I think a big thing I feel after reading this is a lot more disillusioned about community-building.
It is really unhealthy that people feel like they can’t dissent from more established (more-fleshed out?) thoughts/arguments/conclusions.
Where is this pressure to agree with existing ideas and this pressure against dissent coming from? (some early thoughts to flesh out more 🤔)
This post isn’t the only thing that makes me feel that there is way too much pressure to agree and way too little room to develop butterfly ideas (that are never well-argued the first time they are aired, but some of which could iterate into more fleshed-out ideas down the road if given a bit more room to fly).
My guess is there is a lot more uncertainty among people who fleshed out a lot of the ideas that now feel unquestionable, but uncertainty is hard to communicate. It is also much easier to build on someone else’s groundwork than to start an argument from scratch, making it easier to develop existing ideas and harder to get new ones, even potentially good ones, off the ground.
I also think it’s incredibly important to make sure people who are doing community building feel fully comfortable saying exactly what they think, even if it isn’t their impression of the “consensus” view. No talking point should ever be repeated by someone who doesn’t buy into it because that person can’t defend it if questioned because it’s not their view. My guess is the original talking points got written up as inspiration or prompts, but weren’t ever intended to be repeated without question and without buy-in. It’s such a big ask of people though to figure out that they don’t really believe the things they are saying. It is especially hard in a community that values legible thinking and intelligence so much and can be quite punishing to half-formed thoughts. There is often a long period between not fully buying-in and having a really well-fleshed out reason for disagreeing. This period where you have to admit you feel you don’t really agree but you don’t know why yet is hard to be honest about, especially in this community. I don’t think addressing this pressure has easy answers but I think addressing it seems pretty incredibly important anyway for creating healthy spaces with healthy epistemics.
More thoughts and suggestions on how we maybe can improve
I agree with so much of this post’s suggestions. I also have so many random half-baked ideas in so many half-finished google docs.
Maybe get better at giving people who are not extremely dedicated or all-in good vibes/a good impression because we see them as future potential allies (even if we don’t have the capacity to fully on-board them into the community)
It just does seem so important to make sure we have a culture where people really feel they don’t have to take all or leave all of effective altruism to have a voice in this community or to have a place in our spaces. The all-in and then all-out dynamic has a tonne of negative side-effects and I’ve definitely seen it a lot in the people I’ve known.
I can see why the strategy of only accepting and focusing on full-in extremely dedicated people makes sense given how capacity constrained community building is and given this community probably can only accommodate so many new people at a time (detailed and nuanced communication is so time-consuming and within community trust seems important but is hard to build with too much growth too fast).
It is challenging to create room for dissent and still have a high trust community with enough common ground for it to be possible for us to cohesively be all in the same community.
I’m not sure exactly what a feasible alternative strategy looks like, but it seems plausible to me that we can get better at developing allies to collaborate with who come by a local group and have a good time and some food for thought without this feeling like an all-in or all-out type engagement.
It seems good to me to have more allies who give us that sometimes nuanced but sometimes (naturally) missing-the-mark critique, who feel comfortable thinking divergently and developing ideas independently. Many of those divergent ideas will be bad (of course, that’s how new ideas work) but some might be good, and when they’re developed, those people who got good vibes from their local group are keen to share them with us because we’ve left a good enough impression that they feel we’ll really want to listen to them. I think there are ways of having a broader group of people who are sympathetic but who think differently who we don’t try and do the “super detailed and nuanced take on every view ever had about how to help others as much as possible” thing. Not sure exactly how to do this well though, messaging gets mixed-up easily and I think there are definitely ways to implement this idea that could make things worse.
More separate communities for the thinking (the place where EA is supposed to be a question) and the doing (the place for action on specific causes/current conclusions)
Maybe it is also important to separate the communities that are supposed to be about thinking and the ones that are supposed to be about acting on current best guesses.
