EA - If EA Community-Building Could Be Net-Negative, What Follows? by joshcmorrison

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: If EA Community-Building Could Be Net-Negative, What Follows?, published by joshcmorrison on January 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I think it’s likely that institutional effective altruism was a but-for cause of FTX’s existence and therefore that it may have caused about $8B in economic damage due to FTX’s fraud (as well as potentially causing permanent damage to the reputation of effective altruism and longtermism as ideas). This example makes me feel it’s plausible that effective altruist community-building activities could be net-negative in impact, and I wanted to explore some conjectures about what that plausibility would entail.I recognize this is an emotionally charged issue, and to be clear my claim is not “EA community-building has been net-negative” but instead that that’s plausibly the case (i.e. something like >10% likely). I don’t have strong certainty that I’m right about that and I think a public case that disproved my plausibility claim would be quite valuable. I should also say that I have personally and professionally benefitted greatly from EA community building efforts (most saliently from efforts connected to the Center for Effective Altruism) and I sincerely appreciate and am indebted to that work.Some claims that are related and perhaps vaguely isomorphic to the above which I think are probably true but may feel less strongly about are:To date, there has been a strong presumption among EAs that activities likely to significantly increase the number of people who explicitly identify as effective altruist (or otherwise increase their identification with the EA movement) are default worth funding. That presumption should be weakened.Social movements are likely to overvalue efforts to increase the power of their movement and undervalue their goals actually being accomplished, and EA is not immune to this failure mode.Leadership within social movements are likely to (consciously or unconsciously) overvalue measures that increase the leadership’s own control and influence and under-value measures that reduce it, which is a trap EA community-building efforts may have unintentionally fallen into.Pre-FTX, there was a reasonable assumption that expanding the EA movement was one of the most effective things a person could do, and the FTX catastrophe should significantly update our attitude towards that assumption.FTX should significantly update us on principles and strategies for EA community/movement-building and institutional structure, and there should be more public discourse on what such updates might be.EA is obligated to undertake institutional reforms to minimize the risk of creating an FTX-like problem in the future.Here are some conjectures I’d make for potential implications of believing my plausibility claim:Make Impact Targets Public: Insofar as new evidence has emerged about the impact of EA community building (and/or insofar as incentives towards movement-building may map imperfectly onto real-world impact), it is more important to make public, numerical estimates of the goals of particular community-building grants/projects going forward and to attempt public estimation of actual impact (and connection to real-world ends) of at least some specific grants/projects conducted to date. Outside of GiveWell, I think this is something EA institutions (my own included) should be better about in general, but I think the case is particularly strong in the community-building context given the above.Separate Accounting for Community Building vs. Front-Line Spending: I have argued in the past that meta-level and object-level spending by EAs should be in some sense accounted for separately. I admit this idea is, at the moment, under-specified but one basic example would be “EAs/EA grant makers should say their “front-line” and “met...