Belonging, fitting in, and why do EAs look the same?
There’s this thing where after people have been in EA for a while, they start looking the same. They drink the same huel, use the same words, have the same partners, read the same econ blogs… so what’s up with that?
Let’s take Brene Brown’s insightful eighth graders as a starting point
Belonging is being accepted for being you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else.
Things are good and nice hypothesis: EAs end up looking the same because they identify and converge on more rational and effective ways of doing things. EA enables people to be their true selves, and EAs true selves are rational and effective, which is why everyone’s true selves drink Huel.
Cynical hypothesis: EAs end up looking the same because people want to fit in, and they can do that by making themselves more like other people. I drink Huel because it tells other people that I am rational and effective, and I can get over the lack of the experience of being nourished by reminding myself that huel is scientifically actually more nourishing than a meal which I chew sat round a dinner table with other people.
Fitting in with one group makes it harder to fit in with other groups + me being annoying
One maybe sad thing on the cynical hypothesis is that the strategy for fitting in in one group, eg. adopting all these EA lifestyle things, decreases the fit in other groups, and so increases the dependence on the first group… eg. the more I ask my non EA friends what their inside views on AI timelines are the more they’re like, this guy has lost the plot and stop making eye contact with me.
(In my research for this post I asked a friend ‘Did I become more annoying when I got into the whole EA stuff? It would be helpful if you could say yes because it will help me with this point I’m trying to make’ And he said ’Well there was this thing where you were a bit annoying to have conversations with about the world and politics and stuff because you had this whole EA thing and so thought that everything else wasn’t important and wasn’t worth talking about because the obvious answer was do whatever is most effective… but tbh otherwise not really, you were always kind of annoying)
I found this post harder to understand than the rest of the series. The thing you’re describing makes sense in theory, but I haven’t seen it in practice and I’m not sure what it would look like.
What EA-related lifestyle changes people would other people find alienating? Veganism? Not participating in especially expensive activities? Talking about EA?
I haven’t found “talking about EA” to be a problem, as long as I’m not trying to sell my friends on it without their asking first. I don’t think EA is unique in this way — I’d be annoyed if my religious friends tried to proselytize to me or if my activist friends were pressuring me to come and protest with them.
If I talk about my job or what I’ve been reading lately in the sense of “here’s my life update”, that goes fine, because we’re all sharing those kinds of life updates. I avoid the EA-jargon bits of my job and focus on human stories or funny anecdotes. (Similarly, my programmer friends don’t share coding-related stories I won’t understand.)
And then, when we’re not sharing stories, we’re doing things like gaming or hiking or remembering the good times, all of which seem orthogonal to EA. But all friendships are different, and I assume I’m overlooking obstacles that other people have encountered.
Belonging, fitting in, and why do EAs look the same?
There’s this thing where after people have been in EA for a while, they start looking the same. They drink the same huel, use the same words, have the same partners, read the same econ blogs… so what’s up with that?
Let’s take Brene Brown’s insightful eighth graders as a starting point
Things are good and nice hypothesis: EAs end up looking the same because they identify and converge on more rational and effective ways of doing things. EA enables people to be their true selves, and EAs true selves are rational and effective, which is why everyone’s true selves drink Huel.
Cynical hypothesis: EAs end up looking the same because people want to fit in, and they can do that by making themselves more like other people. I drink Huel because it tells other people that I am rational and effective, and I can get over the lack of the experience of being nourished by reminding myself that huel is scientifically actually more nourishing than a meal which I chew sat round a dinner table with other people.
Fitting in with one group makes it harder to fit in with other groups + me being annoying
One maybe sad thing on the cynical hypothesis is that the strategy for fitting in in one group, eg. adopting all these EA lifestyle things, decreases the fit in other groups, and so increases the dependence on the first group… eg. the more I ask my non EA friends what their inside views on AI timelines are the more they’re like, this guy has lost the plot and stop making eye contact with me.
(In my research for this post I asked a friend ‘Did I become more annoying when I got into the whole EA stuff? It would be helpful if you could say yes because it will help me with this point I’m trying to make’ And he said ’Well there was this thing where you were a bit annoying to have conversations with about the world and politics and stuff because you had this whole EA thing and so thought that everything else wasn’t important and wasn’t worth talking about because the obvious answer was do whatever is most effective… but tbh otherwise not really, you were always kind of annoying)
I found this post harder to understand than the rest of the series. The thing you’re describing makes sense in theory, but I haven’t seen it in practice and I’m not sure what it would look like.
What EA-related lifestyle changes people would other people find alienating? Veganism? Not participating in especially expensive activities? Talking about EA?
I haven’t found “talking about EA” to be a problem, as long as I’m not trying to sell my friends on it without their asking first. I don’t think EA is unique in this way — I’d be annoyed if my religious friends tried to proselytize to me or if my activist friends were pressuring me to come and protest with them.
If I talk about my job or what I’ve been reading lately in the sense of “here’s my life update”, that goes fine, because we’re all sharing those kinds of life updates. I avoid the EA-jargon bits of my job and focus on human stories or funny anecdotes. (Similarly, my programmer friends don’t share coding-related stories I won’t understand.)
And then, when we’re not sharing stories, we’re doing things like gaming or hiking or remembering the good times, all of which seem orthogonal to EA. But all friendships are different, and I assume I’m overlooking obstacles that other people have encountered.
(Also, props for doing the research!)