This is a short post to "pre-register" some research questions we’re currently exploring, and to invite discussion from others who might be thinking about similar things.
 

The core question is: are changemakers systematically disconnected from each other, and if so, why? By “changemakers” we mean people actively working to improve the world in a deliberate, thoughtful, and often high-leverage way — this includes (but isn’t limited to) people in the effective altruism community, founders of impact-oriented orgs, public-interest technologists, activist researchers, movement builders, etc.

Anecdotally, we’ve noticed a pattern: many of these people report feeling somewhat isolated, alone and also they often don't trust anybody whose ideas sound similar to their own. They frequently duplicate each other’s efforts, or struggle to find aligned collaborators (and seem unhappy about that). Even within shared paradigms like EA, coordination often seems harder than it “should” be.

This led us to a set of questions we’re now investigating:

• Is this disconnection real, or just a sampling artifact from a few communities?
• If real, what explains it? (personal factors as well as systemic)
  • Is it incentive misalignment (e.g. status/resource competition, org branding)
  • Cognitive/epistemic load (e.g. “heads down” mode, local optimization)?
  • Psychological traits (e.g. high openness + low agreeableness, trust issues, trauma)?
  • Cultural norms (e.g. strong epistemic individualism, fear of memetic contamination)?
  • Logistical issues (e.g. geography, lack of common infrastructure)?
• What actually helps counteract this?
  • Intentional coordination spaces?
  • Trusted curators/brokers?
  • Better discovery mechanisms?
• Tools for epistemic legibility or collaboration readiness?

Our current impression is that there’s a mix of factors — some structural, some psychological, some epistemic. Coordination failures may emerge not from lack of will but from subtly misaligned models of each other, or just a lack of affordances for lightweight collaboration. In some cases, people may be protecting themselves (consciously or unconsciously) from reputational risk or emotional overload. In other cases, it’s just hard to prioritize “meta-work” when the object-level problems feel so urgent.

We’re doing a qualitative study on this topic and are currently conducting interviews with people across different change-oriented domains. If this resonates with you (especially if you have the experience of successful coordination) and you’d be willing to talk (confidentially), we’d love to hear from you — feel free to comment below or DM .