[epistemic status: articulation of a position I kind of believe and think is under-articulated, but am unsure of the strength of]
I think EA has a lot of great ideas. I wish more people in the world deeply understood them, and took ~EA principles seriously. I'm very into people studying the bodies of knowledge that EA has produced, and finding friends and mentors in the ecosystem.
But I also think that EA is still a tiny corner of the world, and that there's a lot of important networks and knowledge beyond it. When I think about optimal allocation of people who are bought into EA, I want quite a lot of those people to go out and interact with different systems in the world, different peer groups; and learn from them, make connections.
In principle this should be pretty accessible. Except I worry about our implicit social structures sending the message "all the cool people hang around the centrally EA spaces" in a way that doesn't really support people to actually go and do these exploring moves while being engaged in and encouraged by EA.
I think that this is one of the (if not the) most important problems to fix in EA messaging / status-granting.[1] Note that I don't think we want to slow down people coming in to the EA bubble -- I think it's often healthy and good for people to get up to speed on a lot of stuff, to give them better context for subsequent decisions. So the challenge is to encourage people to graduate to exploring without making exploring itself so high-status that people jump directly there without learning the cool stuff that EA has to offer first.
What could we do about it? Some options:
- Encourage a narrative something like "when your EA learning slows down, that's often the time to dive back into the wider world"
- Celebrate people who follow this trajectory
- Make sure that community support structures are helpful and functional for people who have a lot of EA knowledge but are now exploring rather than "full time EA professionals"
I'd be keen to see fleshed out versions of these, or other ideas.
Absent good fixes here, I'm inclined to celebrate a certain amount of EA disillusionment: it seems important that a fraction of super talented people go and explore different areas, and if that's easier to access given disillusionment with EA then so much the worse for people's good opinions of EA. But this seems worse if something else could work, because of bad feeling, and making it harder for people to stop exploring mode and start working with the core of the community when that's correct.
N.B. I'm making a directional claim here. Of course it's quite possible to imagine getting to a stage where too many people go and explore, evaporating the pool of people trying to work on the most crucial things. What would be too much exploration? My guess is that in equilibrium the ideal might be between 10% and 20% of the people who are sufficiently skilled up to do really important work in the core should be exploring instead. And a larger group around them who can't yet find crucial work in the core (but hope to some day) should also do this. But I don't put that much stock in my numbers; I'm interested in takes from people who would go higher or lower.
- ^
Another candidate: wanting people who can think for themselves, but granting social status to people who appear to come to the same conclusions as leadership.
I'll answer the question based on my experience as someone who tried something similar to what you're suggesting without being incentivized. I say "something similar" because I was never all in on any EA bubbles like many, so I got way, way outside to movements that aren't even "EA-adjacent-adjacent." I also left for multiple other reasons, some of my own, but also to not only learn for EA what we could from other movements but what we have to, as I was convinced neither I nor anyone else in EA could do the most good feasible within EA as it was at the time. This began in 2018.
Myself and others barely received support. EAs were mostly indifferent and were nonplussed when the rationale was given that EA could have something to learn. Among others, I lost esteem. Some who'd known me in EA for years treated me like I stopped caring about effectiveness or EA values, as if they were judging me on principle, or as if I was the one who turned my back on EA. Others didn't maintain a pretense and disengaged because I simply made myself less cool in EA social circles by spending less time in them.
I didn't have incentives. I've participated in EA in explicit contradiction to status structures that have long disgusted me for how they result in people marginalizing their peers for even appearing to buck the status quo. I've been resilient enough to go back and forth with having one whole foot and 4 more toes elsewhere, while keeping one toe in EA. The EA community still made it hard enough for me. There are hundreds who either were too afraid to stray from EA and or to ever return.
I don't know how to accurately characterize how much worse it is than you're worried it might be, other than to say it could be a couple orders of magnitude worse than however you'd measure your worry, as someone whose job entails operationalizing intangibles more than most of us.
What needs to be done is to eliminate the incentives against leaving EA bubbles to explore. Here are some ideas.
Make it low status to stigmatize leaving EA bubbles. Enough of this happens in private that it can't be fixed by yet another post on the EA Forum or talk at EAG from Will MacAskill himself about the marginal value of opening your hearts and minds to people you already know. Public solutions can work but they need to be solutions, not platitudes.
Identify the narratives discouraging exploration and neutralize them. Again, self-appointed bad actors in EA to defend the status quo for the greater good, or whatever, aren't usually stupid or shameless enough to post the worst of those narratives on the EA Forum for you to find. I found them by thinking like a detective, so everyone should try it.
Do damage to harmful and dysfunctional structures in EA that stigmatize those from both inside and outside of EA who aren't among this movement's leadership of high-status, full-time EA professionals.
Disillusionment is an optimized solution in practice now,without being optimal on an absolute sense, because nothing else will work until the disincentive structures are dismantled. The extant destructive incentives are mutually exclusive with the constructive incentives you want to see flourish. We won't know what incentives to explore will work until it's possible to build them in the first place. Until then, disillusionment may remain the best feasible option.
What were the areas you sought to learn from?