— I engineer ambitious ideas until they survive the battlefield of reality —
I have received funding from the LTFF and the SFF and am also doing work for an EA-adjacent organization.
My EA journey started in 2007 as I considered switching from a Wall Street career to instead help tackle climate change by making wind energy cheaper – unfortunately, the University of Pennsylvania did not have an EA chapter back then! A few years later, I started having doubts whether helping to build one wind farm at a time was the best use of my time. After reading a few books on philosophy and psychology, I decided that moral circle expansion was neglected but important and donated a few thousand sterling pounds of my modest income to a somewhat evidence-based organisation. Serendipitously, my boss stumbled upon EA in a thread on Stack Exchange around 2014 and sent me a link. After reading up on EA, I then pursued E2G with my modest income, donating ~USD35k to AMF. I have done some limited volunteering for building the EA community here in Stockholm, Sweden. Additionally, I set up and was an admin of the ~1k member EA system change Facebook group (apologies for not having time to make more of it!). Lastly, (and I am leaving out a lot of smaller stuff like giving career guidance, etc.) I have coordinated with other people interested in doing EA community building in UWC high schools and have even run a couple of EA events at these schools.
I think we may be looking at this at the wrong level of analysis. Individual responsibility matters and people should be held accountable, but if the goal is to reduce incidents like this, focusing mainly on individual cases probably won’t move the needle much. I’d like to zoom out and consider what this might imply about the male part of the EA community more generally.
I previously used the Boeing analogy: a door falls off a plane and we find the missing bolt. But bolts are not the real problem — safety culture is. The real issue is the environment that allowed the missing bolt to go undetected until the plane was already in flight.
Previous EA harassment cases and EA community surveys suggest many women in EA report gender-related concerns. That points to broader cultural and structural dynamics we should examine.
I suspect many of us men in the community (myself included) should reflect more seriously on how we can improve. Some of this may relate to biases or blind spots that are widely documented in the literature. If so, addressing them would not only improve community culture but also help us think more clearly in general.
I’m not sure where this reflection will lead, but it seems like a necessary first step. A few areas that might be worth examining:
Norms around dating primarily within the community, especially given the gender imbalance.
Cultural habits that strongly optimize for direct intellectual exchange and efficiency, sometimes skipping the social rituals that in other communities help build trust and mutual understanding.
More broadly, it might be productive for EA to treat this as a structural issue and proactively implement lessons from the large body of research on reducing harassment risk in organizations.