EA - Red-teaming contest: demographics and power structures in EA by TheOtherHannah

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: Red-teaming contest: demographics and power structures in EA, published by TheOtherHannah on August 31, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary In this post we look at two common high-level criticisms of the EA movement, and evaluate them against specific examples from the global health and development cause area. These high-level criticisms are [Section 1]: EA’s narrow demographic is bad for the movement, and EA has power structures that mirror (neo)colonialism, paternalism and institutional racism. We evaluate these through three case studies [described in Section 2], and we identify three issues that we believe are restricting the EA movement's effectiveness and growth [Section 3]. These identified issues are: 3.1 Demographic homogeneity (specifically, low cultural/geographic diversity) is limiting the EA community’s ability to design and deliver effective, innovative solutions. [confidence: relatively strong, size of impact: medium in non-longtermist cause areas] 3.2 Decision-makers in some EA orgs do not have enough information or robust processes for addressing their blindspots, and this decreases the accuracy of their models. [confidence: medium, size of impact: relatively small] 3.3 Power structures within EA organisations have parallels to colonialism and institutional racism, and this is damaging the reputation and credibility of the EA movement. [confidence: medium, size of impact: difficult to determine, and debatable] We believe these issues are limiting EA’s ability to become a truly global movement that inspires innovative and effective solutions for the world's most pressing problems [Section 4]. Finally, we make recommendations for the EA community and some EA orgs to adopt in the near-term future [Section 5]. Broadly, our recommendations seek to: Increase the sharing of EA tools with people in different geographic areas, without prescribing the end goal for those we share them with. Increase conversations within EA about colonialism and institutional racism, with the aim that community members can better identify and avoid biases and power structures that perpetuate them. Epistemic status: We have considered the high-level criticisms from a variety of angles, and this post includes only the issues we think are the most persuasive. None of us are experts in the fields investigated, so we anticipate that there will be some mistakes or blindspots of our own contained in this critique. If you think we've completely missed work that EA is doing in these areas, perhaps this signals that the EA culture we've been exposed to doesn’t have enough mention of these aspects of EA. Section One: Introducing the original high-level criticisms 1.1 EA’s narrow demographic is bad for the movement 1.2 EA has power structures that mirror (neo)colonialism, paternalism and institutional racism. We will give a quick overview of these common high-level criticisms and state what we hope to add to the discussion. 1.1 EA’s narrow demographic is bad for the movement The demographic of people who respond to the EA survey has stayed relatively consistent over recent years. Respondents are over 70% each of White, male and young, and live in the same set of five high-income, western countries (the US, the UK, Germany, Australia, and Canada) that were most common in previous years. People commonly comment on the importance of demographic diversity, and how to increase it. The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) has a statement on why diversity, equity and belonging are important in an EA context, and the steps they are taking to increase these. It’s really good and you should check it out. This discussion is missing: concrete examples that demonstrate a theory of change from “increased diversity” to “better ability to improve the lives of others”, and Systems-change (outside o...