EA - Deconfusion Part 3 - EA Community and Social Structure by Davidmanheim

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Deconfusion Part 3 - EA Community and Social Structure, published by Davidmanheim on February 9, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is part 3 of my attempt to disentangle and clarify some parts of what comprises Effective Altruism, in this case, the community. As I’ve written earlier in this series, EA is first a normative philosophical position that is near-universal, as well as some widely accepted ideas about maximizing good that are compatible with most moral positions. It’s also, as I wrote in the second post, a set of causes, in many cases contingent on very unclear or deeply debated philosophical claims, and a set of associated ideas which inform specific funding and prioritization decisions, but which are not necessary parts of the philosophy, yet are accepted by (most of) the community for other reasons.The community itself, however, is a part of Effective Altruism as an applied philosophy, for two reasons. The first, as noted above, is that it impacts the prioritization and funding decisions. It affects them both because of philosophical, political, and similar factors belonging to those within the community, and because of directly social factors, such as knowledge of projects, the benefits of interpersonal trust, and the far less beneficial conflicts of interest that occur. The second is that EA promotes community building as itself a cause area, as a way to build the number of people donating and directly working on other high-priority cause areas.Note: The posts in this sequence are intended primarily as descriptive and diagnostic, to help me, and hopefully readers, make sense of Effective Altruism. EA is important, but even if you actually think it’s “the most wonderful idea ever,” we still want to avoid a Happy Death Spiral. Ideally, a scout mindset will allow us to separate different parts of EA, and feel comfortable accepting some things and rejecting others, or assisting people in keeping identity small but still embrace ideas. That said, I have views on different aspects of the community, and I’m not a purely disinterested writer, so some of my views are going to be present in this attempt at dispassionate analysis - I've tried to keep those to the footnotes.What is the community? (Or, what are the communities?)This history of Effective Altruism involves a confluence of different groups which overlap or are parallel. A complete history is beyond the scope of this post. On the other hand, it’s clear that there was a lot happening. Utilitarian philosophers started with doing good, as I outlined in the first post, but animal rights activists pushed for taking animal suffering seriously, financial analyst donors pushed for charity evaluations, extropians pushed for a glorious transhuman future, economists pushed for RCTs, rationalists pushed for bayesian viewpoints, libertarians pushed for distrusting government, and so on. And in almost all cases I’m aware of, central people in effective altruism belonged to several of these groups simultaneously.Despite the overlap, at a high level some of the key groups in EA as it evolved are the utilitarian philosophers centered in Oxford, the global health economists, the Lesswrong rationalists and AI-safety groups centered in the Bay, and the biorisk community. Less central but at some-point relevant or related groups are the George Mason libertarians, the animal suffering activists, former extropians and transhumanists, the EA meme groups, the right-wing and trad Lesswrong splinter groups, the leftist AI fairness academics, the polyamory crowd, the progress studies movement, the democratic party funders and analysts, post-rationalist mystics, and AI safety researchers. Getting into the relationship between all of these groups is several careers worth of research and writing as a modest start, but ...