EA-adjacent-adjacent. opinions emphatically not those of my employer
ethai
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strong upvoted, I think it’s good to encourage non-EAs to give more effectively and I think it’s good to broaden what we think of as “evidence” and consider its pros and cons.
I work with a community in my city that gives primarily locally (leaving aside my judgment on that), and I find that many people think that they’re not giving based on any idea of effectiveness: e.g. they’ll say they’re giving based on community need, or trust in a relationship they have, or values-alignment. But usually there’s an implicit sense of “what is effective” underneath that, and it’s helpful to push people to make that explicit: if you’re giving because you trust the relationship you have with this organization, how good of a signal is that about the organization’s work? Is it a better signal than other evidence you have access to?
(Aside: Quite often with small grassroots organizations, I think a strong relationship with the right people honestly is one of the best available signals! In particular, I find that the organizations that community leaders consider important/tractable/neglected—though not using those words—are not always the ones that gain a lot of media attention, external funding, etc.)
I’ve thought a fair amount about this (Shell recruited pretty heavily at my college). I agree with previous answers and think those are probably the primary considerations. Some other thoughts, both for you personally and on the moral value of the work:
Being thoughtful (as you are doing) is half the battle, and it’s key to make sure that your own values and motivations aren’t led astray by the environment you will be in—it’s easy to have value drift when your job is on the line.
I wouldn’t underestimate the subtle ways in which being owned by a FF can change the way a company does business (and therefore what you are able to do and what you are rewarded for). An imperfect analogue is the way SBF’s funding shaped what EA orgs did over the past few years, and the resulting fallout and instability now.
There’s some research that even if you have idealistic motivations about doing good, the environment around you can shift your preferences towards whatever is externally rewarded, e.g. here re law school.
It is hard to be motivated and do your best work (and therefore get promotions, transition into a better job in the future, etc) when you don’t feel affirmed and aligned with your work.
There is utilitarian value in socially stigmatizing fossil fuel companies. If FFs (& the companies they own) can’t find talent, that’s yet another signal that they should be seriously re-evaluating their business model. I do think this consideration is less clear when it comes to acquisitions like sonnen.
If you care about what climate people think, there was a lot of discussion on Twitter recently of a similar piece in NYT’s The Ethicist (though I personally disagree with climate Twitter consensus on this).
I wouldn’t do it myself in your situation, especially since there are probably plenty of non-FF-owned clean tech companies hiring SWEs. But it’s not clear to me whether it would be net good or bad, for the world or for you.
Yeah, strong agree with this. [I used to work in VC and frequently diligenced ARPA-E grantees.] I don’t think the cited study supports the claim that all externalities are priced in in the US, let alone globally.
I would also guess that the valuation of the 26 exited companies is an underestimation of overall impact for other reasons—top of mind: impact of non-exited companies, learning benefit to the field of a company that “fails” and exits at a very low valuation.
@charrin thanks for writing this, as a below commenter said it’s nice to see an EA-style investigation of a potentially impactful career path outside the community!
Thank you for sharing that!
For what it’s worth, I think “discussions of DEI end up becoming discussions about women” is pretty common—not to say it’s excusable, but I don’t think that’s unique to EA.
Thanks, I realize this is a tricky thing to talk about publicly (certainly trickier for you, as someone whose name people actually know, than for me, who can say whatever I want!). I’m coming in with a stronger prior from “the outside world”, where I’ve seen multiple friends ignored/disbelieved/attacked for telling their stories of sexual violence, so maybe I need to better calibrate for intra-EA-community response. I agree/hope that our goals shouldn’t be at odds, and that’s what I was trying to say that maybe did not come across: I didn’t want people to come away from your comment thinking “ah, Maya’s wrong and people shouldn’t criticize EA culture.” I wanted them to come away both knowing the truth about this specific situation AND thinking more broadly about EA culture, because I think this post makes a lot of other very good points that don’t rely on the Kathy claims. (And thinking more broadly could include updating positively like I did, although I didn’t expect that would be the case when I made that comment!)
You’re probably right that it’s not worth giving much more of a response, but I appreciate you engaging with this!
Thank you, this is clarifying for me and I hope for others.
