epistemic status: i timeboxed the below to 30 minutes. it’s been bubbling for a while, but i haven’t spent that much time explicitly thinking about this. i figured it’d be a lot better to share half-baked thoughts than to keep it all in my head — but accordingly, i don’t expect to reflectively endorse all of these points later down the line. i think it’s probably most useful & accurate to view the below as a slice of my emotions, rather than a developed point of view. i’m not very keen on arguing about any of the points below, but if you think you could be useful toward my reflecting processes (or if you think i could be useful toward yours!), i’d prefer that you book a call to chat more over replying in the comments. i do not give you consent to quote my writing in this short-form without also including the entirety of this epistemic status.
1-3 years ago, i was a decently involved with EA (helping organize my university EA program, attending EA events, contracting with EA orgs, reading EA content, thinking through EA frames, etc).
i am now a lot less involved in EA.
e.g. i currently attend uc berkeley, and am ~uninvolved in uc berkeley EA
e.g. i haven’t attended a casual EA social in a long time, and i notice myself ughing in response to invites to explicitly-EA socials
e.g. i think through impact-maximization frames with a lot more care & wariness, and have plenty of other frames in my toolbox that i use to a greater relative degree than the EA ones
e.g. the orgs i find myself interested in working for seem to do effectively altruistic things by my lights, but seem (at closest) to be EA-community-adjacent and (at furthest) actively antagonistic to the EA community
(to be clear, i still find myself wanting to be altruistic, and wanting to be effective in that process. but i think describing my shift as merely moving a bit away from the community would be underselling the extent to which i’ve also moved a bit away from EA’s frames of thinking.)
why?
a lot of EA seems fake
the stuff — the orientations — the orgs — i’m finding it hard to straightforwardly point at, but it feels kinda easy for me to notice ex-post
there’s been an odd mix of orientations toward [ aiming at a character of transparent/open/clear/etc ] alongside [ taking actions that are strategic/instrumentally useful/best at accomplishing narrow goals… that also happen to be mildly deceptive, or lying by omission, or otherwise somewhat slimy/untrustworthy/etc ]
the thing that really gets me is the combination of an implicit (and sometimes explicit!) request for deep trust alongside a level of trust that doesn’t live up to that expectation.
it’s fine to be in a low-trust environment, and also fine to be in a high-trust environment; it’s not fine to signal one and be the other. my experience of EA has been that people have generally behaved extremely well/with high integrity and with high trust… but not quite as well & as high as what was written on the tin.
for a concrete ex (& note that i totally might be screwing up some of the details here, please don’t index too hard on the specific people/orgs involved): when i was participating in — and then organizing for — brandeis EA, it seemed like our goal was (very roughly speaking) to increase awareness of EA ideas/principles, both via increasing depth & quantity of conversation and via increasing membership. i noticed a lack of action/doing-things-in-the-world, which felt kinda annoying to me… until i became aware that the action was “organizing the group,” and that some of the organizers (and higher up the chain, people at CEA/on the Groups team/at UGAP/etc) believed that most of the impact of university groups comes from recruiting/training organizers — that the “action” i felt was missing wasn’t missing at all, it was just happening to me, not from me. i doubt there was some point where anyone said “oh, and make sure not to tell the people in the club that their value is to be a training ground for the organizers!” — but that’s sorta how it felt, both on the object-level and on the deception-level.
this sort of orientation feels decently reprensentative of the 25th percentile end of what i’m talking about.
also some confusion around ethics/how i should behave given my confusion/etc
importantly, some confusions around how i value things. it feels like looking at the world through an EA frame blinds myself to things that i actually do care about, and blinds myself to the fact that i’m blinding myself. i think it’s taken me awhile to know what that feels like, and i’ve grown to find that blinding & meta-blinding extremely distasteful, and a signal that something’s wrong.
some of this might merely be confusion about orientation, and not ethics — e.g. it might be that in some sense the right doxastic attitude is “EA,” but that the right conative attitude is somewhere closer to (e.g.) “embody your character — be kind, warm, clear-thinking, goofy, loving, wise, [insert more virtues i want to be here]. oh and do some EA on the side, timeboxed & contained, like when you’re donating your yearly pledge money.”
where now?
i’m not sure! i could imagine the pendulum swinging more in either direction, and want to avoid doing any further prediction about where it will swing for fear of that prediction interacting harmfully with a sincere process of reflection.