Effective altruism groups sound like they sometimes are seen as a recruiting ground for specific cause areas. I think this might be creating a lot of pressure to come to specific conclusions. Building infrastructure within the effective altruism brand for specific causes maybe also makes it harder for anyone to change their minds. This makes effective altruism feel like much less of a question and much more like a set of conclusions.
Ideally, groups that are supposed to be about the question “how do we help others as much as possible?” should be places where everyone is encouraged to engage with the ideas but also to dissent from them and to digress for hours when someone has an intelligent objection. If effective altruism is not a question, then we cannot say it is. If the conclusions newcomers are supposed to adopt are pre-written, then effective altruism is not a question.
Separating encouragement of the effective altruism project from the effective altruism community
Maybe also we need to be better at not making it feel like the effective altruism project and the effective altruism community come together. Groups can be places where we encourage thinking about how big a part of our lives we want the effective altruism project to be and what our best guesses are on how to do that. The community is just one tool to help with the effective altruism project, to the extent that the EA project feels like something that group members want to have as a part of their lives. If collaborating with the community is productive, then good, if a person feels like they can do the EA project or achieve any of their other goals better by not being in the community, that should be strongly encouraged too!
More articulation of the specific problems like this one
I’m so very glad you articulated your thoughts because I think it’s posts like this that help us better capture exactly what we don’t want to be and more of what we do want to be. There have been a few and I think each one is getting us closer (and we’ll iterate on each other’s ideas until we narrow down what we do and don’t want the effective altruism community to be).
(just for context given I wrote way too many thoughts: I used to do quite a bit of community building and clearly have way too many opinions on stuff given my experience is so out-of-date, I am still pretty engaged with my local community, I care a lot about the EA project, a lot of my friends consider themselves engaged with the effective altruism community but many aren’t but everyone I’m close to knows lots about the EA community because they’re friends with me and I talk way too much about my random interests, I have a job outside the EA community ecosystem, I haven’t yet been disillusioned but I cheated by having over-confident friends who loudly dissented so I think this helped a tonne in me avoiding a lot of the feelings described here)
I think a big thing I feel after reading this is a lot more disillusioned about community-building.
It is really unhealthy that people feel like they can’t dissent from more established (more-fleshed out?) thoughts/arguments/conclusions.
Where is this pressure to agree with existing ideas and this pressure against dissent coming from? (some early thoughts to flesh out more 🤔)
This post isn’t the only thing that makes me feel that there is way too much pressure to agree and way too little room to develop butterfly ideas (that are never well-argued the first time they are aired, but some of which could iterate into more fleshed-out ideas down the road if given a bit more room to fly).
My guess is there is a lot more uncertainty among people who fleshed out a lot of the ideas that now feel unquestionable, but uncertainty is hard to communicate. It is also much easier to build on someone else’s groundwork than to start an argument from scratch, making it easier to develop existing ideas and harder to get new ones, even potentially good ones, off the ground.
I also think it’s incredibly important to make sure people who are doing community building feel fully comfortable saying exactly what they think, even if it isn’t their impression of the “consensus” view. No talking point should ever be repeated by someone who doesn’t buy into it because that person can’t defend it if questioned because it’s not their view. My guess is the original talking points got written up as inspiration or prompts, but weren’t ever intended to be repeated without question and without buy-in. It’s such a big ask of people though to figure out that they don’t really believe the things they are saying. It is especially hard in a community that values legible thinking and intelligence so much and can be quite punishing to half-formed thoughts. There is often a long period between not fully buying-in and having a really well-fleshed out reason for disagreeing. This period where you have to admit you feel you don’t really agree but you don’t know why yet is hard to be honest about, especially in this community. I don’t think addressing this pressure has easy answers but I think addressing it seems pretty incredibly important anyway for creating healthy spaces with healthy epistemics.
More thoughts and suggestions on how we maybe can improve
I agree with so much of this post’s suggestions. I also have so many random half-baked ideas in so many half-finished google docs.