Responses to me, including yours, have helped me update my thinking on how the EA community handles gendered violence. I wasn’t aware of these cases and am glad, and hope that other women seeing this might also feel more supported within EA knowing this. I realize there are obvious reasons why these things aren’t very public, but I hope that somehow we can make it clearer to women that Kathy’s case, and the community’s response, was an outlier.
I would still push back against the gender-reversal false equivalency that you and others have mentioned. EA doesn’t exist in a bubble. We live in a world where survivors, and in particular women, are not supported, not believed, and victim-blamed. Therefore I think it is pretty reasonable to have a prior that we should take accusations seriously and respond to them delicately. The Forum, if anywhere on earth, should be a place where we can have the nuanced understanding that (1) the accusations were false AND (2) because we live in a world where true accusations against powerful men are often disbelieved, causing avoidable harm to victims, we need to keep that context in mind while condemning said false accusations.
So to clarify my stance: I don’t think it was wrong to mention that the false accusation is false. I think it seems dismissive and insensitive to do so without any acknowledgement of the rest of the post. I don’t think it would have hurt your point to say “yes, EA is a male-dominated culture and we need to take seriously the harms done to women in our community. In this specific instance, the accusations were false, and I don’t believe the community’s response to these accusations is representative of how we handle harm.”
I think the disconnect here is that you are responding / care about this specific claim, which you have close knowledge of. I know nothing about it, and am responding to / care about the larger claim about EA’s culture. I believe that Maya’s post is not trying to to make truth claims about Kathy’s case and is more meant to point out a broad trend in EA culture, and I’m trying to encourage people to read it as such, and not let the wrongness of Kathy’s claims undermine Maya’s overall point.
(edit: basically I agree with your comment above:
if I appear to be implicitly criticizing Maya for bringing that up, fewer people will bring things like that up in the future, and even if this particular episode was false, many similar ones will be true, so her bringing it up is positive expected value, so I shouldn’t sound critical in any way that discourages future people from doing things like that.)
Thank you, yeah I think I may be overindexing on a few public examples (not being privy to the private examples that you and others in thread have brought up). Glad to hear that there are plenty of examples of the community responding well to protect victims/survivors.
I still also don’t think everything’s fine, but unsure to what extent EA is worse than the rest of the world, where things are also not fine on this front.
Yeah, this is very fair and I agree that transparency is not always the right call. To clarify, I’ll say that my stance here, medium confidence, is: (1) in instances which the victim/survivor has already made their accusations public, or in instances where it’s already necessarily something that isn’t interpersonal [e.g. hotness ranking], the process of accountability or repair, or at least the fact that one exists, should be public; (2) it should be transparent what kind of process a victim can expect when harm happens.
There’s some literature around procedural justice and trust that indicates that people feel better and trust the outcomes of a process more when it is transparent and invites engagement, regardless of whether the actual outcome favors them or not.
I am glad to hear that there have been cases where women have felt safe reporting and action has been taken!
(edited to delete a para about CEA community health team’s work that I realized was wrong, after seeing this page linked below)
edit: after discussion below & other comments on this post, I feel less strongly about the claim “EA community is bad at addressing harm”, but stand by / am clarifying my general point, which is that the veracity of Kathy’s claims doesn’t detract from any of the other valid points that Maya makes and I don’t think people should discount the rest of these points.
A suggestion to people who are approaching this from a “was Kathy lying?” lens: I think it’s also important to understand this post in the context of the broader movement around sexual assault and violence. The reason this kind of thing stings to a woman in the community is because it says “this is how this community will react if you speak up about harm; this is not a welcoming place for you if you are a survivor.” It’s not about whether Kathy, in particular, was falsely accusing others.
The way I read Maya’s critique here is “there were major accusations of major harm done, and we collectively brushed it off instead of engaging with how this person felt harmed;” which is distinct from “she was right and the perpetrator should be punished”. This is a call for the EA community to be more transparent and fair in how it deals with accusations of wrongdoing, not a callout post of anybody.
Perhaps I would feel differently if I knew of examples of the EA community publicly holding men accountable for harm to women, but as it stands AFAIK we have a lot of examples like those Maya pointed out and not much transparent accountability for them. :/ Would be very happy to be corrected about that.
