Demanding Diversity: The issue so far and the way forward

How can we community build more inclusively and why does it matter so much?

This is not the first time the issue of diversity has been raised in the forum and it won’t be the last. We are at a point of growth as a movement/community and in a geopolitical moment where we need to be careful of our perception and examine how seriously we are taking efforts to include multiple demographics.

I am entering an insightful yet tumultuous conversation about an issue of undeniable importance but prone to a lot of abstraction, free-flowing debate and (justified) grievances. I think this post can help provide some direction and a new approach for some of the following reasons.

This post aims to summarize the key ideas of the diversity discourse so far and highlight what the next steps toward making EA more inclusive might look like with specific calls to action
For now, I am focusing on diversity and inclusion in community building which will allow me to go concretely in depth in an area where the consequences of the issue at hand are arguably the most pronounced since we interact directly with newer people.
I have been deeply involved with community-building in the most diverse undergraduate university campus which has one of the most diverse EA chapters globally. This has allowed me to gain insight directly into why this matters and what we can do to refine our approach to inclusion.

Having repeated these ideas like a tape recorder in virtually every EA conference I’ve been to with various community builders and organizers, I can attest to two facts. Firstly, interest and concern for diversity and inclusion exist and secondly, there seems to be no clear path or agreement on what concrete steps can be taken collectively. People want to do something and organizers from our chapter have often been approached for advice for being more inclusive. I would like to share with fellow community builders some key insights from the chapter and some key conversations that might help visualize how we can approach this issue with some concrete directions on the way forward.

Brief overview:

I would just like to highlight the biggest issues raised (from a community building perspective)-

-Alienating talent

-Blindspot recognition

I will also elaborate on potential ways to address these:

-Levels of engaging with EA content by being sensitive to context and background

-Bidirectionally- focusing on concretizing feedback mechanisms from a diversity of contexts

The potential of alienating valuable talent and resources:

Quinn in his post about ‘Diversity Takes’ raises a salient point about value props of inclusivity efforts and how they should not be undertaken for the sake of perception just so that people feel nice about being part of EA. While I agree that this is not a compelling enough value prop, I would argue that the issue of perception goes beyond the ‘feel-good’ factor.

Perception of the movement mattersIf people enter the house, look around and still don’t like what they see, then we’ve done our job as community builders. But if people are turned off at the doorstep itself, then our work is far from done.

EA has developed a reputation as a closed-off elite group with an unwavering homogeneous intellectual approach. In the argument being made here, the truth doesn’t matter, the perception does.

A lot of past discourse indicated two takes on this: 1) The ideas are strong and compelling enough to draw in the right talent and resources 2) The essence of the ideas should not be diluted to pander or appease more people because then it will stop being effective altruism and become a more generic philanthropic effort. While I agree with these points to a large extent, they still do not take away from the importance of perception.

Both in community building and in my personal life, I have seen potentially ‘great fits’ of EA get turned away or have a great hesitancy to associate themselves with a seemingly exclusive and elite movement. Perception in itself is not enough to stop efforts to try to change the world in the best way we know how. But can we be sure we are doing the ‘best’ if great talent, or worse, entire demographics are not even part of the effort?

By ‘valuable’ I don’t just mean the random chance that great potential contributors exist within the group of people who don’t join due to their perception of EA. I mean specifically the voices of marginalized or impacted groups who are the subjects of a lot of discourse but not part of the discourse itself. There is little objection to the value-added of such intellectual diversity or how much contextual information can help broaden the scope of historically Western-centric ideas.

And it’s wishful to assume that people with issues with the movement will spend a lot of time and effort engaging and delving deeper to find ideas they agree with. We need to work on inclusivity to ensure people are at least willing to engage with the movement enough to disagree with the ideas itself and not the image.

More specifically, the barriers to entry which will turn people away at the door include demographic, intellectual, and value-based homogeneity. The first aversion is an instinctive one: it seems that this is a space for WEIRD adults or elite university students who have money but also a conscience- how will they solve the pressing issues where I come from? A more concrete example is the issue that advocates for people with disabilities have with aspects of the EA ideas like the flippant use of DALYs (disability-adjusted life years) and may choose to disengage based on this without further inquisition.

