“Maybe you’re already doing this much more than me—I’m sure some people are, and that’s great. But I also think it’s not something we’ve prioritised or talked much about explicitly as a group. This is surprising, in a way—seeking negative feedback is such an obviously useful thing. So why aren’t we doing this more?”
First off, I like this post and up-voted it, because the concrete suggestions on how to go about this are good and I would like to see them done.
But my response to this post up to this point was to be confused because I think talking and listening to outsiders is already prioritised very highly. To take an obvious example, at London EA meetups I try to spend the bulk of my time talking to people who I don’t recognise and asking what their impressions are. Within EA, one of the main things I do is try to feed back those outside impressions and use that to shape how we approach things. Am I really one of few people deliberately doing this?
I guess I might fall into the ‘maybe you’re already doing this more than me’ category and then be committing a typical mind fallacy. With that said, I do see at least some evidence that a lot of other people are thinking about this hard and implementing at least your first three suggestions:
In much of the internal discussion about how to present EA that you reference, people imply or explicitly state that their basis for their opinion is exactly such conversations with outside friends or family.
There have been multiple long facebook threads seemingly doing exactly this; it seems quite popular and most of the commentary has been thoughtful. In fact, I’m not aware of a public critique of EA that hasn’t been widely shared and reasonably fairly discussed within the community. I think this is good! But beyond perhaps drawing together common strands of criticism, I’m not sure what more we actually could do here.
Ben Kuhn stands out here, with both his description of HCEA meetings with other groups below and blog posts like http://www.benkuhn.net/etg-objections. There’s also some overlap with 2, which I think is being heavily done. Anecdotally I also think CEA is trying to do this, especially on the academics/public figures front.
Ok, AFAIK this is new. No idea how to implement it sensibly, but quite probably worth someone’s time. I’m curious as to whether CEA/EAO have considered anything like this, and if so what they make of it.
I don’t have the impression that most people talk and listen to outsiders as much as I do. I think the Bay Area is a lot worse about this than Boston (for instance, AFAIK the Bay Area has no introductory EA meetups), so maybe it’s an issue with how numerous local EAs are? In Boston we were forced to talk and listen to outsiders a lot because there weren’t enough insiders, but in the Bay Area you can easily forge an entire social circle out of people in the EA movement and never interact with anyone else.
This might explain why Jess has observations closer to mine than yours, since hers are based partly on Oxford, which has a similar critical mass to the Bay Area.
at London EA meetups I try to spend the bulk of my time talking to people who I don’t recognise and asking what their impressions are. Within EA, one of the main things I do is try to feed back those outside impressions and use that to shape how we approach things. Am I really one of few people deliberately doing this?
Kudos to organizing meetups! Not too many people do that, actually, so I think you might be rarer than you think.
Also, do you ever get a chance to talk to people who don’t go to the meetup groups?
Sam Hilton does most of the organising, I mostly just turn up :)
Less so. I have my extended network of friends and acquaintances, obviously, but I’m cautious about bothering people where it doesn’t come up naturally or they haven’t indicated interest. One of the points of the donation match Denise and I are currently running is to flush out people who might have interest.
Mostly I just want to talk to those in my extended (non-EA) network who donate, thank them for donating, and work out where they are w.r.t. EA ideas. I don’t currently have a more detailed plan than that.
“Maybe you’re already doing this much more than me—I’m sure some people are, and that’s great. But I also think it’s not something we’ve prioritised or talked much about explicitly as a group. This is surprising, in a way—seeking negative feedback is such an obviously useful thing. So why aren’t we doing this more?”
First off, I like this post and up-voted it, because the concrete suggestions on how to go about this are good and I would like to see them done.
But my response to this post up to this point was to be confused because I think talking and listening to outsiders is already prioritised very highly. To take an obvious example, at London EA meetups I try to spend the bulk of my time talking to people who I don’t recognise and asking what their impressions are. Within EA, one of the main things I do is try to feed back those outside impressions and use that to shape how we approach things. Am I really one of few people deliberately doing this?
I guess I might fall into the ‘maybe you’re already doing this more than me’ category and then be committing a typical mind fallacy. With that said, I do see at least some evidence that a lot of other people are thinking about this hard and implementing at least your first three suggestions:
In much of the internal discussion about how to present EA that you reference, people imply or explicitly state that their basis for their opinion is exactly such conversations with outside friends or family.
There have been multiple long facebook threads seemingly doing exactly this; it seems quite popular and most of the commentary has been thoughtful. In fact, I’m not aware of a public critique of EA that hasn’t been widely shared and reasonably fairly discussed within the community. I think this is good! But beyond perhaps drawing together common strands of criticism, I’m not sure what more we actually could do here.
Ben Kuhn stands out here, with both his description of HCEA meetings with other groups below and blog posts like http://www.benkuhn.net/etg-objections. There’s also some overlap with 2, which I think is being heavily done. Anecdotally I also think CEA is trying to do this, especially on the academics/public figures front.
Ok, AFAIK this is new. No idea how to implement it sensibly, but quite probably worth someone’s time. I’m curious as to whether CEA/EAO have considered anything like this, and if so what they make of it.
I don’t have the impression that most people talk and listen to outsiders as much as I do. I think the Bay Area is a lot worse about this than Boston (for instance, AFAIK the Bay Area has no introductory EA meetups), so maybe it’s an issue with how numerous local EAs are? In Boston we were forced to talk and listen to outsiders a lot because there weren’t enough insiders, but in the Bay Area you can easily forge an entire social circle out of people in the EA movement and never interact with anyone else.
This might explain why Jess has observations closer to mine than yours, since hers are based partly on Oxford, which has a similar critical mass to the Bay Area.
Kudos to organizing meetups! Not too many people do that, actually, so I think you might be rarer than you think.
Also, do you ever get a chance to talk to people who don’t go to the meetup groups?
Sam Hilton does most of the organising, I mostly just turn up :)
Less so. I have my extended network of friends and acquaintances, obviously, but I’m cautious about bothering people where it doesn’t come up naturally or they haven’t indicated interest. One of the points of the donation match Denise and I are currently running is to flush out people who might have interest.
That’s a smart idea! I hadn’t thought of that.
What are your plans on following up with them?
Mostly I just want to talk to those in my extended (non-EA) network who donate, thank them for donating, and work out where they are w.r.t. EA ideas. I don’t currently have a more detailed plan than that.