Interested in biosecurity, policy, AI governance, community building, and entrepreneurship.
Talos Fellow, trained as a biomedical engineer in France and Switzerland (MSc).
Originally from France.
Alix Pham
Karma: 915
Thank you for sharing!
I would like to emphasize my choice of word (“affiliation” and not “identity”), as I do understand the offputting implications of “being an EA” (as opposed to “being part of the EA community” or another less identity-defining formulation).
I also want to add that I don’t think anyone can claim they endorse everything about a movement they consider themselves a part of (e.g. feminism or civil rights or...), I don’t think it’s possible to expect full alignment for anyone in any movement. I think it’s important people know that about EA. I think there are as many definitions of EA as there are “members”. But I also think not defining it for yourself will leave more space for others to define it for you (and most likely, wrongly). (That is to say, I probably won’t support anything along the lines of “you misunderstanding EA” or “you not being aligned with EA”, but I can’t say anything with certainty as I don’t have enough context on you)
I hope that makes sense.
Thank you!
I think people tend to trust you more if they notice your transparency and sincerity, especially over time. I think transparency has high long-term rewards. There is also a great deal of better sense-making: you can connect the dots that this bad thing happened but you know someone that was outspoken about an affiliated thing—how do those two things make sense together? is there some misunderstanding that one can gain clarity on?
A bit is captured here:
I’d guess their trust in the org is high particularly because they have always been transparent about something that is “courageous” to own. And they wanted to understand why people they trust still stand by something that seems so controversial.
Does that help?
3. More open affiliation would show the true diversity of the EA community and prevent “tokenization” of the few vocal members.
I would replace “vocal” with “visible” (e.g. I don’t think the members of the OpenAI board were especially vocal about their EA affiliation, people simply singled them out)
Thanks Oscar for sharing this! A few points:
Bregman and Harari are exactly examples of tokens, and being open about your EA-ness to friends is detokenizing them I think, so I do agree with you on this being part of the solution.
I don’t think me not having a job offer cuts against my thesis:
It’s not that simple and there’s more to the story
My point is, I was frustrated, but I think being honest about my EA affiliation is not something I would trade against a job—if someone doesn’t want me because of that, I’d probably be better off somewhere else. There will be other impactful opportunities, some of them with a better value-alignment factor.
I can say that also because I was not in a precarious financial situation.
It’s also a point supporting something like “I have experienced this myself and don’t regret it” (it happened 9 months ago and I’m perfectly satisfied of where I am today, despite this happening).
I think many others will make different tradeoffs, and that’s okay. I am merely advocating for shifting the norm and questioning one’s motivations more explicitly, instead of defaulting to this behavior as if it was harmless.
one solution would be to signal the flavor of EA you’re most involved in, e.g. “bed nets not light cone” but it sounds like that would not be owning your EA identity publicly according to the OP
I’d also add that I took great care in not using “identity” but “affiliation” instead, I think it’s important not to make it about identity.
Thanks for clarifying, that makes a lot of sense. I’m not sure yet, but I think those considerations are not in the scope of my post, then? Let me know what you think.
Maybe this part
I’m also not necessarily saying that one needs to shout it everywhere, but simply be transparent about it.
conveys it, maybe?
That’s interesting, thanks for sharing this. The framework of thought is useful.
I think there’s a key component that I still see: on top of being the default, not being outspoken about one’s EA affiliation sometimes require some efforts, it’s not about “not feeling the need to reveal” but “feeling the need to conceal” (e.g. not sharing events with networks and friends, not appearing on pictures of EA events).
But again, I do think some cases are exceptional.
Thank you for writing this!
That’s interesting, I’ll reflect on that. I would be curious to explore how the reason you mention can be a risk for you? And to what extent you’ll undertake actions to make sure people don’t know your EA affiliation for that reason?
one solution would be to signal the flavor of EA you’re most involved in, e.g. “bed nets not light cone” but it sounds like that would not be owning your EA identity publicly according to the OP
No, I do think it’s owning to some extent already.
I think the reason you’re mentioning is also partly included in “people don’t talk to you” (because they project some beliefs on you you actually don’t have). But my certainty on that line of thought is lower as it’s something I thought less about.
Thank you for writing this, it means a lot to me!
Good to know. I think French is usually very badly translated by Google Translate.
On Owning Our EA Affiliation
Thanks for writing this, Alex, I think you touch on some good and mixed things that are probably shared by others in a similar position. Looking forward to see you in your next chapter!
Re: Annex 3 - For now, we tend to delegate this to local groups, but we would be keen to experiment more on the national level. We just haven’t yet, unfortunately. Some local groups are good at this, with a Luma calendar full of events that they share regularly on some group chats. Curious to see if that succeeds.
Re: links—Oh no! They are links to headings of the doc, but as I added them while writing the post, it points to the headings in the draft, funnily enough… I’ll try to fix that soon.
EDIT: links should be fixed now.
EA Switzerland—Strategy (v2024)
I’m curious if you fed Claude the variables or if it fetched them itself? In the latter case, there’s a risk of having the wrong values, isn’t there?
Otherwise, really interesting project. Curious of the insights to take out of this, esp. for me the fact that Switzerland comes up first. Also surprising that Germany’s not on the list, maybe?
Thanks!
Thank you so, so much, Elliot, for writing this and being so caring and kind. This is so cleverly worded and beautifully read, we need more of this.
Community building in effective altruism (panel discussion)
But it’s usually bad, isn’t it? I mean Google Translate is not my go-to translator… Or am I missing something?
Thank you very much for taking the time to write this.
I generally don’t feel disagreement with what you say, I don’t think it’s completely opposed to what I’m advocating for. I feel that there’s a huge deal of interpretation around the words used, here “affiliation” (and as mentioned at the beginning of the post, not “identity”).
I do think more people “affiliating” will make EA less of an ingroup / outgroup, and more of a philosophy (a “general held value system” as you say in the beginning) people adhere to to some extent, esp if framed as “this is a community that inspires me, those are ideas that are influencing my actions”.