Prioritising between people isn’t great for belonging
The community is built around things like maximising impact, and prioritisation. Find the best, ignore the rest.
Initially, it seemed like this was more focused on prioritising between opportunities, eg. donation or career opportunities. Though it seems like this has in some sense bled into a culture of prioritising between people, and that doing this has become more explicit and normalised.
Eg. words I see a lot in EA recruitment: talented, promising, high-potential, ambitious. (Sometimes I ask myself, wait a minute… am I talented, promising, high-potential, ambitious?). It seems like EA groups are encouraged to have a focus on the highest potential community members, as that’s where they can have the most impact.
But the trouble is, it’s not particularly nice to be in a community where you’re being assessed and sized up all the time, and different nice things (jobs, respect, people listening to you, money) are given out based on how well you stack up.
Basically, it’s pretty hard for a community with a culture of prioritisation to do a good job of providing people with a sense of belonging.
Also, heavy tailed distributions—EA’s love them. Some donation opportunities/ jobs are so much more impactful than the others etc. If the thing you’re doing isn’t in the good bit of the tail, it basically rounds to zero. This is kind of annoying when by definition, most of the things in a heavy tailed distribution aren’t in the good bit.
Prioritising between people isn’t great for belonging
The community is built around things like maximising impact, and prioritisation. Find the best, ignore the rest.
Initially, it seemed like this was more focused on prioritising between opportunities, eg. donation or career opportunities. Though it seems like this has in some sense bled into a culture of prioritising between people, and that doing this has become more explicit and normalised.
Eg. words I see a lot in EA recruitment: talented, promising, high-potential, ambitious. (Sometimes I ask myself, wait a minute… am I talented, promising, high-potential, ambitious?). It seems like EA groups are encouraged to have a focus on the highest potential community members, as that’s where they can have the most impact.
But the trouble is, it’s not particularly nice to be in a community where you’re being assessed and sized up all the time, and different nice things (jobs, respect, people listening to you, money) are given out based on how well you stack up.
Basically, it’s pretty hard for a community with a culture of prioritisation to do a good job of providing people with a sense of belonging.
Also, heavy tailed distributions—EA’s love them. Some donation opportunities/ jobs are so much more impactful than the others etc. If the thing you’re doing isn’t in the good bit of the tail, it basically rounds to zero. This is kind of annoying when by definition, most of the things in a heavy tailed distribution aren’t in the good bit.