Auf Wiedersehen, Effective Altruism II: Wir Sehen Uns Wieder

Because doing enough good won’t make me good enough

Six months ago, I wrote:

I have no plans to return to the EA community

I’ve changed my mind. This post will explain why.

It’s well-covered ground¹ that Effective Altruism is an overloaded term. Worse still, “the EA community” could itself refer to many somewhat-distinct communities. There are those whose idea of doing the most good involves campaigning to prevent billions of shrimp from suffering eyestalk ablation, and there are those for whom it involves working to prevent powerful artificial intelligence from causing human extinction (or worse). While these groups both fall under the banner of “Effective Altruism”, and indeed share many of the same beliefs and opinions, it is self-evidently true that they have radical disagreements about important questions, and that these disagreements tend to cause a clustering effect whereby they form distinct sub-communities.

Reading back my post, there is clearly a lot of emotion involved, particularly shame and anger. Feeling emotions and making decisions based on them is good and normal. I was hurt by the actions of specific people at a specific organisation, but also felt let down by “the community” - whichever community that might be - which I felt had encouraged me to pursue the path that led to me suffering. It is true that many people had encouraged me to pursue said trajectory, in both implicit and explicit ways, but being angry at them for my suffering should not mean that I neglect my personal responsibility for my own situation.

Emotions aside, I have many criticisms of the Effective Altruist community (and many-or-all of its subsets) that I believe are less reactive.² At least for my tastes, there is too much groupthink, unhealthy markers of status and an unhealthy relationship with status in general, naive insistence on reinventing social and professional norms within the group, general lack of acknowledgement that taking some of the key ideas seriously can lead to radical and damaging conclusions, and that we ought to try and safeguard against that. It self-selects for people who are very head-y, who often have poor social skills and so can be frustrating to deal with, as well as those with a predilection for utilitarianism that is liable to cause catastrophe. And of course, the ever-present fetish for self-flagellation.

I’ve spent the last several months searching for a replacement community for EA, not finding anything suitable, and then promising that I was going to start my own. I thought hard about what I wanted from a community, and was cognizant that I was going to have to make compromises in order to have the things I wanted.

And… the things I wanted and the concessions I was willing to make ended up looking awfully EA-shaped. The community selects for people who are unusually sincere, intelligent, and altruistic. This seems extremely good! Spending time around people with moral ambition, who think and talk and care about morality, and who encourage one another to be more moral beings, also seems extremely good. These qualities are rare, particularly in Western individualistic culture, and I love spending time with these kinds of people; in this way, the EA community bears some resemblance to a secular sangha. I’ve decided to renege on creating a rival community, rather than risk a 15th competing standard. I hope that by returning to the fold, I may further sharpen the characteristics in myself that I so admire in others.

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Recently I asked people for help, both friends and in some semi-public spaces, including some EA spaces. People that I’d never met not only gave up their time to meet with me for the purpose of trying to help, they were also vulnerable and shared their own stories with me³. I realised that I was very wrong in November when I wrote:

Here’s the thing: while some individuals within EA are warm and approachable, the community at large is not. This is largely by design, which meant I felt like there was nowhere to go when I was struggling.

Had I been brave enough at the time, I could have approached the community for help, and I did have somewhere to go when I was struggling. Perhaps there are ways in which the community could have made it easier for me to ask, but still - when I got round to it a year later, I felt humbled and extremely emotional to receive the level of support that I did.

Through these conversations, including those had at an integral altruism workshop full of people who broadly shared my structural concerns about the EA project, I came to realise that perhaps it is possible to strike a new deal with the EA movement.

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Firstly, I have to acknowledge that my intrinsic desire to do good is partially (and perversely) avoidant in nature. My lingering sense of inadequacy motivates me to do good, on the false premise that if I do enough good, perhaps I will feel good enough. It’s tempting to allow myself to continue to believe this, particularly given the relative tractability of the projects of Effective Altruism compared to fundamentally altering a load-bearing part of my psyche. But, now I see it for what it is, I am doing neither myself nor the world any favours by repeating this pattern. My altruistic drive must be balanced with my need for self-compassion, and the knowledge that time and energy must be devoted towards healing my psychic wounds. This means any demandingness must be held at bay.

Secondly, status; as noted in last year’s post, EAs are big on status. Status is usually acquired via having a greater perceived impact, which is naturally fallible to Goodharting. My thoughts on this have changed since my previous writing - yes, status is a big deal in EA, and yes, status games are zero sum, but status games are ubiquitous in any community and so only avoidable by enforcing social isolation. If anything, the fact that EA is slightly self-aware about this means it is doing better than most communities, and if I can be more conscious of status dynamics then I am confident I can mitigate some of their inherent downside risks.

Lastly, I can just engage with the bits I do and don’t like. I am at peace with any moral mistakes I might be making therein, as I think they’re small. If it seems to go badly for me again, I can just hit da bricks once more.

One of the strangers gracious enough to have lunch with me last week closed by telling me “Jonny, there is a place for you in Effective Altruism”. I felt moved by his comment, his warmth and his generosity of spirit. Most importantly, I think he was right.