Most of the problems you mention seem to be about the specific current EA community, as opposed to the main values of “doing a lot of good” and “being smart about doing so.”
Personally, I’m excited for certain altruistic and smart people to leave the EA community, as it suits them, and do good work elsewhere. I’m sure that being part of the community is limiting to certain people, especially if they can find other great communities.
That said, I of course hope you can find ways for the key values of “doing good in the world” and similar to work for you.
Thanks for sharing your experiences and reflections here — I really appreciate the thoughtfulness. I want to offer some context on the group organizer situation you described, as someone who was running the university groups program at the time.
On the strategy itself: At the time, our scalable programs were pretty focused from evidence we had seen that much of the impact came from the organizers themselves. We of course did want groups to go well more generally, but in deciding where to put our marginal resource we were focusing on group organizers. It was a fairly unintuitive strategy — and I get how that could feel misaligned or even misleading if it wasn’t clearly communicated.
On communication: We did try to be explicit about this strategy — it was featured at organizer retreats and in parts of our support programming. But we didn’t consistently communicate it across all our materials. That inconsistency was an oversight on our part. Definitely not an attempt to be deceptive — just something that didn’t land as clearly as we hoped.
Where we’re at now: We’ve since updated our approach. The current strategy is less focused narrowly on organizers and more on helping groups be great overall. That said, we still think a lot of the value often comes from a small, highly engaged core — which often includes organizers, but not exclusively.
In retrospect, I wish we’d communicated this more clearly across the board. When a strategy is unintuitive, a few clear statements in a few places often isn’t enough to make it legible. Sorry again if this felt off — I really appreciate you surfacing it.
Riffing out loud … I feel that there are different dynamics going on here (not necessarily in your case; more in general):
The tensions where people don’t act with as much integrity as is signalled
This is not a new issue for EA (it arises structurally despite a lot of good intentions, because of the encouragement to be strategic), and I think it just needs active cultural resistance
In terms of writing, I like Holden’s and Toby’s pushes on this; my own attempts here and here
But for this to go well, I think it’s not enough to have some essays on reading lists; instead I hope that people try to practice good orientation here at lots of different scales, and socially encourage others to
The meta-blinding
I feel like I haven’t read much on this, but it rings true as a dynamic to be wary of! Where I take the heart of the issue to be that EA presents a strong frame about what “good” means, and then encourages people to engage in ways that make aspects of their thinking subservient to that frame
As someone put it to me, “EA has lost the mandate of heaven”
I think EA used to be (in some circles) the obvious default place for the thoughtful people who cared a lot to gather and collaborate
I think that some good fraction of its value came from performing this role?
Partially as a result of 1 and 2, people are disassociating with EA; and this further reduces the pull to associate
I can’t speak to how strong this effect is overall, but I think the directionality is clear
I don’t know if it’s accessible (and I don’t think I’m well positioned to try), but I still feel a lot of love for the core of EA, and would be excited if people could navigate it to a place where it regained the mandate of heaven.
some further & updated thoughts, written in ~30 min, are below. canonical version lives here.
Here’s a frame I’ve found helpful for thinking about effective altruism:
When I look inside myself, I notice that I care about a lot of things.
You could also reasonably replace “care” with “wanting,” “preferring,” “valuing,” “desiring,” “having goals,” etc, rather than “caring.” I’m okay being loose.
Some examples of things I care about:
I want my sister to have an excellent career.
I’m hungry, and want some food.