Another barrier to entry is the value clash. Certain demographic values like cosmopolitanism, agnosticism, and utilitarian ideas happen to be common values of the average EA but appear to be a requirement for entry. These characteristics happen to be a consequence of where the movement originated and the nature of the ideas, as opposed to a feature of the movement itself. The distinction is fine but important. It is more likely that a cosmopolitan buys into EA because of the idea of ‘Global Priorities’ but that does not mean a nationalist can’t find other ideas just as compelling or want to run a chapter in their country.

This leads to a more salient issue. Often while community building I have seen that newer fellows start viewing these values or specific ways of thinking (like being purely rational) as a ‘criteria for membership’. Of course, there has to be an agreement with core ideas (like focusing on evidence-based impact for example). However, often this comes off as ‘We have found for certain the very best way to tackle this issue and it requires you to think in this specific non-negotiable way.’ If we had found the most effective way we would not have as highly engaged EAs being near termists and long termists simultaneously. Not to over-simplify the whole movement but fundamentally we agree on approaches but are working in different streams to find better ways to get there. We are all coexisting and working within a common framework using our own individual talents, niches, and value systems that allow us to add value in distinct ways.

A hegemonic criteria for membership developed from limited context will perpetuate demographic biases that formed that so-called membership criteria in the first place. Again, I am referring to a common perception, not a an explicit ‘you have to be this tall to ride’ sign. But for community builders a problem of perception is a proble we have to worry about.

If people with different value systems believe that they cannot contribute because of the supposed value-based and intellectual criteria for membership, then we are narrowing the pool of talent. Is it more likely that a cosmopolitan utilitarian joins EA? Yes. Is it a requirement? I hope not.

In recent times, as the movement has taken more shape and ‘grown’ in a technical sense, the definition and boundaries around the movement have tightened. Movement growth should not come at the cost of losing the open, self-critical, constantly questioning and ‘semi-permeable’ boundaries that made this community so refreshing and compelling in the first place.

So what can we do?

Levels of Engagement: As was insightfully put forward by a sprightly fellow of mine, EA ideas can be proposed with certain levels of engagement. The fellow was referring to scaffolding an introduction to radical and counterintuitive principles raised in EA, for ease of transition. However, this showed me the value of introducing newer ideas into existing frameworks in a way that doesn’t disrupt the work in that context but enhances it. I can’t ascertain what the intent of all the syllabus material is, but the reception often has been ‘Oh so however we’ve been doing things so far is misguided, and here you think you know better?’

Cause neutrality suggests that we should care about the world’s most pressing problems regardless of personal context and bias but I would dare to posit that there is ubiquitous agreement on what these are. I am not challenging the relevance, credibility and rationality behind Global Priorities, but I do wonder if these priorities would look the same had they originated in a non-WI.E.R.D context. Recent Local Priorities research demonstrates that priorities can look different in various social, cultural and geographic contexts. While this may seem obvious or banal, a lot of the mainstream content and fellowship material does not reflect it as such.

More importantly, people recently introduced to EA cannot be expected to immediately engage with cause neutrality or forego the insights that their context provides them with. More importantly, why should they?

I think we would make a lot more headway in certain communities if we took certain values of the context for granted and figured out the most effective way to work within those value systems. This is where the central value clash between the ‘average EA’ (not necessarily but according to dominant perception) and some demographics occur. As posts in the past have mentioned, in a lot of collectivist cultures these value differences are what turn most people away at the doorstep. I think that the potential for the movement to appeal to a larger demographic exists, and the way to address that is through levels of engagement.

Human emotions, cultural context, socio-political background and economic context certainly determine how these ideas are received. If this were not the case we wouldn’t put so much effort into nuanced community building in the first place. The Arete fellowship could have been a series of self-explanatory blog posts. However, the very nature of fellowships acknowledges that bidirectional engagement and dialogue are required to be able to truly digest and accept Effective Altruism. Keeping this in mind, I think there is a balance that can be drawn between retaining core ideas and expressing them in ways that actually resonate with a variety of contexts.

