The community health team has done some more in-depth work, for example interviews about women’s experiences in a couple of workspaces. Unfortunately, the in-depth work didn’t yield that many useful next steps. (I’m sure this varies, and in some cases in-depth study of what’s going on with the culture in a space would yield useful action points.)
And more general thoughts:
EA is multifaceted, made of thousands of people in different online spaces, workplaces, cities, and countries. Even understanding the culture(s), let alone shaping the whole thing, is a huge task.
All of us bring pre-existing expectations from our universities, friend groups, workplaces, etc, so there’s no static EA culture—there’s constant inflow from other cultures.
The work of shaping culture is usually best done by people who understand their space well (their workplace, local group, etc) rather than an outside entity. The staff at CEA can provide advice and support, but we certainly can’t single-handedly change the culture of all these EA spaces.
Since Isabel argues that this is a deployment rather than a research problem, and since CEA doesn’t have a lot of fine-grained control over all the EA spaces, and since I have the perhaps naive and not-empirically-substantiated view that at least the majority of organizers of EA spaces are well-intentioned – maybe we need high-status group stress the urgency of this problem more.
For example, maybe you can still get permission to work with all these interviews some more, e.g., mix and amalgamate them into a large body of anonymized case studies to convince anyone who thinks that that’s not happening in their particular spaces that they’re likely mistaken and need to address the problem?
Thanks for starting this discussion!
Some previous efforts here:
The community health team has done some more in-depth work, for example interviews about women’s experiences in a couple of workspaces. Unfortunately, the in-depth work didn’t yield that many useful next steps. (I’m sure this varies, and in some cases in-depth study of what’s going on with the culture in a space would yield useful action points.)
And more general thoughts:
EA is multifaceted, made of thousands of people in different online spaces, workplaces, cities, and countries. Even understanding the culture(s), let alone shaping the whole thing, is a huge task.
All of us bring pre-existing expectations from our universities, friend groups, workplaces, etc, so there’s no static EA culture—there’s constant inflow from other cultures.
The work of shaping culture is usually best done by people who understand their space well (their workplace, local group, etc) rather than an outside entity. The staff at CEA can provide advice and support, but we certainly can’t single-handedly change the culture of all these EA spaces.
Since Isabel argues that this is a deployment rather than a research problem, and since CEA doesn’t have a lot of fine-grained control over all the EA spaces, and since I have the perhaps naive and not-empirically-substantiated view that at least the majority of organizers of EA spaces are well-intentioned – maybe we need high-status group stress the urgency of this problem more.
For example, maybe you can still get permission to work with all these interviews some more, e.g., mix and amalgamate them into a large body of anonymized case studies to convince anyone who thinks that that’s not happening in their particular spaces that they’re likely mistaken and need to address the problem?