EA research project
Some questions I’m interested in:
What does a community that’s conducive to effectively improving the world look like?
To what extent is EA such a community? How could it be better here?
I’ve been somewhat casually interested in these questions for a long time, and I’m now wanting to think more seriously about them. Some of what’s driving me:
A lot of my work is in the EA community building space. I have a lot of uncertainty about what kinds of things are actually good, and I’d like to be more confident that the work I’m doing is pushing in the right direction.
I think the EA community could be much better than it is currently. Or, maybe more importantly, I think that the shape of one’s social environment plays a pretty big role in what one does, and I’d like to see more and better social environments that are conducive to people effectively improving the world. In part my views here are shaped by my own experience, in particular of being involved in EA, and noticing the ways in which it’s felt difficult to be attuned to the good in such an environment.
Also, there are lots of things that seem relevant or important to me (more on what exactly these things are below), and my sense is that the explicit efforts to build or shape the EA community don't take these things into account much, and the predominant EA community building paradigm is pretty different from how I’m thinking about EA (I might be wrong here, I don’t feel like I have great insight into what the relevant people (whoever they are) think about this topic.
Where I’m currently at
I don’t have a strong thesis at the moment. Instead, I have a hodgepodge of ideas or phenomena that seem relevant to me, mostly borrowed from other people, and vague questions about them eg.
Joe Carlsmith writes about sincerity. Is EA sincere? Is it conducive to sincerity?
David Chapman has a model of subcultures and how they die. How well does this describe EA?
What’s going on with EA disillusionment?
Is EA making high-modernist errors, in the way described by Seeing Like a State (SSC book review link)?
What’s going on with EA burnout, and impostor syndrome and EA job scarcity? Why do they exist? How specific are these to EA vs. phenomena of any ambitious/ selective community? Are these signs of something going like pretty wrong with EA somehow, or just a cost of doing business?
Is EA an angler fish?
Habryka writes about EAs and rationalists sometimes turning crazy. Erm… what’s going on there?
My rough plan
I’m hoping to embark on investigating this area somewhat more seriously at roughly 0.5 - 2 days a week, doing some combination of reading, writing, talking to people, interviewing people, and reflecting on my own experience. And perhaps also making small scale attempts to build social environments that I think are conducive to the good, running surveys.
I’m particularly interested in getting a better understanding of other people’s experiences of EA.
A lot of my thinking is informed by my own experiences with trying to do good, being within EA and adjacent environments, and the things I’ve found challenging and so on. My sense is that a lot of the things I’ve found challenging are fairly common, and in some ways are reflective of more general social dynamics within EA and other places. And, I’m a bit wary of typical minding here.
What I’m looking for
One of the main things I’m looking for is collaborators or thought partners. At the moment I’m seeing this as a solo project, though in my ideal world it would be more of a joint project, where I’m working on it with other people.
I’m also interested in people that are up for chatting about these topics, even if it’s in more of a one-off way, rather than a collaborator way. Both people that have a similar overall take to me, and people with a very different overall take to me.
And I’m interested in other things I should read or investigate.