(Maya, I know it’s probably really hard to see that the first reply on your post is an example of exactly the problem you’re describing, so I just want to add in case you see this that I relate to a lot of what you’ve shared and you have an open offer to DM me if you need someone to hold space for your anger!)
thanks for pointing this out—I think this is a key point AND I think it is inflected by gender. My guess (not being an expert on autism, but being somewhat of an expert on gender) is that women who are autistic are more likely to learn, over time, how to display and react to emotion “like normal people”, because women build social capital through relational and emotional actions. Personal experience (I am a woman, to a first degree approximation): as a child I did not really understand emotion / generally felt aversive when other people expressed it. Over time I learned how to feel / respond to others’ emotions in a socially normative way, through observation and self-reflection and learning.
This is not to say that those of us in EA who are naturally different w.r.t. our emotional processing should feel bad/abnormal, but to say that EA would be a more welcoming community, especially to women, if people in EA learned how to process and respond to “normative” emotional expressions. Someone above said that EAs see debate as an expression of caring, and I (a) am the same way and (b) understand that most people are not! I’ve learned to ask “are you looking for discussion and finding solutions together, or are you not ready for that yet?” (Similarly, people with more normative emotional expression entering EA should learn to ask/adapt to the person they’re talking to.) I’ve been in spaces that I think are very good at this and have a cultural norm of it.
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Thanks for writing this—this resonates a lot with my experience, as I was also exposed to and very put off from EA in college! But have eventually, slowly, made my way back here :)
I want to add that many of the “disconcerting” tactics community builders use are pretty well-established among community organizers (and larger student groups, like Greek life). So my sense is that the key problem lies in EA using well-proven community building tactics, but implementing them poorly. Having a scripted 1:1, a CRM, intro talks; making leadership asks of younger and newer members; measuring success by gaining new members; and trying our best to connect someone’s interests to the values and goals of our community are all very standard practice in community organizing. (They’re also very sales-y tactics, which is probably why they feel off-putting and slimy. I think most policy and entrepreneur types would be aware of this as long as they had some experience in the field, but perhaps students might not be.)
I’m not sure what exactly EA is doing wrong, or where the line between “wholesome supportive community” and “creepy cult” is, and I’d love to think about this more. My intuition is that EA student groups are fighting an uphill battle; the EA movement is somewhat unique in that it (1) already attracts a certain non-normative niche group of people; (2) asks people to change their careers without any clear offering in return (other than the resources available to help you… change your career); (3) espouses unusual beliefs.
Most of the students I’ve talked to name the community as one of the main reasons they stay in EA, and I wonder if EA would be better off leaning into community-building messaging over cause-area and career messaging, at least on campus.
(Context: I’d consider myself new to the EA community, but I’ve been doing community building and community organizing for ~5 years, including, as a student, teaching student community organizing fellowships and running recruitment for a sorority. I’m also a recovering hyperrationalist of the sort that once would have found EA to be extremely appealing.)
I do community building with a (non-student, non-religious, non-EA) group that talks a lot about pretty sensitive topics, and we explicitly ask for permission to record things in the CRM. We don’t ask “can we put you in our database?”; we phrase it as “hey, I’d love to connect you with XYZ folks in the chapter who have ABC in common with you, would you mind if I take some notes on what we talked about today, so I can share with them later?” But we take pretty seriously the importance of consent and privacy in the work that we’re doing.
Also, as someone who was in charge of recruitment at a sorority in college where ~half the student body was Greek-affiliated… yeah, community builders should have CRMs. We just don’t call them CRMs; we call them “Potential New Member Sheet” or something.
It does feel a bit slimy, but I think this is pretty normal, and if done well, not likely to put off the folks we’re worried about.
I think that’s precisely what I’m saying—people have different preferences, but that doesn’t negate the existence of broader dynamics of privilege, i.e. John’s earlier comment, and doesn’t negate that the facts of the matter are shaped by intersecting oppressions.
