Relentless generalist, ex community builder, AI policy activist and occasional researcher.
More responsive via email: [my_first_name].[my_last_name]@gmail.com
Difficult to say. I think it's just a lucky case of a small country that managed to get a few active organizers early on (and managed to get members fill out the survey 😁).
AFAIK, we haven't done anything significantly differently to other groups. It's been a fairly standard Intro Course, Career Course, Public Events, Core Volunteer Team setup.
Whether it's got something to do with the Estonian cultural landscape affecting people's readiness to join EA is hard to assess, as I have little experience recruiting outside Estonia :)
But most people I've spoken to in Intro Courses have been pretty much immediately sold on EA ideas, and have been familiar with animal welfare and global health concerns.
I'd love to see the results of a good experiment in in the member-first approach.
I'm leaning more towards the cause-first approach, but possibly for the wrong reasons. It's easier to measure, it's impact is easier to communicate and understand, the funnel feels shorter and more straight-forward, the activities and tools to achieve impact are there for me to use, I don't need to invent anything from skratch. This all might be a streetlight fallacy.
The strongest for the member-first approach for me would be:
Thanks for the nice words!
Regarding the "active members" count, here are the stats:
So to increase activity on Slack, we'd either have to prevent people leaving or add people to Slack. We could:
But another queston to ask is, whether activity on Slack should even be a metric to optimize for. I feel like it's okay to a have a static member count, as long you are creating lots of HEAs.
This touches a bit on the the question of what even is a national EA group: whether it's necessarily a big community of friends, or can it be a narrow attempt at getting more people working on top causes? I'm leaning more towards the latter lately.
PS! Looks like there's lots of collaboration to be done on the mushroom front :)
Calling all Lithuanians!
I'm on the lookout for people who are interested in effective altruism / rationality and living in Lithuania.
If you happen to know anyone like that, let me know, so I could invite them to apply to the upcoming EAGxNordics conference.
For context, I am on the organising team for EAGx Nordics and one of our goals is to grow the smaller EA communities in the region. Most notably Lithuania, which is the largest country in the Baltics, but has the smallest EA presence. My hope is that the conference will help connect existing EA-aligned individuals living in Lithuania, who might not know each other.
Right. I was also concerned some of the proposals here might be misleading to be named 'pauses'. Proposals to 'significantly slow down development' might be more accurate in that case.
Maybe that's a better way to approach talking about pausing. See it more as a spectrum of stronger and weaker slowdown mechanisms?