Does this make the idea of an EA ‘community’ self-defeating?
I think that it’s possible to have a community that minimizes the distortion of these social dynamics, or at least is capable of doing significant good despite the distortions—but as I argued in the post, at scale this is far harder, and I think it might be net negative to try to build a single global community the way EA seems to have decided to do.
My own view is that things that work in the world are rare, so when you find one you need to do what you can to replicate or widen it.
Agreed—and that was one of the key things early EA emphasized—and it’s been accepted, in small part due to EA, to the point that it is now conventional wisdom.
I want to fully acknowledge the massive pathologies of the formal aid sector, but I work to mitigate those in the course of my job. I haven’t, to be honest, seen anything from the EA community that would help me with that other than an articulation of fairly obvious general principles.
I don’t think that EA as a movement is well placed to provide ways to reform traditional aid. As you point out, it has many pathologies, and I don’t think there is a simple answer to fix a complex system deeply embedded in geopolitics and social reality. I do think that EA-promoted ideas, including giving directly, have the potential to displace some of the broken systems, and we should work towards figuring out where simpler systems can replace current complex but broken ones. I also think that an EA-like focus on measuring outcomes helps push for the parts of traditional aid that do work. That is, it identifies specific programs which are effective and evaluates and scales them. This isn’t to say that traditional aid doesn’t have related efforts which are also successful, but I think overall it’s helpful to have external pushes from EA and people who embrace related approaches for this work.
Thanks for this response! I don’t want to go too deep on the traditional aid sector, being still in it and all, but I do think they could do with a lot more thinking about real effectiveness. Or even just to occasionally step back, and think ‘what are we trying to do here?’ I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written, except to wonder if it’s even possible to have non-global communities anymore, and if even small scale communities succumb to the same dynamics.
Just when an idea becomes popular it becomes a community, and the community imports the social dynamics. I suppose if I had to say what I would envision for something EA-like is in line with a what you said about conventional wisdom – a kind of invisible force that no one really identifies with, but nudges decisions in a better direction. To some extent I wonder if game theory and microeconomics have maybe achieved this – people seem to subconsciously think a lot more in terms of cost/benefit than they did 20 years ago. But whenever an online community becomes a ‘thing’, I really feel like those social communities overwhelm – and my experience living in Berlin suggests to me that even the tiniest subcultures develop the same dynamics.
Speaking of geopolitics and social reality, do you think EA grapples with that well? In my experience one of the most crucial elements of effectiveness for aid projects has been good buy-in from the local government and community, which can be a messy, political and extremely tedious process, and I’m lucky enough to have an employer that takes the time. What’s the EA opinion on ‘do something suboptimal because otherwise one department of a ministry will hate you and your whole project is screwed’?
I think that it’s possible to have a community that minimizes the distortion of these social dynamics, or at least is capable of doing significant good despite the distortions—but as I argued in the post, at scale this is far harder, and I think it might be net negative to try to build a single global community the way EA seems to have decided to do.
Agreed—and that was one of the key things early EA emphasized—and it’s been accepted, in small part due to EA, to the point that it is now conventional wisdom.
I don’t think that EA as a movement is well placed to provide ways to reform traditional aid. As you point out, it has many pathologies, and I don’t think there is a simple answer to fix a complex system deeply embedded in geopolitics and social reality. I do think that EA-promoted ideas, including giving directly, have the potential to displace some of the broken systems, and we should work towards figuring out where simpler systems can replace current complex but broken ones. I also think that an EA-like focus on measuring outcomes helps push for the parts of traditional aid that do work. That is, it identifies specific programs which are effective and evaluates and scales them. This isn’t to say that traditional aid doesn’t have related efforts which are also successful, but I think overall it’s helpful to have external pushes from EA and people who embrace related approaches for this work.
Thanks for this response! I don’t want to go too deep on the traditional aid sector, being still in it and all, but I do think they could do with a lot more thinking about real effectiveness. Or even just to occasionally step back, and think ‘what are we trying to do here?’ I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written, except to wonder if it’s even possible to have non-global communities anymore, and if even small scale communities succumb to the same dynamics.
Just when an idea becomes popular it becomes a community, and the community imports the social dynamics. I suppose if I had to say what I would envision for something EA-like is in line with a what you said about conventional wisdom – a kind of invisible force that no one really identifies with, but nudges decisions in a better direction. To some extent I wonder if game theory and microeconomics have maybe achieved this – people seem to subconsciously think a lot more in terms of cost/benefit than they did 20 years ago. But whenever an online community becomes a ‘thing’, I really feel like those social communities overwhelm – and my experience living in Berlin suggests to me that even the tiniest subcultures develop the same dynamics.
Speaking of geopolitics and social reality, do you think EA grapples with that well? In my experience one of the most crucial elements of effectiveness for aid projects has been good buy-in from the local government and community, which can be a messy, political and extremely tedious process, and I’m lucky enough to have an employer that takes the time. What’s the EA opinion on ‘do something suboptimal because otherwise one department of a ministry will hate you and your whole project is screwed’?