I recently encountered the EA community (Sep 16, 2022), and it is extremely unlikely I will ever become a member of the EA community. This being said, I think there is a lot of room for me to collaborate with EA and bring a healthy outsider perspective and contribute a lot of value.
I am going to drop a personal and individual account of my own experience here with the hope that it can be used as a piece of empirical piece of evidence for your proposed solution. Specifically, by fostering people like me who think “EAs have a lot of great ideas, but the community is also misguided in a bunch of ways” and by preventing deep initial infatuation. If there is more evidence similar to my own experiences, I think this post should be part of the introductory content for people looking to interact with EA.
Reading this post allowed me to more easily break the three point cycle of infatuation, doubt, and distancing. When I first discovered EA through Giving What We Can and saw how few people out of those with the means to do so had signed the pledge, I was worried EA’s ideas might be subject to pressures which would eventually cause it to die out because the community was so self sacrificing. This probably could have led me down a path of infatuation. Fortunately, I quickly discovered the forum with its enormous number of community critiques, which led me to become suspicious enough of effective altruism to make sure it remains a small portion of my interpersonal network.
Your post probably had a very large positive impact on me, if only preventing massive burn out (I’m pretty susceptible to working too hard if everyone around me thinks something is important and I do as well). It may go beyond this as I figure out how to user my outsider knowledge to offer some potential improvements for EA in EA terminology which EA will hopefully use as a way to improve.
Thank you for writing this!
I recently encountered the EA community (Sep 16, 2022), and it is extremely unlikely I will ever become a member of the EA community. This being said, I think there is a lot of room for me to collaborate with EA and bring a healthy outsider perspective and contribute a lot of value.
I am going to drop a personal and individual account of my own experience here with the hope that it can be used as a piece of empirical piece of evidence for your proposed solution. Specifically, by fostering people like me who think “EAs have a lot of great ideas, but the community is also misguided in a bunch of ways” and by preventing deep initial infatuation. If there is more evidence similar to my own experiences, I think this post should be part of the introductory content for people looking to interact with EA.
Reading this post allowed me to more easily break the three point cycle of infatuation, doubt, and distancing. When I first discovered EA through Giving What We Can and saw how few people out of those with the means to do so had signed the pledge, I was worried EA’s ideas might be subject to pressures which would eventually cause it to die out because the community was so self sacrificing. This probably could have led me down a path of infatuation. Fortunately, I quickly discovered the forum with its enormous number of community critiques, which led me to become suspicious enough of effective altruism to make sure it remains a small portion of my interpersonal network.
Your post probably had a very large positive impact on me, if only preventing massive burn out (I’m pretty susceptible to working too hard if everyone around me thinks something is important and I do as well). It may go beyond this as I figure out how to user my outsider knowledge to offer some potential improvements for EA in EA terminology which EA will hopefully use as a way to improve.