Entertainment for EAs

By Toby Tremlett🔹 @ 2025-10-17T11:15 (+56)

I’ve used the phrase “entertainment for EAs” a bunch to describe a failure mode that I’m trying to avoid with my career. Maybe it’d be useful for other people working in meta-EA, so I’m sharing it here as a quick draft amnesty post. 

There’s a motivational issue in meta-work where it’s easy to start treating the existing EA community as stakeholders. The real stakeholders in my work (and meta-work in general) are the ultimate beneficiaries — the minds (animal, human, digital?) that could benefit from work I help to initiate. But those beneficiaries aren’t present to me — they aren’t my friends, they don’t work in the same building as me. To keep your eyes on the real prize takes constant effort. 

When your attention slips, you could end up working on ‘entertainment for EAs’, i.e. something which gets great feedback from EAs, but only hazily, if at all, affects the ultimate beneficiaries. Obviously this is something for me to watch out for in my work — I want my work on the Forum to lead to impact, but I’m also likely to hear enthusiastic feedback if I host an event that is really fun, even if it doesn’t ultimately lead to anything else. 

This doesn’t just affect my work though. My “entertainment for EAs” detector goes off whenever: 

a) I hear a theory of change that routes through the EA community, i.e. helping EAs with productivity, mental health, etc… 

b) I hear about a content project (blog, podcast) which sounds like it’ll mostly appeal to EAs. 

I’m not saying that these projects won’t turn out to be valuable — for example I felt this scepticism towards Asterisk when it began, and now I’m very glad they exist, and working on improving the mental health/ productivity of existing workers can sometimes be more cost-effective than finding and hiring new workers — but I think we should approach them with initial scepticism. This is a classic case of a surprising and suspicious convergence, e.g. the thing we should fund just happens to also be something we’d benefit from directly — that merits a “hmmm”. 

Draft amnesty post, and I only had 10 minutes to write this, so I won’t add anything else, but I thought it may be valuable to share, even in its current form. 

Also, if you see me doing something on the Forum that looks plausibly like entertainment for EAs, message me/ comment! I’d appreciate being held to account on this.