On Owning Our EA Affiliation

Someone suggested I name this post “What We Owe The Community”: I think it’s a great title, but I didn’t dare use it...

Views and mistakes my own.

EDIT: I’d like to emphasize the choice of the word “affiliation” as opposed to”identity” as I do think it’s important not to make it about identity.

What I believe

I think owning our EA affiliation—how we are inspired by the movement and the community—is net positive for the world and our careers. If more people were more outspoken about their alignment with EA principles and proximity to the EA community, we would all be better off. While there may be legitimate reasons for some individuals to not publicly identify as part of the EA movement, this can create a “free-rider problem”. If too many people choose to passively benefit from EA without openly supporting it, the overall movement and community may suffer from it.

Why I think more people should own their EA affiliation publicly

I understand why one doesn’t, but I’d probably not support it in most cases—I say most cases, because some cases are exceptional. I’m also not necessarily saying that one needs to shout it everywhere, but simply be transparent about it.

The risks

These are the risks—actual or perceived—that I mostly hear about when people choose not to publicly own their EA identity:

  • People don’t want to talk to you /​ take you seriously because you are affiliated with EA

  • You won’t get some career opportunities because you are affiliated with EA

And I get it. It’s scary to think two letters could shut some doors closed for some potentially incorrect reasons.

A prisoner’s dilemma

But I think it hurts the movement. If people inspired or influenced by EA are not open about it, it’s likely that their positive impact won’t get credited to EA. And in principle, I wouldn’t mind. But that means that the things that EA will get known for will mostly be negative events, because during scandals, everyone will look for people to blame and draw causal paths from their different affiliation to the bad things that happened. It’s much less attractive to dig out those causal paths when the overall story is positive. I’d believe this is a negative feedback loop that hurts the capacity of people inspired by the EA movement to have a positive impact on the world.

Tipping points

It seems to me that currently, not publicly affiliating with EA is the default, it’s normal, and there’s no harm in doing that. I’d like that norm to change. In Change: How to Make Big Things Happen, Damon Centola defines the concept of “tokens”, e.g. for women:

[Rosabeth Moss Kanter] identified several telltale signs of organizations in which the number of women was below the hypothesized tipping point. Most notably, women in these organizations occupied a “token” role. They were conspicuous at meetings and in conferences, and as such were regarded by their male colleagues as representatives of their gender. As tokens, their behavior was taken to be emblematic of all women generally. They became symbols of what women could do and how they were expected to act.

We need more people to own their affiliation, to represent the true diversity of the EA identity and avoid tokenization.

On transparency

On a personal level, I think transparency is rewarded, in due time. On a community level, one will get to be part of a diverse pool of EAs, which will contribute to showing the diversity of the community: its myriad of groups and individuals, that all have their own vision of what making the world a better place means. It would solve the token problem.

An OpenPhil-funded AI governance organization I am in contact with has chosen a long time ago to always be transparent about their founders’ EA affiliation and its funding sources. Long-term, they benefited from proving high-integrity for not leaving out some details or reframing them. After the OpenAI debacle (Sam Altman being unsuccessfully fired by the board, event that was linked to some people from the EA movement), I asked them if their EA affiliation had had consequences on the trust others placed in them.

My expectation was that their reputation was hurt as a result of associating the event to EA and thus, to this organization. What the leadership described was quite different: actually, people asked them about how to make sense of the events. Their non-EA contacts easily differentiated between them and Sam Altman (as well as the other Sam). I’d guess their trust in the org is high particularly because they have always been transparent about something that is “courageous” to own. And they wanted to understand why people they trust still stand by something that seems so controversial. However, it requires them not to back down and get scared of when such things happen. But overall, they don’t see their affiliation as a sacrifice they have to navigate, that’s just who they are. It does take some additional work but it doesn’t seem too much for the leadership. It just takes a little bit of mental resilience.

I want to see more of that.

Where I come from

Event branding

My current job is being a full-time community builder for EA Switzerland. In that capacity, I organize events. It happened several times that my requests were declined for public relations (PR) reasons, whether as a speaker,[1] or even just for sharing an event. From my experience, this seems to be particularly true in the policy world.

I could set up a different project (under the EA Switzerland umbrella but without the EA name) that is used for outreach and events, and I would probably solve the above problems, but I don’t think that’s what I /​ EA Switzerland should be doing.

Getting hired

When I was considering whether or not to take my current (EA community-building) job, I felt that the strongest potential downside was that I’d have to make my EA affiliation public—it will be my full-time job, it will be something I have to justify on my CV. This might be a bad move if the movement were to fall in disgrace or if I were to dissociate from it at some point, or just because people might have negative impressions of it. But I don’t stand by that line of reasoning anymore. I know why I’m here, and I can explain it to the people who care about listening.

I also knew working in an EA organization this could potentially hurt my career at some point. It actually did. It was part of the reasons why I didn’t get hired once. But I don’t think it should motivate me to be less transparent about my beliefs.


Thanks to Guillaume Vorreux, James Herbert and many others for feedback and discussions on the topic, and to many more for the conversations that lead to the writing of this post.

  1. ^

    One person told me they would be happy to participate if it was branded differently, i.e. non-EA.