EA - EA is a global community - but should it be? 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: EA is a global community - but should it be?, published by Davidmanheim on November 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Without trying to wade into definitions, effective altruism is not just a philosophy and a plan of action, it’s also a community. And that means that community dynamics are incredibly important in shaping both the people involved, and the ideas. Healthy communities can make people happier, more effective, and better citizens locally and globally - but not all communities are healthy. A number of people have voiced concerns about the EA community in the recent past, and I said at the time that I think that we needed to take those concerns seriously. The failure of the community to realize what was happening with FTX isn’t itself an indictment of the community - especially given that their major investors did not know - but it’s a symptom that reinforces many of the earlier complaints.The solutions seem unclear, but there are two very different paths that would address the failure - either reform, or rethinking the entire idea of EA as a community. So while people are thinking about changes, I’d like to suggest that we not take the default path of least resistance reforms, at least without seriously considering the alternative.“The community” failed?Many people have said that the EA community failed when they didn’t realize what SBF was doing. Others have responded that no, we should not blame ourselves. (As an aside, when Eliezer Yudkowsky is telling you that you’re overdoing heroic responsibility, you’ve clearly gone too far.) But when someone begins giving to EA causes, whether individually, or via Founders Pledge, or via setting up something like SFF, there is no-one vetting them for being honest or well controlled.The community was trusting - in this case, much too trusting. And people have said that they trusted the apparent (but illusory) consensus of EAs about FTX. I am one of them. We were all too trusting of someone who, according to several reports, had a history of breaking rules and cheating others, including an acrimonious split that happened early on at Alameda, and evidently more recently frontrunning. But the people who raised flags were evidently ignored, or in other cases feared being pariahs for speaking out more publicly.But the idea that I and others trusted in “the community” is itself a problem. Like Rob Wiblin, I generally subscribe to the idea that most people can be trusted. But I wasn’t sufficiently cautious about how trust that applies to “you won’t steal from my wallet, even if you’re pretty sure you can get away with it,” doesn’t scale to “you can run a large business or charity with effectively no oversight.” A community that trusts by default is only sustainable if it is small. Claiming to subscribe to EA ideas, especially in a scenario where you can be paid well to do so, isn’t much of a reason to trust anyone. And given the size of the EA community, we’ve already passed the limits of where trusting others because of shared values is viable.Failures of TrustThere are two ways to have high trust: naivety, and sophistication. The naive way is what EA groups have employed so far, and the sophisticated way requires infrastructure to make cheating difficult and costly.To explain, when I started in graduate school, I entered a high-trust environment. I never thought about it, partly because I grew up in a religious community that was high trust. So in grad school, I was comfortable if I left my wallet on my desk when going to the bathroom, or even sometimes when I had an hour-long meeting elsewhere in the building.I think during my second year, someone had something stolen from their desk - I don’t recall what, maybe it was a wallet. We all received an email saying that if someone took it, they would be expel...