EA - An Elephant in the Community Building room by Kaleem

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An Elephant in the Community Building room, published by Kaleem on August 21, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.These are my own views, and not those of my employer, EVOps, or of CEA who I have contracted for in the past and am currently contracting for now. This was meant to be a strategy fortnight contribution, but it's now a super delayed/unofficial, and underwritten strategy fortnight contribution.Before you read this:This is pretty emotionally raw, so please 1) don't update too much on it if you think I'm just being dramatic 2) I might come back and endorse or delete this at some point. I've put off writing this for a long time, because I know that some of the conclusions or implications might be hurtful or cause me to become even more unpopular than I already feel I am - as a result, I've left it really brief, but I'm willing to make it more through if I get the sense that people think it'd be valuable.This post is not meant as a disparagement of any of my fellow African or Asian or Latin-American EAs. This is less about you, and more about how much the world sucks, and how hard the state of the world makes it for us to fully participate in, and contribute to, EA the way we'd like to. I think I'm hoping to read a bunch of comments proving me wrong or at least making me reconsider how I feel about this. That being said, I don't like letting feelings get in the way of truth seeking and doing what's right. So here it goes.Summary:I think community builders and those funding/steering community building efforts should be more explicit and open about what their theory of change for global community building is (especially in light of the reduced amount of funding available), as there could be significant tradeoffs in impact between different strategies.IntroductionI think there are two broad conceptualisations of what/how EA functions in the world, and each has a corresponding community building strategy. If you think there are more than these two, or that these are wrong or could be improved, please let me know. From my experience, I think that all community building initiatives fall into one of two strategies/worldviews, each with a different theory of change. These are:Global EAEA can be for anybody in the world - The goal of EA community building is to spread the ideas of EA as far and wide as possible. By showing people that regardless of your context, you can make a difference which is possibly hundreds of times better than you would have done otherwise, we'll be increasing the chances of motivated and talented people getting involved in high-impact work, and generally increasing the counterfactual positive impact of humanity on the wellbeing of living and future beings. I have a sense that following this strategy currently leads to having a more transparent/non-secretive/less insidious optic for the movement.Efforts which fall into this bucket would be things like:funding city and national groups in countries which aren't major power-centers in the US, UK, EU, or Chinafunding university groups which aren't in the top 100/200 in the world for subjects which have a track record of being well-represented amongst global decision-makers.Allocating community resources to increasing blindly-racial or geographic diversity and inclusion in the community (rather than specific viewpoints or underrepresented moral beliefs etc).Narrow EAPower and influence follow a heavy-tailed distribution, and we need power and influence to make important changes. If there is a small group of people who are extremely influential or high-potential, then the goal of community building should be to seek out and try to convince them to use their resources to have an outsized positive influence on the wellbeing of current and future beings. I have a sense that the way that ...