I think local EA groups should start organizing community service projects. I'm writing this post to explore the idea, get feedback, and share the idea with my local EA group. I wasn't able to find anyone obviously advocating for this concept, so there might be some value here.

Let's first get this out of the way: local community service projects likely score very poorly in terms of expected marginal impact. Cleaning up public spaces or planting trees isn't going to move the needle very much.

However, I'm compelled by the idea of EA group service projects for very different reasons than direct impact. They seem like excellent ways to build social infrastructure and keep us honest and invested.

Build local social infrastructure

Done correctly service projects could allow EA groups to produce a small amount of positive impact while forging strong support networks and attracting possible EAs, all without displacing higher impact activities.

Allow me a speculative generalization: EAs tend to be more analytical, cerebral, and socially disconnected than the average person. If that's not true of EAs in general, it's certainly true of me!

The resources I found discussing local EA groups seem to support that generalizaton. They mostly suggest cerebral activities like career workshops, reading sessions, discussions, or outreach. All of these are useful, but I suggest that service projects could do a better job:

• Attracting altruistic people who aren't already familiar with EA or don't have an outlet for impact. Someone who's willing to show up and do possibly difficult or dirty work is likely someone we could convince to make more impactful changes. People understand service projects, the concept is well-established. They're also usually a better format for meeting new people than a possibly awkward or boring discussion/presentation.
• Helping members forge strong friendships and support networks. We trust and love those who work and sacrifice alongside us. Using our hands and feet together is the most primal way we feel connected to others.

Will these projects distract time and resources away from higher impact activities? I don't think so, it seems more likely they will merely substitute for lower fidelity and less meaningful socialization and leisure. The way I'm specifically pitching service projects is as one evening/day once a month or possibly once every two weeks. This isn't very much time. EA folks aren't robots, we need time to socialize too, so spending some of that social time doing something even only slightly useful is a strict improvement.

Will these projects attract the wrong sort of people? Will it grow social communities without actually increasing the reach of EA ideas? I don't think so as long as organizers do these things to frame the projects and point toward EA ideas:

• Always have a brief discussion before service projects that explicitly raises the points of this post (that the project likely isn't the highest impact use of time and we're doing it for more indirect reasons).
• Prompt participants to think about what broader social failures have allowed the problem being fixed to come about in the first place. Prompt them to ask how they could use EA tactics to more deeply understand and fix those social failures.
• Alternate between service projects and more directly EA focused activities like career workshops and presentations and reading sessions. Be sure to call out these activities at service projects.

Service projects are also an excellent way to build bridges to existing non-EA organizations, and to possibly pull those organizations in more impactful directions.

Keep us honest and invested

Service projects could be a form of moral hygiene, to ensure our movement stays grounded to real people and places.

The EA arguments are extremely compelling. It's hard to argue that if we really want to make the world a better place we shouldn't be extremely analytical. There's absolutely no reason that doing the most good will feel the most good.

But we're still tribal primates. Actually doing concrete things in the world has a greater impact on our psychology than working toward abstract goals. Despite our ability to make complex abstract long term plans, the thing that usually really gets us moving every day is loyalty to our social group, and the desire to do something tangible. Our brains evolved to hunt animals and find berries and dance around fires, so if we can make our complex plans feel more like those activities, we're going to be more reliably motivated.

It seems useful to prove to both others and ourselves that we really are serious about making the world a better place, and concrete tangible work is more convincing than anything else. It seems useful to demonstrate we have "skin in the game".

Brushing your teeth doesn't change the world in any meaningful way, but it does prevent problems that would otherwise stop you from achieving the most possible. Service projects could be similar.

Doing concrete work with real people in the real places we live in will hopefully keep us connected to the conscious beings our big plans are actually supposed to help. The hope is for it to prevent us from drifting off into a cerebral imagination land, even if we remain convinced our highly abstract plans are the best use of our time.

How to concretely proceed?

It seems very natural to me to alternate service projects and normal EA activities on a two week cycle, so both types happen once a month.

The most important question: what service projects specifically? This is the most difficult part to get right, since service projects could easily do work that wastes resources or doesn't even unambiguously do good. Most local problems are difficult to even slightly improve without systemic change.

What we're looking for is activities that unambiguously do some good, where we can contribute a virtually unlimited amount of unskilled labor.

Here are some ideas that seem like they might not be awful:

• Clean up public spaces.
• Plant trees, or do other cheap/durable/uncontroversial beautification.
• Visit and do housework for the elderly or homebound.
• Maintain or improve nature trails.
• Volunteer for local governmental organizations that are useful but under-resourced.

Groups can of course solicit their existing networks for good ideas. Different cities have different concrete issues.

Cleaning up public spaces seems like a winner to me. The work is never-ending, and it's hard to argue that public spaces should have more garbage or decay. Even if those public spaces are maintained by public employees it seems unlikely a small group of volunteers would in some way displace them or cause bad incentives.

Thank you!

Have I missed something important? Are the social and groundedness goals I've given important enough to be worth the effort? Would these projects waste time and resources? If we're looking to work and sacrifice together maybe we just start ultra-marathon groups? :worried-laugh:

I look forward to the discussion.