The Biggest Issue with the EA Movement
As opined by me, stemming from anecdote
I’m applying to the Charity Entrepreneurship incubation program, and I wrote this as part of the application. Posting it just to make more of my thinking public and to invite feedback. See here for an argument for a specific intervention for this problem.
The most problematic symptom that I see with the Effective Altruism movement is difficulty in building broad support. I believe the root causes are qualities like poor relational skills, lack of humility, and closeted egoism, which aggregate to an offputting culture. And key solutions to those qualities are teaching emotional intelligence, genuine empathy, and therapy.
I realize that this is relatively at odds with the current strategic focus of CEA, which is about encouraging deep, committed engagement, rather than widening the top of the funnel. As one of the leading organizations in EA for this topic specifically, they have likely thought much more about this, and probably have strong data to support their conclusions.
However, I believe that EA’s current conduct (to lump together a whole movement) may achieve short term goals of increasing deep engagement, but is repellant in a way that exponentially hurts its long term prospects. In short, this is because the top of the funnel changes exponentially — in (human) networks, good vibes attract recursively, and bad vibes repel. In particular, EA’s vibes likely play a major role in disparities in gender, ethnic, etc. representation.
Beyond this, deep engagement might be unexpectedly bottlenecked by these cultural issues, because all of these factors are interconnected. The most salient to me is hiring — getting someone in the door is already hard enough, without having to apologize for the shortcomings of an entire movement. They then also have to make the same apologies to their social circles. Has EA considered that it itself might be a factor in challenges filling roles?
There are indications of these problems in existing EA data, like from 80000 hours’s sampling of flaws in the community, and Rethink Priorities’ community survey results. In the latter, personal contacts had the most negative impact on involvement (yikes), and elitism was the most commonly disliked factor about EA, qualities that I think clearly contribute to an off putting culture.
Particularly damning in the latter is EA’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) (I know they prefer ACSI but there aren’t good benchmarks for that). The survey shows the distribution of scores, but doesn’t actually calculate the score. If you do the math:
Promoters = 18.9 + 18.5 = 37.4
Detractors = 1.4 + 1 + 2.6 + 2.3 + 5.1 + 9.7 = 22.1
= 15.3
According to the first google result, 15.3 is most comparable to the industry average for Health Insurance. EA’s would only recommend EA at a rate slightly higher than their health insurance company. The only worse industries are TV and internet services. Yikes.
To add to that, the NPS question generally doesn’t contain a qualification; this survey asked only about friends “who you thought would agree with the core principles of EA”. How bad would the results have been across the broader population?
I’ve personally been long described as preachy. I’ve recently realized/admitted that much of my life has been based around “having a better way”, to a degree. I’ve been examining that deeply recently and trying to change for years now. I’ve also been a part of an organization in university that was very unpopular, socially. So I’m trying to speak more from experience than from a place of blind, theoretical criticism.
In the interest of time and word count, I’ll stop here, and leave discussion of interventions/solutions to another time (although I began the discussion in my cause area 1 pager).
