I'm not really sure why you think the refusal to decouple can't co-exist with people wanting clarity?
And I'm also not sure why you think philosophers hating EA means people don't hate EA the same way they hate philosophers? I think a lot of philosophers hate each other as well, and those same people get hated on by outsiders for philosophy-vibes reasons. Unfortunately hatred is not a zero-sum game.
I think so much of the PR problem EA has just comes down to people hating EA for the same reason people hate philosophers:
people want clarity in a chaotic world, but philosophers often poses more questions than answers (like how EA itself is an open question)
populism is really popular right now, but philosophers are technocrats in ivory towers (like the memetic associations EA has with ivy league educations, silicon valley, etc.)
there's a lot more noise about what EA thinks rather than what EA does, aligning with the stereotype that philosophers don't do anything to apply their ideas in the real world.Â
I think the solution here is to just keep hammering in what EA has done, rather than engaging on what EA thinks. Most people's only knowledge of what EA has done is SBF, because that's all that gets talked about. Anecdotally, my friends' impressions of EA were most improved by learning that:
EA did a lot of pandemic risk preparation before COVID, and is part of the reason why the COVID vaccine came out as quickly as it did (Also really good if people start asking about why EA is investing in AI safety)
EA has gotten people to donate >2 billion to save >300k lives through GiveWell alone
(for leftist friends) EA supports a lot of direct money transfers to people in the global south, allowing for local entrepreneurship
(depends on the audience) EA is one of the reasons why so many countries are now emphasizing cage-free eggs, so chickens don't die in their own feces
It seems like EAs care a lot about defining EA, but it's not clear to me what the purpose of defining EA is. A lot of social movements are ill-defined, either because the people inside the movement disagree (i.e. socialism), or because the people outside the movement disagree (i.e. zionism, or feminism).Â
If the definition is meant for PR reasons, then it strikes me as weird why most definitions are either long or not immediately understandable. PR seems to heavily favor processing fluency (how easy it is to understand something; happy to cite my sources if needed), and most definitions of EA seem like they're more catered towards philosophical ponderings than spreadable messages that someone can understand in <10 seconds.
If the definition is meant for marketing reasons (marketing is attracting people into EA, PR is managing what people say about EA on the outside), then the current array of definitions seems to further encourage only philosophically-inclined people to get into the movement (which isn't a problem, tbh, if you don't weigh ideological diversity highly).
If the definition is meant for gaining clarity as a community on what the community is about, then it seems strange that people are presumably unsatisfied enough with previous definitions that new posts trying to define EA and its direction keeps on popping up. Some of it is justified by evolutions in the movement, for sure, but I think part of it is also just that people keep trying to explain EA to their non-EA friends, and most of the current defintions don't land very well (anecdotally, n > 30).
Thank you so much for writing this Julian! I'm Cat, the operations lead at Rethink Wellbeing. Mental health does seem like a huge issue in the AI safety field right now, and we've been trying to tailor our CBT Lab program to fit with the most common things EAs/AIS report struggling with (burnout, work related stress, etc.). Our previous cohorts with a general EA/ambitious altruist audience have suggested that mental health support (via our program) can potentially increase productivity by 4-8 hours per week, which does seem to corroborate the claim that the AIS ecosystem could benefit from mental health support.
We're planning to make the broader AI Safety space one of our highest-priority targets for our next cohort (tentatively scheduled starting early/mid November) and we have been floating the possibility of officially partnering with organizations to provide mental health support as a employee benefit (and some plans for evidence-based team-building programs as well). Thankfully, since we're currently funded by the EAIF, we're able to offer this support for free. However, we're currently being bottlenecked by our reach. We primarily promote our programs on the forums, various Slack channels, and through organizations where we have warm connections. But it can be hard to reach organizations where we don't have warm connections, and from informal chats I've had with other EAs, it seems like there's a lot of dedicated EAs/AIS people who could benefit from the program but simply don't hear about it since they don't frequent the forums/slack channels! If anyone has ideas for how to reach AI Safety people/organizations better, we would love to hear them. Similarly, if you run an AIS/EA organization and would like free peer-support CBT programs as an employee benefit, please reach out to me or [email protected]!
Rethink Wellbeing has opened up applications for our Summer 2026 CBT Lab cohort!
