I’ll admit that since the SSC stuff happened, I’ve been feeling a lot further from EA (not necessarily the core EA ideas, but associating with the community or labeling myself as an EA), and I felt genuinely a bit scared learning through the SSC stuff about ways in which the EA community overlaps with alt-right communities and ideas, etc. I don’t know what to make of all of it, as everyone I work with in EA regularly are wonderful people who care deeply about making the world better. But I feel wary and nervous about all this, and I’ve also been considering leaving the forum / FB groups just to have some space to process what my relationship with EA ought to be external to my work.
I see a ton of overlap between EA in concept and social justice. A lot of the dialogue in the social justice community focuses on people reflecting on their biases, and working to shift out of a lens on the world that introduces some kinds of biases. And, broadly folks working on social justice issues are trying to make the world better. This all feels very aligned with EA approaches, even if the social justice community is working on different issues, and are focused on different kinds of biases.
I’ve heard (though don’t know much about it), that to some extent EA outreach organizations stopped focusing on growth and has focused more on quality in some sense a few years ago. I wonder if doing that has locked in whatever norms were present in the community prior to that, and that’s ended up unintentionally resulting in a fair amount of animosity toward ideas or approaches to argument that are outside the community’s standards of acceptability? I generally think that one of the best ways to improve this issue is to invest heavily in broadening the community, and part of that might require work to make the community more welcoming (and not actively threatening) to people who might not feel welcome here right now.
Thanks, Abraham. It’s really valuable to get these perspectives, and it’s helpful to get people discussing these issues under their real names where they feel they can. I agree that there is a lot of overlap between the impulses that lead people into EA and those that lead many people into SJ.
I’m too tired right now to respond to this in the depth and spirit it deserves – I’ll try and do so tomorrow – so just wanted to flag that this is a positive and valuable contribution to the discussion. I hope any responses to it in the meantime are made in the same spirit.
Thanks for making this post Will -
I’ll admit that since the SSC stuff happened, I’ve been feeling a lot further from EA (not necessarily the core EA ideas, but associating with the community or labeling myself as an EA), and I felt genuinely a bit scared learning through the SSC stuff about ways in which the EA community overlaps with alt-right communities and ideas, etc. I don’t know what to make of all of it, as everyone I work with in EA regularly are wonderful people who care deeply about making the world better. But I feel wary and nervous about all this, and I’ve also been considering leaving the forum / FB groups just to have some space to process what my relationship with EA ought to be external to my work.
I see a ton of overlap between EA in concept and social justice. A lot of the dialogue in the social justice community focuses on people reflecting on their biases, and working to shift out of a lens on the world that introduces some kinds of biases. And, broadly folks working on social justice issues are trying to make the world better. This all feels very aligned with EA approaches, even if the social justice community is working on different issues, and are focused on different kinds of biases.
I’ve heard (though don’t know much about it), that to some extent EA outreach organizations stopped focusing on growth and has focused more on quality in some sense a few years ago. I wonder if doing that has locked in whatever norms were present in the community prior to that, and that’s ended up unintentionally resulting in a fair amount of animosity toward ideas or approaches to argument that are outside the community’s standards of acceptability? I generally think that one of the best ways to improve this issue is to invest heavily in broadening the community, and part of that might require work to make the community more welcoming (and not actively threatening) to people who might not feel welcome here right now.
Thanks, Abraham. It’s really valuable to get these perspectives, and it’s helpful to get people discussing these issues under their real names where they feel they can. I agree that there is a lot of overlap between the impulses that lead people into EA and those that lead many people into SJ.
I’m too tired right now to respond to this in the depth and spirit it deserves – I’ll try and do so tomorrow – so just wanted to flag that this is a positive and valuable contribution to the discussion. I hope any responses to it in the meantime are made in the same spirit.
This post does a much better job that I could manage of explaining how I’ve felt recently. Thank you for writing it.