Largely agree with Owen’s post here. I would just add one point.
There’s a danger of developing a cadre of specialist or semi-professional ‘community-builders’ in EA, which is that they could easily become a recruitment bottleneck, a selection filter, a radicalized activist subculture, and a locus of ideological control and misguided norm-enforcement—just as Human Resources (HR) departments have often become in corporations and academia.
For example, in many companies that become politically radicalized by younger workers, the HR department tends to be in the vanguard of radicalization—partly because already-radicalized workers know that HR is where the power is (to recruit, select, promote, and discipline other workers, and to enforce certain ideological norms), and partly because highly rational systematizers don’t tend to be very interested in joining the people-centered HR world.
My nightmare scenario is that a smallish clique within EA could take over the ‘community-building function’, and nudge the community-building in certain politicized directions that are contrary to the nonpartisan principles of EA. This is unlikely to go in the direction of making EA more Republican, conservative, or religious than it is—it seems much more likely that semi-professional community-builders in EA could push EA recruitment, selection, and outreach in a politically Democratic, liberal, progressive, or woke direction. This is not idle speculation. We have seen this happen again and again in corporations, universities, non-profits, foundations, churches, community groups, and other organizations.
This is captured in Robert Conquest’s ‘Second Law of Politics’: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. Not that EA should be explicitly right-wing. Rather, it should be staunchly, fiercely EA—which is to say, non-partisan, and highly skeptical about allowing any organizational subcultures to develop that would be vulnerable to a woke/progressive takeover.
Of course, it would be great for more EAs to cultivate skills in public outreach, recruitment, marketing, communication, media, conference hosting, podcasting, youtubing, networking, and specific forms of community building. I’m just giving a personal caveat that we should be quite wary of creating an HR-style cadre of specialist ‘community-builders’—because that would be very delectable and low-hanging fruit for political activists to try to take over.
Largely agree with Owen’s post here. I would just add one point.
There’s a danger of developing a cadre of specialist or semi-professional ‘community-builders’ in EA, which is that they could easily become a recruitment bottleneck, a selection filter, a radicalized activist subculture, and a locus of ideological control and misguided norm-enforcement—just as Human Resources (HR) departments have often become in corporations and academia.
For example, in many companies that become politically radicalized by younger workers, the HR department tends to be in the vanguard of radicalization—partly because already-radicalized workers know that HR is where the power is (to recruit, select, promote, and discipline other workers, and to enforce certain ideological norms), and partly because highly rational systematizers don’t tend to be very interested in joining the people-centered HR world.
My nightmare scenario is that a smallish clique within EA could take over the ‘community-building function’, and nudge the community-building in certain politicized directions that are contrary to the nonpartisan principles of EA. This is unlikely to go in the direction of making EA more Republican, conservative, or religious than it is—it seems much more likely that semi-professional community-builders in EA could push EA recruitment, selection, and outreach in a politically Democratic, liberal, progressive, or woke direction. This is not idle speculation. We have seen this happen again and again in corporations, universities, non-profits, foundations, churches, community groups, and other organizations.
This is captured in Robert Conquest’s ‘Second Law of Politics’: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. Not that EA should be explicitly right-wing. Rather, it should be staunchly, fiercely EA—which is to say, non-partisan, and highly skeptical about allowing any organizational subcultures to develop that would be vulnerable to a woke/progressive takeover.
Of course, it would be great for more EAs to cultivate skills in public outreach, recruitment, marketing, communication, media, conference hosting, podcasting, youtubing, networking, and specific forms of community building. I’m just giving a personal caveat that we should be quite wary of creating an HR-style cadre of specialist ‘community-builders’—because that would be very delectable and low-hanging fruit for political activists to try to take over.