Assuming that we take as true that systemic oppression is a real thing, the distinction is this: I don’t consider myself to have a dating “advantage”, but I do think that I have a larger dating pool than the average Asian man because of the ways in which Asian women sit at the intersection of racism and sexism. I’m sure plenty of 1950s housewives considered themselves to be advantaged personally, but that doesn’t negate that they were structurally disempowered.
I am no philosopher, but I think it’s a bit slippery-slope to go from “we disagree on whether larger dating pools have inherent goodness” to “everything is subjective”!
Ah, I apologize, I think I’ve phrased my first comment poorly. I believe that the difference in desirability is due to both fetishization of women and emasculation of men. My initial comment did not make that clear due to the word “mostly”, which was the wrong word to use. I meant simply to highlight that desirability as an Asian woman is not without its downsides.
Re:
It doesn’t predict that being a member of two “oppressed” classes can result in an intersectional “privilege”… In any case, there are disadvantages associated with fetishization, but acknowledging this group’s relative dating advantage as an advantage would break the model*.
I actually think that this is perfectly compatible with intersectional theory:
There’s a distinction between “privilege” as a class, and “advantage” in certain areas of life. Intersectionality claims that Asian men have gender privilege, as a class, over Asian women, and that Asian women exist at the intersection of oppressions in a way that Asian men do not. It doesn’t claim that Asian men are advantaged in every area of life over Asian women, or that every single experience of Asian women is due to disadvantage. (edit: John’s comment below explains this way better than I did)
In fact, I think an analysis of how Western gender ideals hurt Asian men via emasculation and Asian women via fetishization is an intersectional analysis, i.e. Asian men and women have different experiences of racism due to the ways in which racism and sexism intersect. (And both are still racism, and bad.)
Acknowledging that Asian women empirically have larger dating pools is just a statement about the world. Whether you consider this to be an “advantage” or not is really subjective, and not addressed by a theory of systemic oppression. I would personally rather have fewer dates than have to wade through fetishizing weebs, but that’s obviously a subjective judgment that you disagree with.
I do share the hope that in popular discourse we start to see more understanding of the nuances of the theory, because it is absolutely more sophisticated in academia than it is on Twitter (or in my EA Forum comments!).
I’ve been thinking about the (perceived or actual) tension between intersectionality and effective giving for a while now and haven’t had the words to think through it productively, so thank you for providing those words and sparking this discussion!
One thing I would add that is relevant to EAs thinking about this:
Being both a part of the wealthy global elite and people of colour, they feel a special obligation to help people within their own communities who are not blessed with the same advantages. Whether or not this feeling of obligation cashes out in concrete ethical positions, the emotional force of the obligation has a real effect on their donation decisions, and this tension makes them feel uncomfortable when discussing donations in EA spaces.
I think there is an argument that helping people within our own communities can be more effective; i.e. that, given two otherwise equal interventions, one within a community and one outside it, an EA should choose the one within the community. This is because:
There is greater potential to form a relationship that will lead to further giving and/or the improvement of the intervention.
We know more about our communities and the problems they face than we do about communities not our own, especially when thinking about issue areas outside the typical EA global health interventions; therefore, we are likelier to make effective choices within our communities. For instance, I am likely to make better giving decisions about charities in Chicago, where I live, than charities in New York, where I do not live, because I know more people in Chicago who can point me in the right direction.
The EA’s choice can influence non-EAs to give more effectively. If I choose the most effective charity working in Chicago, I can influence the giving decisions of Chicagoans that, for “valid” ethical reasons or otherwise, restrict their giving to Chicago.
Obviously, this advantage isn’t enough to justify funding an extremely ineffective, intra-community intervention over an extremely effective, outside intervention. I’m using Chicago here as an example of a community, and not making the argument that anyone should fund charities in Chicago.
tl;dr it seems to me that preferring intra-community giving should be compatible with EA principles. Curious what other folks think about this; I’m not totally confident in it.
To weigh in here as someone who had to read some race studies literature in college:
the idea that privileged white men find it easier to take a universalising, impartial approach to doing good seems intuitively plausible
I think that’s probably true—the theory I’ve read is based on the idea that white straight men are positioned as the “norm” under racial/gender hierarchy in Western society. Everyone else is othered and seen in relation to that norm. Some oversimplified examples:
“Unisex” sizing is actually men’s sizing.
