EA is probably undergoing "Evaporative Cooling" right now

While anecdote is not data, this is my first post in this forum, as someone who does not self identify as EA (though my friend assures me my views are not exclusive of being EA) and has many problems with much of the EA culture.

But I find the criticism of EA based on SBF incredibly annoying and shallow. Like giving up vegetarianism because of Hitler.

So, I didn't evaporate, for what it's worth!

I'm in favour of the  movement continuing its focus on producing highly-engaged EA's, but also iterating on the red-teaming competition.

I guess I'm more skeptical of this becoming a problem then you are. We've seen a lot, almost non-stop criticism on the EA forum after the FTX collapse following on a huge increase in criticism due to the red-teaming competition, many of which was highly upvoted.

So I don't know, I hardly feel like we have a shortage of criticism at the moment. If anything, I'm starting to worry we're getting too distracted.

All that said, perhaps you feel that I'm focusing too much on the short-term rather than the long?

Thanks for the summary and repost. I do think that this saga also has lessons for the EA community. I have seen many incidences whereby we overemphasise  EA alignment over subject matter expertise , especially when subject expertise is more practical and mission critical, for example in operation and risk management. This supports your comment on ‘This might leave the remaining group less able to identify weaknesses within group beliefs or course-correct, or "steer". 

The framing of trying to "produce highly-engaged EAs" / "produce moderately-engaged EAs" is very offputting to me. 

Good community-building would get more people who can engage with EA ideas while thinking for themselves and criticising things that seem wrong to them, and this seems like a different axis than "level of engagement". 

Thanks for the post, but I strongly disagree that this is the problem we're going through. Here are some things I think might be relevant that are not accounted for in this diagnosis:
First, there are some strong divides inside the movement (or among people who identify as EAs): longtermists vs. people focused on global poverty, wild animal suffering v. effective environmentalists, opinions on climate change as a GCR, etc.
Second, I don't think the problem here is just about "optics"... I was imagining that, next time I tell someone (as someone told me 5y ago, thus getting me interested in effective giving) that maybe they want to reconsider donating to their Alma Mater (because donations to universities are usually not neglected) and instead use an ITN framework to evaluate causes and projects, I might heard a reply like "Oh, you mean the ITN framework consolidated by Owen Cotton-Barrat in 2014... same guy who decided to pay 15 mi GBP for a manor-not-castle conference centre in 2022." And how can I respond to that? I'm pretty confident that OCB had good reasons, but I cannot provide them; thus the other person may just add "oh I trust the dean has reasons to act that way as well." End of discussion.
Third, probably my main issue here: we are beginning to sound a bit neurotic. I'm kinda tired of reading / arguing about EA-the-community. Some months ago, people were commenting Scott Alexander on EA's "criticim fetish" - but I think the problem might be deeper: EA forum is flooding with self-reference, meta-debates about how the community is or should be. I long for those days when the forum was full of thriving intellectual discussions on cost-benefit analysis, "nuka zaria",  population ethics... you'd post a high-quality, well researched and informative text, and be super glad if it received 20 karma points... Now it's about the community, identity, self-care, etc. I'm not saying these things are not important - but, well, that's not why we're here, right? It's not that I don't appreciate something very well-written like We must be very clear: fraud in the service of effective altruism is unacceptable or don't think it deserves a lot of attention... but the very fact that we got to a point where quite obvious things like that have to be said - that we have to say that we are against specific types of felonies -  and argued for aloud, and that it gets 17x  more attention than, e.g., a relevant discussion on altruism and development by David Nash... I don't know how to conclude this sentence, sorry.
And ofc I realize my comment is another instance of this... it reminds me one of those horrible "relationship arguments" where a couple starts arguing about something and then the very relationship becomes the main topic - and they just can't conclude the discussion in a satisfying way.

bad optics of the Whytham Abbey purchase

It doesn't feel to me that the discussion in that thread is one-sided enough to warrant this phrasing/narrative. 

Thank you for this post, I think it's important. I completely agree with your suggestion to focus on more moderately engaged EAs, but not so much with the impetus for it being "evaporative cooling". 

Essentially, when a group goes through a crisis, those who hold the group's beliefs least strongly leave, and those who hold the group's beliefs most strongly stay. 

I don't think that what will determine leaving or staying in response to recent events will be the degree to which people hold EA beliefs. Based on recent discussions on the Forum, I think those most likely to leave the community as a result of recent events would pe people who 

• care very deeply about transparency and accountability in organizations in general and charitable of non-governmental organizations in particular and feel like EVF and other pillar institutions and actors are not upholding these principles in a meaningful way
• care very deeply about the standard of evidence-based  reasoning and are struggling to reconcile things like the purchase of Wyndham Abbey with this standard
• think EAs are espousing principles and ideas that don't match up with their actions
• are concerned that visible engagement with EA might take meaningful action or make effective career choices more difficult due to negative public perception over the longterm 
• don't want to be associated with EA because of negative public perception and don't think it's worth it

I think that out of these, the first two and to a more limited extent the third and fourth would be more likely to strongly hold EA beliefs and the beliefs themselves would be the reason they leave the community. You could argue that the fifth in particular is an example of evaporative cooling, and I would probably agree, but I also think that the other groups deserve more attention in this discussion and the tone of less dedicated rats leaving a sinking ship that I'm getting from the evaporative cooling framing seems counterproductive - I absolutely do not think that that is what you mean or want to indicate, but I feel like it's latent in the framing. 

I also agree very strongly that focusing on moderately involved EAs is beneficial for non-attrition related factors, most importantly for engendering intellectual diversity and allowing the movement to learn from and incorporate experiences that are outside of the non-EA ecosystem. 
 

Diagnosis sounds right to me.

Also, if you read the comments, and other content lately, you might notice that some people are downplaying the gravity of the SBF case, or remarking that it was an utterly unpredictable Black Swan. And some people are signaling virtue by praising the community, or expressing unconditional allegiance to it, instead of to its ideals and principles. I think we both agree this is wasting an opportunity to learn a lesson.
Perhaps you may describe this as a type of evaporative cooling, but it's a different way.
My suggestion right now is some sort of forecasting competition about what is the worst hazard that will come to EA in the next couple of years.

In my view, the correct strategy as a community is to organize, discredit extremists, and trying to keep growing.

I'm extremely sceptical that the evaporative cooling model applies. As far as I'm aware its only empirical support is the three anecdotes in the original post. Almost all social science is wrong so I basically don't update at all on the model's predictions.