But I have not really been much involved in the community since about 2020. The interesting thing about this is that my withdrawal from the community has nothing to do with disagreements, personal conflicts, or FTX. I still pretty much agree with most “orthodox EA” positions, and I think that both the idea of EA and the movement remain straightforwardly good and relevant.
Hence why I describe the process as “senescence”: intellectually and philosophically I am still on board and I still donate, I just… don’t particularly want to participate beyond that.
What does the community have to offer me?
I won’t sugar-coat it: the main reason I don’t engage so much with EA these days is that I find it boring. What draw me to EA was the ideas, and the idea of being able to make an impact. It was interesting and fun to talk to people about it, and there were often new and interesting things happening. Even as a non-specialist community member, there was often a lot you could contribute. I don’t feel like that today, and it’s hard to see myself as having more impact than I do by donating.
There are two main sub-strands to my lack of interest, which are more apparent online or in-person.
Online: much of the content on the EA forum is quite specialized. I, in principle, absolutely love it that people are writing 10,000 word reports on shrimp sentience and posting it on the forum. That is what actually doing the work looks like—rather than speculating at a high level about whether shrimp could suffer and if so what that would mean for us, you go out and actually try to push our knowledge forward in detail. However, I have absolutely no desire to read it.
I think it’s telling that the main things I commented on or posted about on the Forum since 2017 are all “community” stuff—i.e. things that you don’t require any context to have an opinion about!
Is this a me problem? Maybe! Some people love to consume this stuff and I admire them. But also it’s unsurprising that people doing more focussed work on sub-areas will start to exclude people who aren’t focussed on that sub-area, through the gradual build-up of required context; lack of time; or just the normal inability to care about too many specific things.
In some ways it felt like the early EA community was like the old scientific Royal Society. Someone would come in and demonstrate the relationship between heat and pressure in gases—awesome! Then another person would show you what lungs looked like under a microscope—cool! Whereas now it’s a bit more like modern science: fields are much deeper (which is good!) but it is harder to maintain an interest in many of them.
Offline: a lot of what goes on in in-person EA meetups is, quite reasonably, somewhat introductory. There is a lot of emphasis on bringing in and engaging new people. This is all excellent! But I don’t have much interest in it myself. Neither the content nor, to be honest, projecting the charisma to make people feel welcome and want to come back.
There are the conferences, where at least the content is a bit more novel. But the general vibe of the conferences is that they’re for people who are highly engaged and expect to be re-directing large fractions of their energy depending on what happens. And that no longer feels like me.
In the past what mostly kept me attached to the community was the social life. I knew enough people that I always enjoyed going to events for that reason alone, and there were enough parties that I could meet new people as well. The combination of moving cities and COVID more or less broke that connection for me, alas.
What do I have to offer the community?
The other side of this picture is that I don’t feel like I have much to offer the EA community these days:[2]
I’m not deep into any particular areas of active work, so I am neither producing content nor terribly useful at reviewing it
I do not have the spirit to throw myself into a direct work project[3]
I don’t have any particular advantage in working out where to donate over, say, the EA Funds
I am unlikely to drastically change my career at this point
I just have less energy than I did when I was younger
I am not generally the one hosting all the parties!
As a senescent older EA, my virtues are pretty much that I exist, I have some earning capacity, and I’ve been through a bunch. Is that useful? I’m unsure. Perhaps my comparative advantage remains continuing more-or-less as I am and funding the people who have more to offer.
I can’t help but compare EA with the intentional community of my youth: Christianity. People don’t “senesce” out of church in the same way. There’s always a reason to go—the activity itself is regarded by everyone as valuable, regardless of whether it leads to anything in particular. The community is very welcoming. There are many roles for people to contribute something, even if it’s just greeting people or doing a bit of admin.
I fear we have yet to truly refute Robin Hanson’s claim that EA is primarily a youth movement. What could a version of the EA community look like which was compelling to people throughout their entire lives?
I’m going to bracket the obvious response of “why don’t you change those things?”. That’s pretty reasonable, and maybe I will, but for now let’s take me as I am.
