Bad omens in current community building

Abstract

Community building has recently had a surge in energy and resources. It scales well, it’s high leverage, and you can get involved in it even if six months ago you’d never heard of Effective Altruism. Having seen how hard some people are rowing this boat, I’d like to see if I can’t steer it a bit. Some current approaches to community building especially in student groups are driving away great people. These approaches involve optimising for engaging a lot of new people in a waythat undermines good epistemics, and trades off against other goals which are harder to measure but equally important (cf Goodhart’s Law). I argue that this is a top priority because the people that these approaches drive away are in many cases the people EA needs the most.