My mother is a social worker who has worked in the Indian network of NGOs for over 20 years. I pitched EA to her in excitement. Her first response was that people are not going to be open to this. In her experience of the grassroots network for impact, she claimed that people are hesitant to change their way of doing things and getting them to agree to some of the radical-sounding ideas and changes would be virtually impossible. I was all ready to set off on a ‘that’s the problem and that is what we have to fix’ rant. But I took a step back. I assumed that the existing system is filled with obtuse, unwilling-to-change hardliners. But I didn’t consider that they are experts who understand the intricacies and very real constraints of the system. They have the resources, knowledge and distribution that any new effort won’t. So if I walked in and dropped and spoke about expected value and long-termism I would get laughed right out. However, if I walked in, understood the objective of that organization and helped them navigate (using all the EA toolkits in my arsenal) how to improve aspects of their approach, I would at least be invited in for a chat. I am neither a mathematician nor a philosopher, but I know this appears to be a compromise on what is the most effective way. However, getting existing institutions to, within the constraints of their context, adapt some more effective ways is better than having no effect on them whatsoever.

It is not the final step, but it is a step in the right direction.

How can we introduce this at the chapter level?

We are a unique chapter based in an elite American University in the Middle East. Given our context, we had to find unique ways to execute the ideas discussed above. For example, our chapter wanted to have an ‘Effective Zakaat’ initiative where we could help recommend effective charities for Muslims to donate to during the month of Ramadan. Given that these charities had to be pre-approved by the government, there was no guarantee of they being the most effective charity. However, within the legal constraints, finding out the most effective of the pre-existing options was our best bet. If this seems like drifting from EA philosophy, I want to remind you of the key idea: Doing the best we can with the resources we have. The unspoken caveat is the resources we have within the social, political and legal constraints of the context we live in. As I mentioned earlier, these ideas in practicality are partnering with pre-existing local contexts that largely determine the shape of the movement.

As any community builders in the developing World and Global South will agree, the ideas with the most resistance at first are Longtermism and X-Risk. ‘If our countries have uncertain near-terms, how can we be expected to care about the long term?’ So how can we make this contextually relevant?

I spoke to a Global Priorities Existential Risk expert during EAGxIndia, focused on mitigating nuclear risk. My sole intention of meeting him was to probe him to understand why we, in the developing world and Global South, should even care about this. From a community-building perspective, it felt strange precipitating ideas that I myself was unconvinced of and I could not assuage my fellow’s doubts about this either. With a genial smile, he asked if I knew that one of their foremost fears of a nuclear catastrophe is that the conflict between India (my home country) and Pakistan escalates to the usage of nuclear weapons. Naturally, I did not. Maybe in an ideal case scenario Nuclear catastrophe should seem as distressing to me whether it occurs near my home or a million miles away. But as I mentioned earlier, we are taking for granted that currently such psychological factors still play a role in people’s receptivity to such ideas, especially people recently introduced to the movement. Hearing that statement did make me feel that I had more responsibility because a place that I have in-depth knowledge and context of might actually have the potential to cause global harm. More importantly, the same knowledge helped me feel more empowered as well.

He also mentioned that agricultural collapse is one of the biggest concerns of nuclear warfare, hence even if other countries are at risk of nuclear war the long-term implications affect countries with a large dependency on agriculture.

The key takeaway for me here is that the same priorities could be shared from multiple perspectives and contexts that can make fellows understand the relevance as opposed to taking their receptivity that as a given.

One way to make some of these ideas resonate better with fellows from the global south or developing countries is by depicting how these concerns can directly affect these contexts in counterintuitive ways they may not have considered. In other words, by trying to find ways in which long-termism and X-Risk might be of particular relevance to fellows from the Global South and developing countries, we do not negate the importance of cause neutrality. We are just acknowledging the nuance and intricacies of trying to engage people with complex backgrounds to an entirely new way of thinking.

(This is just one example of a Level of Engagement, I plan on collaborating with more community builders, meeting experts and following up with more information and a proper module of introducing ideas in the aforementioned ways in fellowships.)

