Being Open and Honest
Iāve been around the EA community for nearly a decade, and Iāve become close friends with so many amazing people through my local chapter in NYC. One thing Iāve overheard quite frequently when Iām at meetups with first-timers is that these friends will sometimes say things like āEA is this weird philosophyā or āEA is this fringe movement that believes AI is trying to kill us all.ā
Now, to be clear, these are not wholly inaccurate. š However, I do worry that the self-deprecation or quasi-disparaging language may be going too far. Thereās definitely a place for humor and not taking ourselves too seriously, and these could just be isolated incidents owing to how New Yorkers can be edgier than most people, so please take this as anecdotal. But in my observation, being sarcastic or needlessly harsh about the movement (or worse, the people) that you actually admire and respect isnāt the way Iād choose to represent the community or the ideas of EA more broadly.
Personally, I think that EA has been a tremendous source of joy and fulfillment in my life, so I do my best to reflect that joy when I speak about effective altruism to folks who may be unfamiliar. After all, EA has enriched my life, and I know that my friends feel the same way, so I donāt feel the need to use terms like weird or culty to describe the community, even if I do acknowledge that some of the ideas and practices are a bit out of the ordinary. Still, there is nothing objectionable about wanting to do the most good you can do. Iāve written before that I think we should be vocal about what works, and while we shouldnāt shy away from critiques or points of contention where we may disagree with the dominant narratives of the movement (indeed, we should highlight those points to show that there are still tons of open questions in EA), I donāt think we need to self-abnegate when we do so.
I definitely invite your thoughts here. Have you had similar experiences? When youāre talking about EA with newcomers, do you use words that could be perceived as negatively valenced? If so, do you think it helps? I might just be oversensitive here, so Iām willing to recalibrate. If you share my intuition, though, and you think we should generally avoid language that could potentially signal to our interlocutors that weāre disparaging the very ideas and principles that we ourselves espouse, then Iād encourage us to be earnest with our values and talk openly and honestly about why we hold the beliefs that we do, and to do so with love! ā¤ļø
Iāve definitely noticed this as a part of the EA NYC community (and I wouldnāt be surprised if this were true elsewhere). I think it might come from a place of trying to pre-empt common criticisms/ācharacterizations of EA, but comes off as weird, especially when the person has no preconceptions about EA. EA has a strong culture thatās pretty different from every other community Iāve ever been a part of, but it doesnāt exert control over my life. Obviously, ideas and people from EA influence me in big ways, but because I believe those ideas and respect those people.
I donāt know any other EAs in my area so I havenāt witnessed this phenomenon. On the one hand, I like the self-deprecating style because it is the exact opposite style to my arch-nemeses, the anti-science/ādark-epistemology people (you know them by many names: climate dismissives, anti-vaxxers, anti-nuclear-power zealots, math deniers...).
On the other hand, there is a reason my nemeses act this way: it works well for them. Certain anti-vaxxers probably earn over $1 million annually on Substack from $5/āmo. subscriptions. Clearly, a great many people are attracted to a confident āIām always rightā style of speaking and acting. Are there people who would like EA more if it were more like that? No doubt. Are there enough people who reject āweirdnessā that EA would grow more if it worked harder to look cool? Plausible. Can we look cool without risking the soul of EA? Maybe.
But golly, I wouldnāt want to take a position without collecting empirical data on all this!