Thoughts on building a community beyond professional affiliation
1 Intro
When most people think about Effective Altruism (EA), they’ll think of doing the most good. They might think of cost-effective donations, expansive moral circles, or moral arguments about the importance of the far future. What they’re less likely to think about are the weird and wondrous mechanisms that have built a great community.
In what follows, I make the case for a deeper, more expansive, more thoughtful approach to community building. I argue that community building is something we should think about, and that positive community norms might have just as much force in determining whether Effective Altruism thrives as the ideas. If you care about EA ideas, you should care about the community making them a reality.
2 The positive forces of community
When I got started in EA, I was curious about what a maximally good life might look like. I’d watched The Good Place and begun to consider the wider consequences of my actions. I was gripped by the deep and impactful questions of what T-shirts to buy and shoes to wear, troubled that whatever I did seemed to lead to some kind of harm. Thankfully, the EAs were willing to humour me. My priorities have changed somewhat since then, but the thoughtfulness of the people around me has not.
More than thoughtfulness, though, this is a group that selects for compassion, for agency. You’ve seen the problems, become concerned, and now want to do something about them. Better yet, you want to carefully consider what to do, using evidence and reason to help most effectively. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these dispositions carry over. The result is a community of kind, thoughtful, highly agentic people, in more than just their work.
Even as the group selects for these traits, there is a compounding effect within the community, when we share ideas and form connections. Agency, kindness and thoughtfulness compound. Individual goals become collective endeavours. Normally bizarre and unusual choices are no longer met with exasperated confusion – “Did you really say you were working to help shrimp?”¹ Instead, new norms emerge about which paths are standard, which opportunities are worth taking.
3 Engaging with negative forces of community
Oftentimes, we focus on the negative effects of communities on their members. The forces that select for thoughtfulness also select for a kind of ambition, an inclination towards optimisation, and the backgrounds of those curious about these ideas. Tendencies towards groupthink are highlighted, along with threats to personal independence and the risk of future conflicts of interest. Such concern is well placed. We should be aware of the social effects that communities commonly have on their members, of the power dynamics and incentive structures that might emerge.
However, this is not sufficient reason to abandon the enterprise of building community, letting EA become a merely professional affiliation. No, to do this would lose the many benefits of exploring ideas together, and moving as a community towards a shared goal.
It is worth remembering that in the absence of the EA community, other biases and norms exist, many of which perpetuate the problems we might identify within EA. Complete independence from community and shared beliefs is very hard to attain, and probably not even desirable. More engagement in a variety of communities is a very good thing, but we shouldn’t pre-emptively seek to reduce deep engagement with this one.
Instead, this means we should think more carefully about subtle social effects. We should ask how this community can improve the lives of its members, help them realise their goals, and pursue the opportunities they think are worthwhile. We should preserve a culture open to criticisms both of the common pitfalls of the ideas, and of the community itself.
While remaining deeply respectful of independence, community building can and should go beyond purely a professional affiliation of career-based impact. We might initially be inclined to think of EA-related decisions as those someone makes coolly and rationally, but more complicated emotional factors are often more predictive. Trust and connection are essential building blocks in helping people along the way.
This, in turn, has implications for those beginning to explore EA, and considering whether to get more involved. A gut feeling that a community is highly open, highly supportive, and beneficial in a wide range of ways to those who get involved, could in many cases be the point at which someone decides to delve deeper.
4 What now?
Most of what I’ve said so far might seem commonsensical. As I say, I think the EA community does a very good job. I’m probably a better person for having become involved. Even if I decided to stop all EA-related things today, my pre-EA self would probably consider the time I’ve spent involved worthwhile.
Sometimes, though, I think about the nearest possible world where I didn’t get as involved, where I didn’t spend as much time thinking about the ideas, or trying to be impact-motivated. In these worlds, it would probably be for some range of factors that don’t make sense now. It wouldn't be because I disagreed with the ideas, but rather because other opportunities were more socially salient. It would be because other pathways were “what you do”, and they might have been what my friends, and the people I liked and respected found meaningful.
I suspect this kind of dynamic is true for many possible EAs. While some highly impactful people were perhaps always high-agency and impact-motivated, I suspect this isn’t true for most people. In any case, such people are not usually the primary target of outreach. For newer people, it’s worth remembering the importance of meeting people where they’re at². This might mean pitching EA as an opportunity, but it also means creating a strength of community that’s readily apparent.
5 No, actually, what now?
This is still pretty commonsensical, and I haven’t described “strength of community” very specifically. Sure, people are strongly influenced by vibes and what their friends are doing, but what now?
For a start, I think this means placing more importance on being kind, decent, and interested in people, regardless of their level of engagement, and absent some precise impact-oriented calculation. Quite obvious, but we might otherwise be inclined to prioritise what we’re doing, thinking it’s far more important. Of course there are trade-offs, I’m just saying we might not fully appreciate one of the sides.
Community is one of the things evidence-based, outcome-focused reasoning might struggle to fully capture. It’s hard to quantify the long-term benefit of spending time with people, and in any case, such impact-oriented quantification wouldn’t be a good thing. If you take the benefits of strong community engagement seriously, there is a strong case for erring on the side of pro-social behaviour.
Next, it means community building becomes much more than just a job for a small minority of highly involved EAs. Rather, it refers to the majority of the EA community’s interactions with one another, and whether these interactions are generally creating a more welcoming, friendly place to be. Again, I'd argue people separate direct impact from an inclination towards being a decent person. Consciously thinking about impact in most conversations is bad, but a habit which makes more time for conversations, and encourages you to put more effort into them is probably good.
This reasoning applies even more strongly to harmful actions. Besides wrong actions just being wrong in themselves, this argument suggests that negativity compounds, much more than you might otherwise realise. Moreover, harmful actions are often communicated much more widely than positive actions, and can have an outsized impact on how the community is widely considered. This is a strong consequentialist reason to be sincere and act with integrity.
6 Conclusion
The EA community shapes the norms and values its members adopt. It also influences whether more people seek to join the endeavour to use evidence and reason to do good. In light of this, we should see community building not just as a job, but as something nearly every EA, EA-adjacent, or EA-adjacent-adjacent person contributes towards. We’ve set out to solve humanity’s most pressing problems; a thriving community might just make that happen³.
If you have feedback on this forum post, I would greatly appreciate it!
End notes
https://frommatter.substack.com/p/friendship-is-optimal-for-growing (Matt Reardon, Friendship is Optimal for Growing EA).
One thing I really don't see much in community-first EA talk:
Things like just asking a local scout leader to help run your retreat, or someone from your local church who helps run the youth camp, or someone from the Rotary club, or someone who coordinates volunteers at the community arts cafe. A lot of what EA needs is not "special" and the skills to create it can be found elsewhere in your local area.
I agree that an EA community needs high conduct standards for those present that go beyond "don't do bad" to reach "actively help out where this is possible at low cost to you".