“The Case Against Acting Professional When Starting an EA Group” by micahzarin

Me and @Lily Curry launched an EA group at Binghamton University (a SUNY school with no prior EA presence) in August 2026. In two weeks we went from zero to ~500 Instagram followers, got 100+ tabling sign-ups, 59 people in our GroupMe, and ~40 people at our first general interest meeting. Our Instagram is now larger than the established EA groups at Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, and NYU. This post is primarily about the factors we think led to our success.

James C. Scott's has this idea called legibility. Essentially, the part relevant to recruiting is the reversal of Scott's idea. Scott's idea is essentially that institutions have to be able to abstract a complicated social reality into discrete categories that it can analyze and act upon. So, for example, an institution can't remember “Micah, who is sort of like this in this context but actually completely different when he is around these people and has this weird specific relationship to these three other people.” It needs to have information like: Micah Zarin, age 18, resident of X, income Y, student, etc. In doing so, it removes important particular details of individuals. After all, the word abstract [...]

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First published:
September 2nd, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Hw4vNeW6RgvtutSAm/the-case-against-acting-professional-when-starting-an-ea

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.