One small personal experience: I worked a non-EA job for three years. None of my close friends were interested in EA, and my job wasn’t in a highly impactful cause area. I developed some other interests during those years, reading a lot about startups and VC and finance. Despite my enthusiasm when I first read Peter Singer and Doing Good Better, I think my interest in working on EA topics could have slowly faded and been replaced with other interesting ideas.
The EA community was a big part of what kept me engaged with EA. This forum was a steady stream of information about how to do good in the world, and one that allowed me to voice my own opinions and have lots of interesting conversations. I attended two online EA Globals which mostly made me identify more as an EA. Later I went back to school, where the university EA group leader reached out and encouraged me to join a reading group. We had weekly dinners and great conversations, and only a few months later, I quit my part-time job at a for-profit startup and began working on AI Safety.
It’s hard to say what the counterfactual is, but I think the odds I’d be working on AI Safety right now would have been much lower without the identity, personal connections, and intellectual engagement from the EA community. Part of it is nerdsniping — it’s not always easy to find smart, sensible conversations about the world, but I’ve always found EA to provide plenty of them. There are real downsides — I used to think that I deferred way too much on my opinions about cause prioritization (I think I’ve improved, but maybe I’ve just lost my independent thinking). Your post is a great analysis of those dynamics and I’m not trying to argue for a bottom line, but just wanted to share one personal benefit of the community.
One small personal experience: I worked a non-EA job for three years. None of my close friends were interested in EA, and my job wasn’t in a highly impactful cause area. I developed some other interests during those years, reading a lot about startups and VC and finance. Despite my enthusiasm when I first read Peter Singer and Doing Good Better, I think my interest in working on EA topics could have slowly faded and been replaced with other interesting ideas.
The EA community was a big part of what kept me engaged with EA. This forum was a steady stream of information about how to do good in the world, and one that allowed me to voice my own opinions and have lots of interesting conversations. I attended two online EA Globals which mostly made me identify more as an EA. Later I went back to school, where the university EA group leader reached out and encouraged me to join a reading group. We had weekly dinners and great conversations, and only a few months later, I quit my part-time job at a for-profit startup and began working on AI Safety.
It’s hard to say what the counterfactual is, but I think the odds I’d be working on AI Safety right now would have been much lower without the identity, personal connections, and intellectual engagement from the EA community. Part of it is nerdsniping — it’s not always easy to find smart, sensible conversations about the world, but I’ve always found EA to provide plenty of them. There are real downsides — I used to think that I deferred way too much on my opinions about cause prioritization (I think I’ve improved, but maybe I’ve just lost my independent thinking). Your post is a great analysis of those dynamics and I’m not trying to argue for a bottom line, but just wanted to share one personal benefit of the community.