Maybe get better at giving people who are not extremely dedicated or all-in good vibes/a good impression because we see them as future potential allies (even if we don’t have the capacity to fully on-board them into the community)
It just does seem so important to make sure we have a culture where people really feel they don’t have to take all or leave all of effective altruism to have a voice in this community or to have a place in our spaces. The all-in and then all-out dynamic has a tonne of negative side-effects and I’ve definitely seen it a lot in the people I’ve known.
I can see why the strategy of only accepting and focusing on full-in extremely dedicated people makes sense given how capacity constrained community building is and given this community probably can only accommodate so many new people at a time (detailed and nuanced communication is so time-consuming and within community trust seems important but is hard to build with too much growth too fast).
It is challenging to create room for dissent and still have a high trust community with enough common ground for it to be possible for us to cohesively be all in the same community.
I’m not sure exactly what a feasible alternative strategy looks like, but it seems plausible to me that we can get better at developing allies to collaborate with who come by a local group and have a good time and some food for thought without this feeling like an all-in or all-out type engagement.
It seems good to me to have more allies who give us that sometimes nuanced but sometimes (naturally) missing-the-mark critique, who feel comfortable thinking divergently and developing ideas independently. Many of those divergent ideas will be bad (of course, that’s how new ideas work) but some might be good, and when they’re developed, those people who got good vibes from their local group are keen to share them with us because we’ve left a good enough impression that they feel we’ll really want to listen to them. I think there are ways of having a broader group of people who are sympathetic but who think differently who we don’t try and do the “super detailed and nuanced take on every view ever had about how to help others as much as possible” thing. Not sure exactly how to do this well though, messaging gets mixed-up easily and I think there are definitely ways to implement this idea that could make things worse.
More separate communities for the thinking (the place where EA is supposed to be a question) and the doing (the place for action on specific causes/current conclusions)
Maybe it is also important to separate the communities that are supposed to be about thinking and the ones that are supposed to be about acting on current best guesses.
Effective altruism groups sound like they sometimes are seen as a recruiting ground for specific cause areas. I think this might be creating a lot of pressure to come to specific conclusions. Building infrastructure within the effective altruism brand for specific causes maybe also makes it harder for anyone to change their minds. This makes effective altruism feel like much less of a question and much more like a set of conclusions.
Ideally, groups that are supposed to be about the question “how do we help others as much as possible?” should be places where everyone is encouraged to engage with the ideas but also to dissent from them and to digress for hours when someone has an intelligent objection. If effective altruism is not a question, then we cannot say it is. If the conclusions newcomers are supposed to adopt are pre-written, then effective altruism is not a question.
Separating encouragement of the effective altruism project from the effective altruism community
Maybe also we need to be better at not making it feel like the effective altruism project and the effective altruism community come together. Groups can be places where we encourage thinking about how big a part of our lives we want the effective altruism project to be and what our best guesses are on how to do that. The community is just one tool to help with the effective altruism project, to the extent that the EA project feels like something that group members want to have as a part of their lives. If collaborating with the community is productive, then good, if a person feels like they can do the EA project or achieve any of their other goals better by not being in the community, that should be strongly encouraged too!
More articulation of the specific problems like this one
I’m so very glad you articulated your thoughts because I think it’s posts like this that help us better capture exactly what we don’t want to be and more of what we do want to be. There have been a few and I think each one is getting us closer (and we’ll iterate on each other’s ideas until we narrow down what we do and don’t want the effective altruism community to be).
(just for context given I wrote way too many thoughts: I used to do quite a bit of community building and clearly have way too many opinions on stuff given my experience is so out-of-date, I am still pretty engaged with my local community, I care a lot about the EA project, a lot of my friends consider themselves engaged with the effective altruism community but many aren’t but everyone I’m close to knows lots about the EA community because they’re friends with me and I talk way too much about my random interests, I have a job outside the EA community ecosystem, I haven’t yet been disillusioned but I cheated by having over-confident friends who loudly dissented so I think this helped a tonne in me avoiding a lot of the feelings described here)