I want to be valued by people I respect.
I want my dogs to have enjoyable lives.
(And many, many more).
(It’s often useful to be introspective/clear-eyed about what you care about, what that ontology looks like, which values are instrumental to which other values, etc., but I won’t be doing that here, and indeed I think it might be anti-helpful in this particular frame at this particular time. Stay with me until the end.)
Sort-of by definition, I want more of the things I care about. I see my life as a difficult, high-level optimization problem aimed at making decisions which, given my resources at various times, increase my values across time.
Some of the things I care about — like wanting food because I’m hungry — are fundamentally oriented at myself. And I take actions to do better along these axes.
Some examples of actions:
Reading a book on tax strategies
Learning how to cook
Asking people for feedback on my sartorial choices
etc
And in general, I try to be effective at getting what I want, here — that is, I aim to achieve these kinds of goals/values/preferences to as great of a degree as possible.
But other things I care about — like wanting my sister to have an excellent career, or my dogs to have enjoyable lives — are fundamentally oriented at others-by-their-lights. And I take actions to do better along these axes, too.
These motivations often look starkly different in a lot of different situations.
For some of these altruistic motivations, it just so happens that some lovely dynamics have coalesced such that there’s an existing group of people / infrastructure / etc who have worked & are working quite hard toward helping me get what I want w/r/t some of those things I care about that are oriented at others-by-their-lights. In particular, I haven’t found any community which is more effective at helping me achieve the things I care about that are oriented at others-by-their-lights than this one.
(The group of people / infrastructure / etc I’m referring to is effective altruism.)
Why do I like this frame?
Because it’s apparent that I care about quite a few things. It becomes evident quickly that totalizing stances toward EA are just not worth it; a bad trade; just getting less of what I want.
In particular, I think this kind of frame can be validating toward folks who’ve gone quite far, and repressed the values that they in-fact have in other areas of their life. (I think I was in this camp ~two years ago.)
There are interesting subproblems that come into clearer view, e.g.:
When should, on the margin, my resources go toward different things that I care about?
What actions would get me more access to the things that I want with greater robustness (i.e. getting me closer to many different things I want, all at once)?
You go over more details later and answer other questions like what caused some reactions to some EA-related things, but an interesting thing here is that you are looking for a cause of something that is not.
> it feels like looking at the world through an EA frame blinds myself to things that i actually do care about, and blinds myself to the fact that i’m blinding myself.
I can strongly relate, had the same experience. i think it’s due to christian upbringing or some kind of need for external validation. I think many people don’t experience that, so I wouldn’t say that’s an inherently EA thing, it’s more about the attitude.
...but we only know to reach out to people who’re involved with their uni’s clubs. so: if you’re interested in attending, book a 5-10 minute chat with alex or aiden :)
some examples of gaps in our outreach:
unis that don’t have an EA club
students who haven’t joined their uni’s EA club
transfers to west-coast unis
students who’re on leave from their uni and presently living on the west coast
high-schoolers who’ll soon be starting at west coast
we won’t be able to take everyone, but reading the ea forum is a pretty positive indicator that you’d be a good fit!
PurpleAir collects data from a network of private air quality sensors. Looks interesting, and possibly useful for tracking rapid changes in air quality (e.g. from a wildfire).
PurpleAir contribute all of their sensors to IQAir also! So you can get a very comprehensive sense of air quality very quickly and compare private and public sources.
why do i find myself less involved in EA?
epistemic status: i timeboxed the below to 30 minutes. it’s been bubbling for a while, but i haven’t spent that much time explicitly thinking about this. i figured it’d be a lot better to share half-baked thoughts than to keep it all in my head — but accordingly, i don’t expect to reflectively endorse all of these points later down the line. i think it’s probably most useful & accurate to view the below as a slice of my emotions, rather than a developed point of view. i’m not very keen on arguing about any of the points below, but if you think you could be useful toward my reflecting processes (or if you think i could be useful toward yours!), i’d prefer that you book a call to chat more over replying in the comments. i do not give you consent to quote my writing in this short-form without also including the entirety of this epistemic status.