If you've been navigating burnout, anxiety about doing "enough," or just a hard stretch, this might be a fit: • 8 weekly online sessions, small peer groups of 5–7 people • Free if you're employed at a high-impact org; subsidized for participants based in LMICs • ~24% average reduction in depression symptoms across 160+ participants since 2023
You mention not tracking people longitudinally as a limitation, but I imagine this is mostly a limitation for workshops and crisis callers, since I assume a suicide at an outreached school would be news and you would be made aware. Maybe you can compare the regional average to the school's suicide rates as a weak check against reality?Â
I think something that may help donors feel like they're actually doing something and could be cool is a GiveWell-ran but kickstarter aesthetic website for charities. Charities set their moonshots, breaks it down to manageable bitesize pieces and establishes goals based on them. Different promises are made to donors for different goals of donation reached. Donors also have different tiers based on how much they donate.
E.g. We want to distribute malaria vaccines to everyone in Nigeria. For $x donated, we'll distribute vaccines to all children under 5 in the state of Ondo in Nigeria, and send stickers out to all donors. If we reach $x + y, we will expand to the neighboring state of Eikiti as well and all silver+ tier donors will get a handwritten card. Donating $(x * 0.001) grants you bronze tier, $(x * 0.005) grants you silver, etc.
With the right UI design, I think donors could feel much more like they're really contributing because of the relative tiers, and their ability to see the project get closer to pre-established goals specifically due to their donation. There's also a much cleaner feedback cycle when donating $z -> you get letters/videos/whatever else emotionally appeals to donors. And I imagine you could also add a lot of community incentives and gamification elements to something like this.
On a practical level, I don't necessarily disagree with anything you're saying in the first two paragraphs. I tried to address some of what you're saying in my conclusion, and I don't think anything in the "main" argument (benefits missions provide but EA is currently missing) is incompatible with having the abstract "doing good" as the core EA thing (so then it just becomes a semantic thing about how we define missions).Â
As for your last paragraph, I argue for a cultural shift because I've personally seen a lot of people who resonate very much with EA intellectually but not emotionally (like here). This is fine when they have an easy transition into a high-impact role and there are less abstract stuff they can feel emotional about, but a lot of people don't "survive" that transition. They are aligned on principles, but EA is a really different community and movement that takes time getting used to. The current EA community seems to not only select for people who share values, but also people who share personality traits. I think that's bad.
(I do like the subculture idea and it was something I was thinking about as I wrote it! I think that's 100% a viable path too)
On a more speculative level, the people who I see drifting away strongly tend to be the people who have support networks outside of EA, instead of the people who are more reliant on EA for their social/emotional needs. I'm sure some of this trend exists for every movement, but I somewhat believe that this trend is larger for EA. This post gets at one of the reasons I have personally hypothesized to have caused this - that EA feels cold to a lot of people in a way difficult to describe, and humans are emotions-driven at their core. Regardless of the reason, selecting for members that are socially and emotionally reliant on the movement seems like a recipe for disaster.Â
I'm not really sure why you think the refusal to decouple can't co-exist with people wanting clarity?
And I'm also not sure why you think philosophers hating EA means people don't hate EA the same way they hate philosophers? I think a lot of philosophers hate each other as well, and those same people get hated on by outsiders for philosophy-vibes reasons. Unfortunately hatred is not a zero-sum game.
I think so much of the PR problem EA has just comes down to people hating EA for the same reason people hate philosophers:
I think the solution here is to just keep hammering in what EA has done, rather than engaging on what EA thinks. Most people's only knowledge of what EA has done is SBF, because that's all that gets talked about. Anecdotally, my friends' impressions of EA were most improved by learning that:
It seems like EAs care a lot about defining EA, but it's not clear to me what the purpose of defining EA is. A lot of social movements are ill-defined, either because the people inside the movement disagree (i.e. socialism), or because the people outside the movement disagree (i.e. zionism, or feminism).Â
If the definition is meant for PR reasons, then it strikes me as weird why most definitions are either long or not immediately understandable. PR seems to heavily favor processing fluency (how easy it is to understand something; happy to cite my sources if needed), and most definitions of EA seem like they're more catered towards philosophical ponderings than spreadable messages that someone can understand in <10 seconds.
If the definition is meant for marketing reasons (marketing is attracting people into EA, PR is managing what people say about EA on the outside), then the current array of definitions seems to further encourage only philosophically-inclined people to get into the movement (which isn't a problem, tbh, if you don't weigh ideological diversity highly).
If the definition is meant for gaining clarity as a community on what the community is about, then it seems strange that people are presumably unsatisfied enough with previous definitions that new posts trying to define EA and its direction keeps on popping up. Some of it is justified by evolutions in the movement, for sure, but I think part of it is also just that people keep trying to explain EA to their non-EA friends, and most of the current defintions don't land very well (anecdotally, n > 30).
