EA - Announcing CEA’s Interim Managing Director by Ben West

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Announcing CEA’s Interim Managing Director, published by Ben West on April 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.A few weeks ago, Max Dalton stepped down as Executive Director of CEA. Recently, the EV US and UK boards approved my appointment as Interim Managing Director in his stead.CEA accomplished a lot in 2022, and I’m honored to lead the team in this interim period.My communication style is more lighthearted than Max’s was; my model is:People don’t read announcements, and will engage longer if it’s funny.It seems good to bring humor to the Forum, and generally make EA a more fun place to be.Also, I would rather just be myself on the Forum. Maybe I will regret this if a journalist quotes me out of context, but I’d rather do the thing that seems right to me than the thing which seems best for (a seeming definition of) PR.But obviously some people have different opinions, and if you just want to skip to the serious bit you can go here.For everyone else: the remainder of this post goes over some of our highlights from the past year, as well as some suggestions I have for the future.Some CEA Highlights by TeamEvents TeamThe Events Team’s core metric is the number of connections made. More information about this can be found here.This metric has shown substantial growth, approximately doubling from 2021-2022. The team is to be congratulated for their hard work and success:However, recent victories won by Shrimp Welfare Project and others have made clear that there is an important audience which is underserved by current EAGs:I am therefore directing the events team to put EAG Bay Area 2024 actually in the San Francisco bay:EAG Bay Area 2024 (artist’s rendition)Online Team: EA ForumEngagement with object-level posts (those not about the EA community) has approximately quintupled over the past two years:Although weirdly engagement on posts about the EA community spiked in November and are only now going back down to normal levels:This is baffling because we did not roll out any large features in mid-November. If you have any guesses about what might have occurred here, please let us know.Groups TeamOur University Group Accelerator Program (UGAP) program has been growing rapidly:And thousands of people have been through our virtual programs:However, there is something important about meeting in person. Like many of you, I was disturbed to learn that CEA does not actually own a castle, despite the obvious community building benefits. I am therefore instructing Community Building Grants recipients that at least one third of grant expenditures must be castle-related. This relates to my AI safety strategy, which I hope to publish more about soon.Executive OfficeIt’s a great mark for our transparency that almost all of the data in this post can be found publicly. However, many stakeholders do not have access to that webpage.I am therefore instructing the executive office team to create a dashboard which can be accessed throughout the multiverse via correlated decision-making.Communications TeamPerhaps surprisingly, recent polling data from Rethink Priorities indicates that most people still don’t know what EA is, those that do are positive towards it as a brand, overall affect scores haven't noticeably changed post FTX collapse, and only a few percent of respondents mentioned FTX when asked about EA open-ended. It seems like these results hold both in the general US population and amongst students at “elite universities”.Since EA is about blindly following quantitative results, and the quantitative results indicate that the financial fraud scandals don’t affect our public image,... Nope, not even going to joke about that one. (Fraud is, famously, bad.)Serious PartMy roleIn all seriousness: this is a cruxy time for EA and I am honored to lead C...