2. Inability to understand what’s missing/blindspot recognition from within - Diversity is a two way street

Another key issue raised in past discourse that is less intellectually driven and more experientially based: you can’t know what you do not know. As highly engaged EAs it becomes harder and harder to take a step back and recognise some important blindspots, that seem glaringly obvious once they have been pointed out. A fellow of mine who speaks English as her third language, while fluent, pointed out that a lot of the highly academic language used in the core readings of EA was difficult to grasp. She would imagine her family being great contributors to this movement but they wouldn’t be able to understand a lot of the primary ideas and she found no available translations. Sure, an argument is to be made about the fact that the intellectual level of academia already makes it inaccessible as is. But here even people who have English as a second or third language struggled with grasping some of the content. Another loftier and more arduous goal is not just translation but making the material accessible to people with visual impairments (audio transcripts are available for some materials but not a lot of important ones). As community builders in such a diverse chapter, I could not believe we all missed this.

Contextual understanding is largely driven by personal experience, so we cannot guess what might be missing. Of course, the fact that there are separate EA communities in each country is in itself a reflection of how we understand this idea. But if these regional discussions and ideas are not streamlined into a central discourse; we are not enriching the community.

The larger argument here is that without a streamlined outlet or reception for feedback from diverse chapters in different countries, can we claim to really be becoming more diverse? Diversity is not just about conveying our ideas in ways that can resonate with different communities but about the insight that comes from these different communities that need to be taken to the center and integrated into core materials or mainstream discourse.

Again, this might appear banal or obvious. After, all we have EAGx’s all over the world!

Our ideas are certainly spreading to every nook and corner, but where is the bidirectionality? If regional conferences are struggling to get mainstream founders, important speakers and influential decision-makers then the hegemonic mainstream discourse (that within EA hubs and central organizations) is still independent of the other conversations. I remember having one of the most fruitful conversations in EAG London at EAGx Asia speed chatting where I could finally meet community builders who shared the same grievances and concerns. But other than a few well-intentioned foreigners who wanted to understand the pulse and crux of these problems, where can these concerns be streamlined to a point where they garner action?

So what can we do about this?

Diversity is a two way Street: Mechanisms to improve the movement by incorporating bidirectional feedback

This of course merits a separate post, where I hope to follow-up with a potential framework. My fellow university community builders and I have been approached by central organizers to understand what inclusion efforts could look like.

How can we address this at the chapter level?

We need to treat fellowships as our own little Red Teams. Nothing can give more raw and representative insight than the reactions and feedback from fellows. Official feedback mechanisms for lead community builders with some central organizers from all chapters to meet and discuss revisions based on feedback. This could be revisions to the EA VP syllabi, raising important concerns brought up by fellows directly to the CEA. Once again, taking action might be more complicated but at least having dedicated multi-lateral conversations amongst community builders helps streamline feedback instead of more fragmented 1:1s. This discussion/meeting could also be opened to those who want to learn more about inclusion efforts and what EA looks like in non-EA Hubs. This is where cohesion and coordinated effort come into question. There should be a lot more conversation between community builders for whom this is a central focus.

This would likely have to happen online because nationality restrictions often prevent people from going to certain places and that makes the whole effort rather hypocritical.

How can we address this on a larger scale?

The nationality restrictions bring me to the second call to action. The idea of having different conferences in non-EA Hubs and any region with a significant EA presence is to subvert nationality restrictions and have regionally relevant conversations. However, a concern we felt having conversations about having a conference of our own and with some community builders is the attendance of well-established organizers and influential people in the movement. As mentioned earlier, inclusion is not only about making sure these ideas spread far and wide but also making ways for ideas to reach back. By this, I mean having important organizations, funds, and research programs making an active effort to visit non-hubs. There are feasibility concerns but they pale in comparison to the concerns raised if we understand the dire consequences of lack of diversity. Growth should not just be seen as roots spreading outwards that get farther and farther away from the centre. We need people and institutions from the centre to know what is happening and what issues have to be addressed.

This could even look like having regional diversity liaisons who work with community builders/organizers from hubs whose focus is specifically to report on and represent the concerns raised by that region. We need a lot more structured action than a few one-off events about non-hubs within an EAG.

Efforts to hear back from this rapidly expanding diverse community are important. If EA is a question, who all are we really asking?