of culture norms have to start at the local group level. I would like to see city groups take membership subscriptions, for example.

Did you enjoy EA Global? Was it useful to you? 

Consider "tipping" CEA with a donation ( you can donate at https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/centre-for-effective-altruism ) to close any gap between what you paid at registration and the value you feel you have received.

Many people will compromise their morals for money. That's life. I try not to hold it against them.

For what it's worth, EA's donor core of pledgers/EtGers probably aren't going anywhere or compromising anything much, being a group of people who constantly could just decide to have more money and don't. So maybe they'd be a nicer group for you to hang out with if this kind of moral compromise really bugs you?

Personally I'd quite like to hear about your new charity.

I think you're not realising the key difference a non-EA observer might see between

• Shrimp on a farm (of which EAs have welfare projects going)
• Wild, non-farmed non-fished shrimp (which are not to my knowledge the target of any EA welfare projects)

Which means a lot of this is about human intervention in the lives of animals, and therefore, human treatment of animals - cruel or not.

A simple "Some EAs believe we shouldn't be cruel to animals, no matter how small, especially the animals we eat" generally works as a short answer. I generally find people don't want to take the moral position of "humans should be cruel to the animals we eat".