Thanks for posting this Vicky! It’s a super interesting line of thought and I’d love to hear more about your research and how you view its path to effecting change in the world.
I’m commenting to flag one typo which threw me off the first time I read Vicky’s comment for any future readers—I think Bernstein and Malone’s Handbook of Collective Intelligence was published in 2015, rather than 2005.
It feels like CI has been coming into its own as an actual field of research over the last 10-15 years. It’d seem much less promising to me if there had been a handbook published in 2005 without any major synthesizing efforts since.
Needed to be said. I’m someone who gravitates to a lot of EA ideas, but I’ve avoided identifying as “an EA” for just this reason. Recently went to an EAG, which quelled some of my discomfort with EA’s cultishness, but I think there’s major room for improvement.
My lightly held hypothesis is that the biggest reason for this is EA’s insularity. I think that using broader means of communication (publishing in journals and magazines, rather that just the EA forum) would go a really long way to enabling people to be merely inspired by EA, rather than “EAs” themselves. I like EA as a set of ideas and a question, not so much as a lifestyle and an all-consuming community. People should be able to publicly engage with (and cite!) EA rhetoric without having to hang out on a particular forum or have read the EA canon.