You make claims that your movement is growing fast and that many people are already involved. These claims would be more credible you presented more evidence for how committed these people are. Joining a facebook group requires minimal commitment. It’s even less impressive if THINK was free-riding from existing rational altruism groups.
When I look at the website, I don’t see much evidence of 20 serious, well-organized groups being ready to roll-out three weeks from now.
What we actually have is around 50 potential groups, ranging on a spectrum from “might possibly happen” to “is almost certainly going to launch this fall” to “going to launch, and looks to be very strong right out the gate.” The 20 meetups I referred to are groups with organizers which we’ve skyped with extensively, have talked about what needs to get done, and consider it highly likely that the group will launch successfully.
Realistically, some will likely flourish strongly and others will not. The primary difference in our strategy as compared to Giving-What-We-Can and 80000 hours is a massive outreach program. We’ve currently sent out e-mails to around a thousand students who are already involved with charity meetups or otherwise active in student groups. Our volunteers are continuing to research additional schools and find more people to recruit.
We’re casting a wide net, and designing a system that is easier to replicate and self-propagate than existing EA networks.
Some of this is taking advantage of existing altruist networks (the responses from Harvard we’ve gotten mostly comes from an existing Effective Altruist meetup, and the primary difference is that now they’ll have access to our meetup modules for weekly content). But we’ve also reached many new people. We’re particularly excited about Boston University, where 8 people independently replied with interest in starting a meetup there, despite no existing Effective Altruist community.
The website will gradually be updated to showcase individual meetups and organizers. Signalling competence is certainly important, but it does take work beyond the actual competence and it was more important to start promoting the website than to make sure it was perfected first.
You make claims that your movement is growing fast and that many people are already involved. These claims would be more credible you presented more evidence for how committed these people are. Joining a facebook group requires minimal commitment. It’s even less impressive if THINK was free-riding from existing rational altruism groups.
When I look at the website, I don’t see much evidence of 20 serious, well-organized groups being ready to roll-out three weeks from now.
Unrelated point: colleges have complicated restrictions on use of their logo. I’m not sure if your use is a problem, but you might want to check. See, e.g. http://www.clubsandsigs.harvard.edu/article.html?aid=106.
Definitely a legitimate concern.
What we actually have is around 50 potential groups, ranging on a spectrum from “might possibly happen” to “is almost certainly going to launch this fall” to “going to launch, and looks to be very strong right out the gate.” The 20 meetups I referred to are groups with organizers which we’ve skyped with extensively, have talked about what needs to get done, and consider it highly likely that the group will launch successfully.
Realistically, some will likely flourish strongly and others will not. The primary difference in our strategy as compared to Giving-What-We-Can and 80000 hours is a massive outreach program. We’ve currently sent out e-mails to around a thousand students who are already involved with charity meetups or otherwise active in student groups. Our volunteers are continuing to research additional schools and find more people to recruit.
We’re casting a wide net, and designing a system that is easier to replicate and self-propagate than existing EA networks.
Some of this is taking advantage of existing altruist networks (the responses from Harvard we’ve gotten mostly comes from an existing Effective Altruist meetup, and the primary difference is that now they’ll have access to our meetup modules for weekly content). But we’ve also reached many new people. We’re particularly excited about Boston University, where 8 people independently replied with interest in starting a meetup there, despite no existing Effective Altruist community.
The website will gradually be updated to showcase individual meetups and organizers. Signalling competence is certainly important, but it does take work beyond the actual competence and it was more important to start promoting the website than to make sure it was perfected first.
Thanks. We’ll look into that.