My EA Senescence
I have some claim to be an “old hand” EA:[1]
I was in the room when the creation Giving What We Can was announced (although I vacillated about joining for quite a while)
I first went to EA Global in 2015
I worked on a not-very successful EA project for a while
But I have not really been much involved in the community since about 2020. The interesting thing about this is that my withdrawal from the community has nothing to do with disagreements, personal conflicts, or FTX. I still pretty much agree with most “orthodox EA” positions, and I think that both the idea of EA and the movement remain straightforwardly good and relevant.
Hence why I describe the process as “senescence”: intellectually and philosophically I am still on board and I still donate, I just… don’t particularly want to participate beyond that.
What does the community have to offer me?
I won’t sugar-coat it: the main reason I don’t engage so much with EA these days is that I find it boring. What draw me to EA was the ideas, and the idea of being able to make an impact. It was interesting and fun to talk to people about it, and there were often new and interesting things happening. Even as a non-specialist community member, there was often a lot you could contribute. I don’t feel like that today, and it’s hard to see myself as having more impact than I do by donating.
There are two main sub-strands to my lack of interest, which are more apparent online or in-person.
Online: much of the content on the EA forum is quite specialized. I, in principle, absolutely love it that people are writing 10,000 word reports on shrimp sentience and posting it on the forum. That is what actually doing the work looks like—rather than speculating at a high level about whether shrimp could suffer and if so what that would mean for us, you go out and actually try to push our knowledge forward in detail. However, I have absolutely no desire to read it.
I think it’s telling that the main things I commented on or posted about on the Forum since 2017 are all “community” stuff—i.e. things that you don’t require any context to have an opinion about!
Is this a me problem? Maybe! Some people love to consume this stuff and I admire them. But also it’s unsurprising that people doing more focussed work on sub-areas will start to exclude people who aren’t focussed on that sub-area, through the gradual build-up of required context; lack of time; or just the normal inability to care about too many specific things.
In some ways it felt like the early EA community was like the old scientific Royal Society. Someone would come in and demonstrate the relationship between heat and pressure in gases—awesome! Then another person would show you what lungs looked like under a microscope—cool! Whereas now it’s a bit more like modern science: fields are much deeper (which is good!) but it is harder to maintain an interest in many of them.
Offline: a lot of what goes on in in-person EA meetups is, quite reasonably, somewhat introductory. There is a lot of emphasis on bringing in and engaging new people. This is all excellent! But I don’t have much interest in it myself. Neither the content nor, to be honest, projecting the charisma to make people feel welcome and want to come back.
There are the conferences, where at least the content is a bit more novel. But the general vibe of the conferences is that they’re for people who are highly engaged and expect to be re-directing large fractions of their energy depending on what happens. And that no longer feels like me.
In the past what mostly kept me attached to the community was the social life. I knew enough people that I always enjoyed going to events for that reason alone, and there were enough parties that I could meet new people as well. The combination of moving cities and COVID more or less broke that connection for me, alas.
What do I have to offer the community?
The other side of this picture is that I don’t feel like I have much to offer the EA community these days:[2]
I’m not deep into any particular areas of active work, so I am neither producing content nor terribly useful at reviewing it
I do not have the spirit to throw myself into a direct work project[3]
I don’t have any particular advantage in working out where to donate over, say, the EA Funds
I am unlikely to drastically change my career at this point
I just have less energy than I did when I was younger
I am not generally the one hosting all the parties!
As a senescent older EA, my virtues are pretty much that I exist, I have some earning capacity, and I’ve been through a bunch. Is that useful? I’m unsure. Perhaps my comparative advantage remains continuing more-or-less as I am and funding the people who have more to offer.
I can’t help but compare EA with the intentional community of my youth: Christianity. People don’t “senesce” out of church in the same way. There’s always a reason to go—the activity itself is regarded by everyone as valuable, regardless of whether it leads to anything in particular. The community is very welcoming. There are many roles for people to contribute something, even if it’s just greeting people or doing a bit of admin.
I fear we have yet to truly refute Robin Hanson’s claim that EA is primarily a youth movement. What could a version of the EA community look like which was compelling to people throughout their entire lives?
This post is partly a personal response to Will MacAskill’s claim that it would be useful to get “old-hand” EAs out of the woodwork.
I’m going to bracket the obvious response of “why don’t you change those things?”. That’s pretty reasonable, and maybe I will, but for now let’s take me as I am.
I learned this from GTP. Honestly, I kind of hated doing it.