I appreciate this post, but pretty strongly disagree. The EA I’ve experienced seems to be at most a loose but mutually supportive coalition motivated by trying to most effectively do good in the world. It seems pretty far from being a monolith or from having unaccountable leaders setting some agenda.
While there certainly things I don’t love such as treating EAGs as mostly opportunities to hang out and some things like MacAskill’s seemingly very expensive and opaque book press tour, your recommendations seem like they would mostly hinder efforts to address the causes the community has identified as particularly important to work on.
For instance, they’d dramatically increase the transaction costs for advocacy efforts (i.e. most college groups) aimed at introducing people to these issues and giving them an opportunity to consider working on solving them. One of the benefits of EA groups is that it allows for a critical mass of people to become involved where there might not be enough interest to sustain clubs for individual causes (and again the costs of people needing to organize multiple groups). In effect, this would mostly just cede ground and attention to things like consulting, finance, and tech firms.
Similarly, we shouldn’t discount the (imo enormous) value of having people (often very senior people) willing to offer substantial help/advice on projects they aren’t involved with simply because the other person/group is part of the same community and legibly motivated for similar reasons. I can also see ways in which a loss of community would lead to reduced cooperation between orgs and competition over resources. It seems important to note too that being part of a cause-neutral community makes people more able to change priorities when new evidence/arguments emerge (as the EA community has done several times since I’ve been involved).
I think proposals of this kind really ought to be grounded in saying how the arguments the community has endorsed for some particular strategy are flawed, e.g. showing how community building is not in fact impactful. We generally seem to be over updating on a single failure (even allowing that the failure was particularly harmful).
Note: wrote this fairly quickly, so it’s probably not the most organized collection of thoughts.
I appreciate this post, but pretty strongly disagree. The EA I’ve experienced seems to be at most a loose but mutually supportive coalition motivated by trying to most effectively do good in the world. It seems pretty far from being a monolith or from having unaccountable leaders setting some agenda.
While there certainly things I don’t love such as treating EAGs as mostly opportunities to hang out and some things like MacAskill’s seemingly very expensive and opaque book press tour, your recommendations seem like they would mostly hinder efforts to address the causes the community has identified as particularly important to work on.
For instance, they’d dramatically increase the transaction costs for advocacy efforts (i.e. most college groups) aimed at introducing people to these issues and giving them an opportunity to consider working on solving them. One of the benefits of EA groups is that it allows for a critical mass of people to become involved where there might not be enough interest to sustain clubs for individual causes (and again the costs of people needing to organize multiple groups). In effect, this would mostly just cede ground and attention to things like consulting, finance, and tech firms.
Similarly, we shouldn’t discount the (imo enormous) value of having people (often very senior people) willing to offer substantial help/advice on projects they aren’t involved with simply because the other person/group is part of the same community and legibly motivated for similar reasons. I can also see ways in which a loss of community would lead to reduced cooperation between orgs and competition over resources. It seems important to note too that being part of a cause-neutral community makes people more able to change priorities when new evidence/arguments emerge (as the EA community has done several times since I’ve been involved).
I think proposals of this kind really ought to be grounded in saying how the arguments the community has endorsed for some particular strategy are flawed, e.g. showing how community building is not in fact impactful. We generally seem to be over updating on a single failure (even allowing that the failure was particularly harmful).
Note: wrote this fairly quickly, so it’s probably not the most organized collection of thoughts.