1-3 years ago, i was a decently involved with EA (helping organize my university EA program, attending EA events, contracting with EA orgs, reading EA content, thinking through EA frames, etc).
i am now a lot less involved in EA.
e.g. i currently attend uc berkeley, and am ~uninvolved in uc berkeley EA
e.g. i haven’t attended a casual EA social in a long time, and i notice myself ughing in response to invites to explicitly-EA socials
e.g. i think through impact-maximization frames with a lot more care & wariness, and have plenty of other frames in my toolbox that i use to a greater relative degree than the EA ones
e.g. the orgs i find myself interested in working for seem to do effectively altruistic things by my lights, but seem (at closest) to be EA-community-adjacent and (at furthest) actively antagonistic to the EA community
(to be clear, i still find myself wanting to be altruistic, and wanting to be effective in that process. but i think describing my shift as merely moving a bit away from the community would be underselling the extent to which i’ve also moved a bit away from EA’s frames of thinking.)
why?
a lot of EA seems fake
the stuff — the orientations — the orgs — i’m finding it hard to straightforwardly point at, but it feels kinda easy for me to notice ex-post
there’s been an odd mix of orientations toward [ aiming at a character of transparent/open/clear/etc ] alongside [ taking actions that are strategic/instrumentally useful/best at accomplishing narrow goals… that also happen to be mildly deceptive, or lying by omission, or otherwise somewhat slimy/untrustworthy/etc ]
the thing that really gets me is the combination of an implicit (and sometimes explicit!) request for deep trust alongside a level of trust that doesn’t live up to that expectation.
it’s fine to be in a low-trust environment, and also fine to be in a high-trust environment; it’s not fine to signal one and be the other. my experience of EA has been that people have generally behaved extremely well/with high integrity and with high trust… but not quite as well & as high as what was written on the tin.
for a concrete ex (& note that i totally might be screwing up some of the details here, please don’t index too hard on the specific people/orgs involved): when i was participating in — and then organizing for — brandeis EA, it seemed like our goal was (very roughly speaking) to increase awareness of EA ideas/principles, both via increasing depth & quantity of conversation and via increasing membership. i noticed a lack of action/doing-things-in-the-world, which felt kinda annoying to me… until i became aware that the action was “organizing the group,” and that some of the organizers (and higher up the chain, people at CEA/on the Groups team/at UGAP/etc) believed that most of the impact of university groups comes from recruiting/training organizers — that the “action” i felt was missing wasn’t missing at all, it was just happening to me, not from me. i doubt there was some point where anyone said “oh, and make sure not to tell the people in the club that their value is to be a training ground for the organizers!” — but that’s sorta how it felt, both on the object-level and on the deception-level.
this sort of orientation feels decently reprensentative of the 25th percentile end of what i’m talking about.
also some confusion around ethics/how i should behave given my confusion/etc
importantly, some confusions around how i value things. it feels like looking at the world through an EA frame blinds myself to things that i actually do care about, and blinds myself to the fact that i’m blinding myself. i think it’s taken me awhile to know what that feels like, and i’ve grown to find that blinding & meta-blinding extremely distasteful, and a signal that something’s wrong.
some of this might merely be confusion about orientation, and not ethics — e.g. it might be that in some sense the right doxastic attitude is “EA,” but that the right conative attitude is somewhere closer to (e.g.) “embody your character — be kind, warm, clear-thinking, goofy, loving, wise, [insert more virtues i want to be here]. oh and do some EA on the side, timeboxed & contained, like when you’re donating your yearly pledge money.”
where now?
i’m not sure! i could imagine the pendulum swinging more in either direction, and want to avoid doing any further prediction about where it will swing for fear of that prediction interacting harmfully with a sincere process of reflection.
i did find writing this out useful, though!
