Thanks for clarifying your take!

I'm sorry to hear about those experiences. 

Most of the problems you mention seem to be about the specific current EA community, as opposed to the main values of "doing a lot of good" and "being smart about doing so."

Personally, I'm excited for certain altruistic and smart people to leave the EA community, as it suits them, and do good work elsewhere. I'm sure that being part of the community is limiting to certain people, especially if they can find other great communities. 

That said, I of course hope you can find ways for the key values of "doing good in the world" and similar to work for you. 

Thanks for sharing your experiences and reflections here — I really appreciate the thoughtfulness. I want to offer some context on the group organizer situation you described, as someone who was running the university groups program at the time.

On the strategy itself:
 At the time, our scalable programs were pretty focused from evidence we had seen that much of the impact came from the organizers themselves. We of course did want groups to go well more generally, but in deciding where to put our marginal resource we were focusing on group organizers. It was a fairly unintuitive strategy — and I get how that could feel misaligned or even misleading if it wasn’t clearly communicated.

On communication:
 We did try to be explicit about this strategy — it was featured at organizer retreats and in parts of our support programming. But we didn’t consistently communicate it across all our materials. That inconsistency was an oversight on our part. Definitely not an attempt to be deceptive — just something that didn’t land as clearly as we hoped.

Where we’re at now:
 We’ve since updated our approach. The current strategy is less focused narrowly on organizers and more on helping groups be great overall. That said, we still think a lot of the value often comes from a small, highly engaged core — which often includes organizers, but not exclusively.

In retrospect, I wish we’d communicated this more clearly across the board. When a strategy is unintuitive, a few clear statements in a few places often isn’t enough to make it legible. Sorry again if this felt off — I really appreciate you surfacing it.

some further & updated thoughts, written in ~30 min, are below. canonical version lives here.

Here’s a frame I’ve found helpful for thinking about effective altruism:

• When I look inside myself, I notice that I care about a lot of things.
  • You could also reasonably replace “care” with “wanting,” “preferring,” “valuing,” “desiring,” “having goals,” etc, rather than “caring.” I’m okay being loose.
  • Some examples of things I care about:
    • I want my sister to have an excellent career.
    • I’m hungry, and want some food.
    • I want to be valued by people I respect.
    • I want my dogs to have enjoyable lives.
    • (And many, many more).
  • (It’s often useful to be introspective/clear-eyed about what you care about, what that ontology looks like, which values are instrumental to which other values, etc., but I won’t be doing that here, and indeed I think it might be anti-helpful in this particular frame at this particular time. Stay with me until the end.)
• Sort-of by definition, I want more of the things I care about. I see my life as a difficult, high-level optimization problem aimed at making decisions which, given my resources at various times, increase my values across time.
• Some of the things I care about — like wanting food because I’m hungry — are fundamentally oriented at myself. And I take actions to do better along these axes.
  • Some examples of actions:
    • Reading a book on tax strategies
    • Learning how to cook
    • Asking people for feedback on my sartorial choices
    • etc
  • And in general, I try to be effective at getting what I want, here — that is, I aim to achieve these kinds of goals/values/preferences to as great of a degree as possible.
• But other things I care about — like wanting my sister to have an excellent career, or my dogs to have enjoyable lives — are fundamentally oriented at others-by-their-lights. And I take actions to do better along these axes, too.
  • These motivations often look starkly different in a lot of different situations.
  • For some of these altruistic motivations, it just so happens that some lovely dynamics have coalesced such that there’s an existing group of people / infrastructure / etc who have worked & are working quite hard toward helping me get what I want w/r/t some of those things I care about that are oriented at others-by-their-lights. In particular, I haven’t found any community which is more effective at helping me achieve the things I care about that are oriented at others-by-their-lights than this one.
    • (The group of people / infrastructure / etc I’m referring to is effective altruism.)

Why do I like this frame?

• Because it’s apparent that I care about quite a few things. It becomes evident quickly that totalizing stances toward EA are just not worth it; a bad trade; just getting less of what I want.
  • In particular, I think this kind of frame can be validating toward folks who’ve gone quite far, and repressed the values that they in-fact have in other areas of their life. (I think I was in this camp ~two years ago.)
• There are interesting subproblems that come into clearer view, e.g.:
  • When should, on the margin, my resources go toward different things that I care about?
  • What actions would get me more access to the things that I want with greater robustness (i.e. getting me closer to many different things I want, all at once)?
  • etc

I appreciated you expressing this.

Riffing out loud ... I feel that there are different dynamics going on here (not necessarily in your case; more in general):

1. The tensions where people don't act with as much integrity as is signalled
   • This is not a new issue for EA (it arises structurally despite a lot of good intentions, because of the encouragement to be strategic), and I think it just needs active cultural resistance
     • In terms of writing, I like Holden's and Toby's pushes on this; my own attempts here and here
     • But for this to go well, I think it's not enough to have some essays on reading lists; instead I hope that people try to practice good orientation here at lots of different scales, and socially encourage others to
2. The meta-blinding
   • I feel like I haven't read much on this, but it rings true as a dynamic to be wary of! Where I take the heart of the issue to be that EA presents a strong frame about what "good" means, and then encourages people to engage in ways that make aspects of their thinking subservient to that frame
3. As someone put it to me, "EA has lost the mandate of heaven"
   • I think EA used to be (in some circles) the obvious default place for the thoughtful people who cared a lot to gather and collaborate
     • I think that some good fraction of its value came from performing this role?
   • Partially as a result of 1 and 2, people are disassociating with EA; and this further reduces the pull to associate
   • I can't speak to how strong this effect is overall, but I think the directionality is clear

I don't know if it's accessible (and I don't think I'm well positioned to try), but I still feel a lot of love for the core of EA, and would be excited if people could navigate it to a place where it regained the mandate of heaven.

"why do i find myself less involved in EA?"

You go over more details later and answer other questions like what caused some reactions to some EA-related things, but an interesting thing here is that you are looking for a cause of something that is not.

> it feels like looking at the world through an EA frame blinds myself to things that i actually do care about, and blinds myself to the fact that i'm blinding myself.

I can strongly relate, had the same experience. i think it's due to christian upbringing or some kind of need for external validation. I think many people don't experience that, so I wouldn't say that's an inherently EA thing, it's more about the attitude. 

 

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