When I was a Christian, I led a lot of Bible study groups. Christians care a lot about Truth. In theory any question was askable but in practise it was clear that some questions were not. If somebody asked them I maybe allowed some kind of response, and then moved the discussion on. Discussions about the historicity of the Bible often created a mess so you didn’t really want to have them. In practise I recall having them very rarely, if at all.
To me the EA forum often has the smell of the same kind of thing where many important questions are just ‘not the done thing’. Below, James links CEA’s growth discusison. Do I really want to engage with that? Not really. I think I’ll feel like someone who is grumpy at a wedding. But also, from a quick scroll, do I think that CEA getting it’s engagement numbers up is the central thing it should be tracking? Not really. How many career changes are there? What is some notion of total impact?
And, sure, these are hard questions and I am not sure there are good answers. But when I came on here 7 years ago, this felt like a place to have those discussions. And now.. it doesn’t.
I’d be interested to hear more about why you didn’t want to engage with posts like CEA’s, and what you mean by “many important questions are just ‘not the done thing’”. Not sure if it’s related, but I think people who push back on CEA tend to get lots of karma still. :)
Honestly you’d have a great time at EA in the Lakes and should come to the next one I run. More generally, you want to get yourself into an EA group space of people who make donations (of money and/or time) to EA infrastructure, rather than being in receipt of resources from EA infrastructure. The vibe is totally different: the questions are freer, and we help each other clarify the answers to being more truthful and more loving and more actionable because we all want our donations to be used well.
I am pretty happy with my EA circles, for what it’s worth. I have come here to say somethings about this place and to some extent about the powerful organisation that runs it.
But I’d hear more about your EA in the Lakes thing. Which lakes?
A personal reflection:
When I was a Christian, I led a lot of Bible study groups. Christians care a lot about Truth. In theory any question was askable but in practise it was clear that some questions were not. If somebody asked them I maybe allowed some kind of response, and then moved the discussion on. Discussions about the historicity of the Bible often created a mess so you didn’t really want to have them. In practise I recall having them very rarely, if at all.
To me the EA forum often has the smell of the same kind of thing where many important questions are just ‘not the done thing’. Below, James links CEA’s growth discusison. Do I really want to engage with that? Not really. I think I’ll feel like someone who is grumpy at a wedding. But also, from a quick scroll, do I think that CEA getting it’s engagement numbers up is the central thing it should be tracking? Not really. How many career changes are there? What is some notion of total impact?
And, sure, these are hard questions and I am not sure there are good answers. But when I came on here 7 years ago, this felt like a place to have those discussions. And now.. it doesn’t.
I’d be interested to hear more about why you didn’t want to engage with posts like CEA’s, and what you mean by “many important questions are just ‘not the done thing’”. Not sure if it’s related, but I think people who push back on CEA tend to get lots of karma still. :)
The top six posts by karma of 2026 are all criticisms of EA, two of them of CEA explicitly
Yeah that’s a fair point. I don’t come on here much. So maybe I am wrong on how receptive people would be. But this doesn’t sound great.
Be grumpy! I think the forum lacks spice.
Tier 5 is about career changes. That seems like a sensible thing to be tracking, no?
But it’s a lagging indicator so to me it also makes sense to look at engagement at other points in the funnel.
Honestly you’d have a great time at EA in the Lakes and should come to the next one I run. More generally, you want to get yourself into an EA group space of people who make donations (of money and/or time) to EA infrastructure, rather than being in receipt of resources from EA infrastructure. The vibe is totally different: the questions are freer, and we help each other clarify the answers to being more truthful and more loving and more actionable because we all want our donations to be used well.
I am pretty happy with my EA circles, for what it’s worth. I have come here to say somethings about this place and to some extent about the powerful organisation that runs it.
But I’d hear more about your EA in the Lakes thing. Which lakes?