Thanks for clarifying your take!
I’m sorry to hear about those experiences.
Most of the problems you mention seem to be about the specific current EA community, as opposed to the main values of “doing a lot of good” and “being smart about doing so.”
Personally, I’m excited for certain altruistic and smart people to leave the EA community, as it suits them, and do good work elsewhere. I’m sure that being part of the community is limiting to certain people, especially if they can find other great communities.
That said, I of course hope you can find ways for the key values of “doing good in the world” and similar to work for you.
Thanks for sharing your experiences and reflections here — I really appreciate the thoughtfulness. I want to offer some context on the group organizer situation you described, as someone who was running the university groups program at the time.
On the strategy itself:
At the time, our scalable programs were pretty focused from evidence we had seen that much of the impact came from the organizers themselves. We of course did want groups to go well more generally, but in deciding where to put our marginal resource we were focusing on group organizers. It was a fairly unintuitive strategy — and I get how that could feel misaligned or even misleading if it wasn’t clearly communicated.
On communication:
We did try to be explicit about this strategy — it was featured at organizer retreats and in parts of our support programming. But we didn’t consistently communicate it across all our materials. That inconsistency was an oversight on our part. Definitely not an attempt to be deceptive — just something that didn’t land as clearly as we hoped.
Where we’re at now:
We’ve since updated our approach. The current strategy is less focused narrowly on organizers and more on helping groups be great overall. That said, we still think a lot of the value often comes from a small, highly engaged core — which often includes organizers, but not exclusively.
In retrospect, I wish we’d communicated this more clearly across the board. When a strategy is unintuitive, a few clear statements in a few places often isn’t enough to make it legible. Sorry again if this felt off — I really appreciate you surfacing it.
I appreciated you expressing this.
Riffing out loud … I feel that there are different dynamics going on here (not necessarily in your case; more in general):
The tensions where people don’t act with as much integrity as is signalled
This is not a new issue for EA (it arises structurally despite a lot of good intentions, because of the encouragement to be strategic), and I think it just needs active cultural resistance
In terms of writing, I like Holden’s and Toby’s pushes on this; my own attempts here and here
But for this to go well, I think it’s not enough to have some essays on reading lists; instead I hope that people try to practice good orientation here at lots of different scales, and socially encourage others to
The meta-blinding
I feel like I haven’t read much on this, but it rings true as a dynamic to be wary of! Where I take the heart of the issue to be that EA presents a strong frame about what “good” means, and then encourages people to engage in ways that make aspects of their thinking subservient to that frame
As someone put it to me, “EA has lost the mandate of heaven”
I think EA used to be (in some circles) the obvious default place for the thoughtful people who cared a lot to gather and collaborate
I think that some good fraction of its value came from performing this role?
Partially as a result of 1 and 2, people are disassociating with EA; and this further reduces the pull to associate
I can’t speak to how strong this effect is overall, but I think the directionality is clear
I don’t know if it’s accessible (and I don’t think I’m well positioned to try), but I still feel a lot of love for the core of EA, and would be excited if people could navigate it to a place where it regained the mandate of heaven.
some further & updated thoughts, written in ~30 min, are below. canonical version lives here.
Here’s a frame I’ve found helpful for thinking about effective altruism:
When I look inside myself, I notice that I care about a lot of things.
You could also reasonably replace “care” with “wanting,” “preferring,” “valuing,” “desiring,” “having goals,” etc, rather than “caring.” I’m okay being loose.
Some examples of things I care about:
I want my sister to have an excellent career.
I’m hungry, and want some food.
I want to be valued by people I respect.
I want my dogs to have enjoyable lives.
(And many, many more).
(It’s often useful to be introspective/clear-eyed about what you care about, what that ontology looks like, which values are instrumental to which other values, etc., but I won’t be doing that here, and indeed I think it might be anti-helpful in this particular frame at this particular time. Stay with me until the end.)
