I really appreciate you reasoning independently, working through to try to overcome scope insensitivity (and communicate clearly/graphically to others!), and make important prioritisation decisions that affect how you can best help others. Interesting to see your thought process; thanks for sharing!

I agree and am guilty of not doing this myself; I mostly only leave comments when I want to question or critique something. So after reading this I went back and left two positive comments on two posts I read today. (Plus also this comment.) Thanks for the explanation and nudge!

I appreciate the original post and also appreciate you highlighting this useful extra info.

Thanks to both!

Great idea! Seems good to try out and I imagine that a bunch of the infrastructure and expertise CEA has already built up will easily transfer over.

I'm intrigued about the summary costs (total, per attendee average); $, CEA staff time, local organiser staff time etc. I think the linked posts at the top contained some but not all of this. Intrigued to hear how it goes going forward.

In case you and @David Michelson haven't seen them, I and some colleagues did a bunch of research into social movement case studies a few years ago.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ATpxEPwCQWQAFf4XX/key-lessons-from-social-movement-history

Not to suggest that more wouldn't be useful, just an FYI in case you didn't know and would find them helpful!

ank you for this post—it looks very interesting. I’ve given it a quick skim but wanted to check in on a concern/critique I have before engaging more closely with the recommendations.

Most of the post seems dedicated to explaining why the Fabians were so successful. 

However, I’m not yet convinced that they actually caused meaningful change. You begin by listing some of their goals and then highlight how many of those goals came to fruition, but that doesn’t establish their causal role in making those changes happen.

It looks like you provide two main forms of evidence for their influence:

1. Noting that they had influential members or supporters in many countries.

2. Quoting a particular supporter of the Fabians.

Unfortunately, both of these seem like weak evidence to me. The first point is fairly common—many people sign up for societies and pay lip service to their supposed importance without necessarily contributing to their impact. For example, PlayPumps (a classic Effective Altruist case of an ineffective and even counterproductive yet widely endorsed charity) had many influential supporters, but that didn’t make it effective or significant.

As for the Margaret Cole quote, it doesn’t provide much evidence either—it’s essentially just an endorsement, asserting that the Fabians were important without substantiating that claim?

To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong about the Fabians being influential. Rather, I think the post hasn’t yet provided strong evidence for that claim. If you were to include more comprehensive or compelling evidence, this could be a really valuable post.

Thanks a lot for your work here!

(Apologies if this seems pedantic. I think these methodological considerations are important for the effort to learn useful lessons from history though. See these posts I wrote for some related thoughts)

https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/what-can-the-farmed-animal-movement-learn-from-history

https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/social-movement-case-studies-methodology )

Random idea on the random idea: such an event (or indeed similar social opportunities for ETGers) could charge for participation and aim to fully cover costs, or even make a profit that gets donated.

EtGers have money they want to give away, and this is clearly a service that should be supporting them to address a need they have --> they should be willing to pay for it.

Also, if the service just focused on providing EtGers with fun, social connections, and a great community rather than 'overfitting' to what seems directly relevant to impact, I think it might be easier to make it successful and grow it. But then a bunch of the money would be spent on things that are quite disconnected from impact, and arguably shouldn't be funded by Open Philanthropy, EAIF etc and would be better coming from EtGers personal/social/fun budgets rather than out of their donations.

Arguments against: 

separate fuzzies and utilons... This might be blurring the boundaries and making it hard to optimise for either, or making it confusing for EtGers whether they should see it as a donation or not.

EtGers might underestimate the benefits of investing in themselves in this way (in the same way people often underinvest in their own mental health, productivity systems, etc) and offering it free or subsidised might better set incentives that accurately represent its value.

Thanks for the useful post Marcus!

If people reading might be a good fit for running a project helping to improve funding diversification, I encourage them to apply to the EA Infrastructure Fund. We are keen to receive applications that help with this (and aren't currently very funding constrained ourselves).

As for ideas for projects; Marcus lists some above, I list some on my post, and you might have ideas of your own.

I don't know all the details since it's a governance/operational thing but I don't think we expect this to be an issue, thankfully!

I didn't write that wording originally (I just copied it over from this post), so I can't speak exactly to their original thinking.

But I think the phrasing includes the EA community, it just uses the plural to avoid excluding others.

Some examples that jump to mind:

• EA
• Rationality, x-risk, s-risk, AI Safety, wild animal welfare, etc to varying degrees
• Org-specific communities, e.g. the fellows and follow-up opportunities on various fellowship programmes.

I would like to more clearly understand what the canonical "stewards of the EA brand" in CEA and the EAIF have in mind for the future of EA groups and the movement as a whole?

I think this suggests more of a sense of unity/agreement than I expect is true in practice. These are complex things and individuals have different views and ideas!

Thanks for thinking this stuff through and coming up with ideas!