Fresh Off The Boat is marketed as an ethnic, Asian-American story. Friends is just a show about some people who are friends, and doesn’t need to justify its existence by discussing experiences peculiar to the White community.
Car crash dummies are usually shaped to the average man, meaning that women are more likely to die in car crashes.
The whole concept of “ethnic food”.
Given instances like this, it makes sense to me that white men find it easier to be impartial, and PoC are more likely to be aware of and care about issues special to us communities, because knowledge, culture, and norms seen as “impartial” often exclude us.
That being said, I don’t know if PoC feel a stronger desire to donate to their communities than Boy Scouts. Personally, I think that’s just a reason for EA to figure out ways to appeal to Boy Scouts, not to appeal less to PoC.
I think the theory of intersectionality actually does address this well, though perhaps for a different reason than John:
a) Intersectionality is explicitly about the idea that people can be both privileged and oppressed, e.g. Black men having privilege along a gender axis but oppression along a racial axis
b) Intersectionality is explicitly not about “double oppression”, it is about unique forms of oppression.
For instance, we can break down this idea that Asians earn more than white people in the US. When you consider factors like country of origin, class, and immigration status, there’s actually substantial variability in earnings; in particular, East and South Asians tend to earn more than whites, and Southeast Asians tend to earn less. (I haven’t read this study in detail, but it’s an example of this finding.) Therefore, simply categorically ignoring Asians in analyses of economic inequality would (and does) leave Southeast Asians neglected. Southeast Asians will probably not be addressed by interventions to help low-income people in general or interventions to help Asian people in general, because the causes of their suffering are different.
And it’s true that Asian women are seen as more desirable than Asian men in America, but that’s mostly because of fetishization of Asian women. As an Asian-American woman, yes, it’s nice to be able to get a Tinder date or whatever. But overall, being fetishized is rather undesirable, and sometimes involves unfortunate outcomes such as dying in a mass shooting. Addressing the emasculation of Asian men and fetishization of Asian women in American culture are two interrelated but separate problems, which is again what intersectional theory would posit.
Intersectionality is a word that has often been thrown around improperly over the years, so it’s certainly possible that these misinterpretations of the theory would hamper nuanced discussion. But it wouldn’t be due to the academic theory itself.
Ha, I never check my forum notifications—a belated thank you for responding and engaging with this, it’s clear that you’ve already really thought through a lot of the potential harms folks are bringing up which is much appreciated. I definitely see the reasons why each word individually makes sense, but I do also wonder if there’s a better synonym for rare.
The only thing I’d push back on is:
For folks in China, calling something “Chinese” is generally a symbol of pride, the same way American products might brag that they’re “made in America.” There are definitely cases where this isn’t true (i.e. Trump’s “China virus”), but bad examples don’t seem like a reason to not use the label in positive ways.
I think this is 100% true, and also the reason why Chinese-Americans find it off-putting. A lot of what second-gen folks like myself would call “cultural appropriation”, immigrants with stronger ties to their home country would say makes them proud to see their culture represented in American [media/culture/etc].
So I suppose I should clarify that I’m speaking from the POV of Asian-Americans, who might find it more distasteful (pun intended). Whereas native Chinese people and non-Asian Americans will probably resonate w/ the framing for all the reasons you share.
No need to respond to this one month later, just wanted to ~ close the loop ~
James this is great! I really like your framing of donations as in line with other personal actions; I’ve seen the FP graph but never actually interpreted it in the way you have.
Semi-related ramble, I’ve been workshopping this idea of giving as a way of expressing agency—especially when it comes to climate, I think a lot of people turn to plastic bags etc. because they want to feel like they’re directly responsible for a Good Thing. People want to see and feel the impact of their actions, and donations don’t often provide that sense of “I did this, and it meant something”. I think a framing of donations as one of many possible actions actually might break that hesitation down a bit (and specifically, is related to some lefty mutual aid thoughts about money as one of many resources we offer in community). Will experiment with this, thanks for the idea :)
(disclaimer: personal hat on! I do fundraising in my non-work organizing spaces)