Sort-of by definition, I want more of the things I care about. I see my life as a difficult, high-level optimization problem aimed at making decisions which, given my resources at various times, increase my values across time.
Some of the things I care about — like wanting food because I’m hungry — are fundamentally oriented at myself. And I take actions to do better along these axes.
Some examples of actions:
Reading a book on tax strategies
Learning how to cook
Asking people for feedback on my sartorial choices
etc
And in general, I try to be effective at getting what I want, here — that is, I aim to achieve these kinds of goals/values/preferences to as great of a degree as possible.
But other things I care about — like wanting my sister to have an excellent career, or my dogs to have enjoyable lives — are fundamentally oriented at others-by-their-lights. And I take actions to do better along these axes, too.
These motivations often look starkly different in a lot of different situations.
For some of these altruistic motivations, it just so happens that some lovely dynamics have coalesced such that there’s an existing group of people / infrastructure / etc who have worked & are working quite hard toward helping me get what I want w/r/t some of those things I care about that are oriented at others-by-their-lights. In particular, I haven’t found any community which is more effective at helping me achieve the things I care about that are oriented at others-by-their-lights than this one.
(The group of people / infrastructure / etc I’m referring to is effective altruism.)
Why do I like this frame?
Because it’s apparent that I care about quite a few things. It becomes evident quickly that totalizing stances toward EA are just not worth it; a bad trade; just getting less of what I want.
In particular, I think this kind of frame can be validating toward folks who’ve gone quite far, and repressed the values that they in-fact have in other areas of their life. (I think I was in this camp ~two years ago.)
There are interesting subproblems that come into clearer view, e.g.:
When should, on the margin, my resources go toward different things that I care about?
What actions would get me more access to the things that I want with greater robustness (i.e. getting me closer to many different things I want, all at once)?
etc
“why do i find myself less involved in EA?”
You go over more details later and answer other questions like what caused some reactions to some EA-related things, but an interesting thing here is that you are looking for a cause of something that is not.
> it feels like looking at the world through an EA frame blinds myself to things that i actually do care about, and blinds myself to the fact that i’m blinding myself.
I can strongly relate, had the same experience. i think it’s due to christian upbringing or some kind of need for external validation. I think many people don’t experience that, so I wouldn’t say that’s an inherently EA thing, it’s more about the attitude.
UC Berkeley EA is hosting a west coast uni student EA retreat on april 10-12, with ~50 attendees from Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, UCI, UCSD, & more, as well as special guests like Matt Reardon, Jake McKinnon, Jesse Gilbert, Julie Steele, Adam Khoja, Richard Ren, & more...
...but we only know to reach out to people who’re involved with their uni’s clubs. so: if you’re interested in attending, book a 5-10 minute chat with alex or aiden :)
some examples of gaps in our outreach:
unis that don’t have an EA club
students who haven’t joined their uni’s EA club
transfers to west-coast unis
students who’re on leave from their uni and presently living on the west coast
high-schoolers who’ll soon be starting at west coast
we won’t be able to take everyone, but reading the ea forum is a pretty positive indicator that you’d be a good fit!
PurpleAir collects data from a network of private air quality sensors. Looks interesting, and possibly useful for tracking rapid changes in air quality (e.g. from a wildfire).
PurpleAir contribute all of their sensors to IQAir also! So you can get a very comprehensive sense of air quality very quickly and compare private and public sources.
[srs unconf at lighthaven this sunday 9⁄21]
Memoria is a one-day festival/unconference for spaced repetition, incremental reading, and memory systems. It’s hosted at Lighthaven in Berkeley, CA, on September 21st, from 10am through the afternoon/evening.
Michael Nielsen, Andy Matuschak, Soren Bjornstad, Martin Schneider, and about 90–110 others will be there — if you use & tinker with memory systems like Anki, SuperMemo, Remnote, MathAcademy, etc, then maybe you should come!
Tickets are $80 and include lunch & dinner. More info at memoria.day.