Thank you so much for writing this Julian! I'm Cat, the operations lead at Rethink Wellbeing. Mental health does seem like a huge issue in the AI safety field right now, and we've been trying to tailor our CBT Lab program to fit with the most common things EAs/AIS report struggling with (burnout, work related stress, etc.). Our previous cohorts with a general EA/ambitious altruist audience have suggested that mental health support (via our program) can potentially increase productivity by 4-8 hours per week, which does seem to corroborate the claim that the AIS ecosystem could benefit from mental health support.
We're planning to make the broader AI Safety space one of our highest-priority targets for our next cohort (tentatively scheduled starting early/mid November) and we have been floating the possibility of officially partnering with organizations to provide mental health support as a employee benefit (and some plans for evidence-based team-building programs as well). Thankfully, since we're currently funded by the EAIF, we're able to offer this support for free. However, we're currently being bottlenecked by our reach. We primarily promote our programs on the forums, various Slack channels, and through organizations where we have warm connections. But it can be hard to reach organizations where we don't have warm connections, and from informal chats I've had with other EAs, it seems like there's a lot of dedicated EAs/AIS people who could benefit from the program but simply don't hear about it since they don't frequent the forums/slack channels! If anyone has ideas for how to reach AI Safety people/organizations better, we would love to hear them. Similarly, if you run an AIS/EA organization and would like free peer-support CBT programs as an employee benefit, please reach out to me or [email protected]!
Rethink Wellbeing has opened up applications for our Summer 2026 CBT Lab cohort!
Apply: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSemKtBLXzb6yEN_Gn9O7FvFvQMAhKYMl-g23sb0BoLMBa-MEg/viewform
If you've been navigating burnout, anxiety about doing "enough," or just a hard stretch, this might be a fit:
• 8 weekly online sessions, small peer groups of 5–7 people
• Free if you're employed at a high-impact org; subsidized for participants based in LMICs
• ~24% average reduction in depression symptoms across 160+ participants since 2023
Happy to answer questions — DM me or email [email protected].
You mention not tracking people longitudinally as a limitation, but I imagine this is mostly a limitation for workshops and crisis callers, since I assume a suicide at an outreached school would be news and you would be made aware. Maybe you can compare the regional average to the school's suicide rates as a weak check against reality?Â
GivingDirectly & StrongMinds <3
I think something that may help donors feel like they're actually doing something and could be cool is a GiveWell-ran but kickstarter aesthetic website for charities. Charities set their moonshots, breaks it down to manageable bitesize pieces and establishes goals based on them. Different promises are made to donors for different goals of donation reached. Donors also have different tiers based on how much they donate.
E.g. We want to distribute malaria vaccines to everyone in Nigeria. For $x donated, we'll distribute vaccines to all children under 5 in the state of Ondo in Nigeria, and send stickers out to all donors. If we reach $x + y, we will expand to the neighboring state of Eikiti as well and all silver+ tier donors will get a handwritten card. Donating $(x * 0.001) grants you bronze tier, $(x * 0.005) grants you silver, etc.
With the right UI design, I think donors could feel much more like they're really contributing because of the relative tiers, and their ability to see the project get closer to pre-established goals specifically due to their donation. There's also a much cleaner feedback cycle when donating $z -> you get letters/videos/whatever else emotionally appeals to donors. And I imagine you could also add a lot of community incentives and gamification elements to something like this.
morally ambivalent about extinction, though reducing chances of extinction could plausibly also have positive flowthrough for S-Risks.Â
On a practical level, I don't necessarily disagree with anything you're saying in the first two paragraphs. I tried to address some of what you're saying in my conclusion, and I don't think anything in the "main" argument (benefits missions provide but EA is currently missing) is incompatible with having the abstract "doing good" as the core EA thing (so then it just becomes a semantic thing about how we define missions).Â
As for your last paragraph, I argue for a cultural shift because I've personally seen a lot of people who resonate very much with EA intellectually but not emotionally (like here). This is fine when they have an easy transition into a high-impact role and there are less abstract stuff they can feel emotional about, but a lot of people don't "survive" that transition. They are aligned on principles, but EA is a really different community and movement that takes time getting used to. The current EA community seems to not only select for people who share values, but also people who share personality traits. I think that's bad.
(I do like the subculture idea and it was something I was thinking about as I wrote it! I think that's 100% a viable path too)
On a more speculative level, the people who I see drifting away strongly tend to be the people who have support networks outside of EA, instead of the people who are more reliant on EA for their social/emotional needs. I'm sure some of this trend exists for every movement, but I somewhat believe that this trend is larger for EA. This post gets at one of the reasons I have personally hypothesized to have caused this - that EA feels cold to a lot of people in a way difficult to describe, and humans are emotions-driven at their core. Regardless of the reason, selecting for members that are socially and emotionally reliant on the movement seems like a recipe for disaster.Â