I think this is a critical question for EA right now. I do want to try to make some distinctions about what the ‘EA Community’ means though:
I think the “EA brand’ or “public/elite perception of EA” should be evaluated as separate from the “EA Community”, otherwise I think it’s too broad. And I think this is doing very badly, in fact in many areas that used to be friendly-ish to EA (e.g. silicon valley and highly-educated-online-twitter) it seems to be absolutely toxic right now.
I also think the public perception of EA is almost unrelated to the truth. People seem to think that ~95%+ of funding goes to bonkers galaxy-brained AI research, instead of most AI research being mech interp, and most EA Funding still going to GH&D.
“the group of people who identify as effective altruists” is also quite loose. Like, I’m aware of people who hang around EAs and donate almost exclusively to GiveWell recommended charities who personally ‘wouldn’t identify as an effective altruists’,[1] so I don’t know how meaningful that is either.
My particular beef here is that I think the ‘EA Community’ has been used unfairly as a punching bag over the last year. The EAs I interact with are basically all kind, humane, thoughtful, not totalising or involved in any of the shenanigans that I see mostly coming from the Bay Area and Bay Culture rather than EA at all.
‘EA Leadership’ is also a vague and nebulous term but I also want to highly distinguish that from the broader EA Community. People disagree about who these are, and why they matter, and what they believe, and how much it should matter! I agree that there seems to be a lot of changing of the guard, which is interesting, and a lack of people stepping up to be ‘leaders’ in the community in the Long 2023.
tl;dr—agree that these are very important questions, I’d like people (including myself) to be more precise about what they mean when they talk about the Community, as I think that would be more likely to lead to productive changes
I think this is a critical question for EA right now. I do want to try to make some distinctions about what the ‘EA Community’ means though:
I think the “EA brand’ or “public/elite perception of EA” should be evaluated as separate from the “EA Community”, otherwise I think it’s too broad. And I think this is doing very badly, in fact in many areas that used to be friendly-ish to EA (e.g. silicon valley and highly-educated-online-twitter) it seems to be absolutely toxic right now.
I also think the public perception of EA is almost unrelated to the truth. People seem to think that ~95%+ of funding goes to bonkers galaxy-brained AI research, instead of most AI research being mech interp, and most EA Funding still going to GH&D.
“the group of people who identify as effective altruists” is also quite loose. Like, I’m aware of people who hang around EAs and donate almost exclusively to GiveWell recommended charities who personally ‘wouldn’t identify as an effective altruists’,[1] so I don’t know how meaningful that is either.
My particular beef here is that I think the ‘EA Community’ has been used unfairly as a punching bag over the last year. The EAs I interact with are basically all kind, humane, thoughtful, not totalising or involved in any of the shenanigans that I see mostly coming from the Bay Area and Bay Culture rather than EA at all.
‘EA Leadership’ is also a vague and nebulous term but I also want to highly distinguish that from the broader EA Community. People disagree about who these are, and why they matter, and what they believe, and how much it should matter! I agree that there seems to be a lot of changing of the guard, which is interesting, and a lack of people stepping up to be ‘leaders’ in the community in the Long 2023.
tl;dr—agree that these are very important questions, I’d like people (including myself) to be more precise about what they mean when they talk about the Community, as I think that would be more likely to lead to productive changes
whereas to me, if it talks like an EA and if it donates like an EA...