So like you, I’ve been inspired by lots of people in the EA movement and I’m optimistic that the EA movement can continue growing and do lots of good.

However, the history of disasters teaches us that major disasters are often preceded by minor disasters of a similar sort. If people took minor disasters more seriously and put stronger safeguards in place, there would be fewer major disasters. “Only the paranoid survive”, as Andy Grove says.

I’ve been really impressed by the reflectiveness and thoughtfulness of everyone I’ve met through the EA movement. But if the EA movement continues executing on its aggressive expansion plans, we’ll eventually start seeing a larger population of EAs that are less reflective by disposition than our current set. Someday they might even make up the majority of EAs.

Because of this, I think it’s worthwhile taking some time to figure out how to preserve our current culture (which I think is great for the most part) and guard against the failure modes that may come with growth. As Rob Bensinger writes, “The value of growing the EA movement is instrumental, and conditional.” If we’re ever going to codify our cultural norms, that feels like something we should do sooner rather than later. As the movement grows, it’s harder to get group buy-in on new proposed norms.

The biggest failure modes I foresee right now fall under the broad category of “politicization”. “Politicization” doesn’t refer to the discussion of traditionally political topics per se; rather, it refers to the dysfunctional conversational modes traditionally associated with political topics. In principle any topic can be politicized (e.g. the color of the sky in this short story).

Unfortunately, politicization is hard to talk about because discussing it tends to trigger object-level discussion of politicized topics. I’ve been thinking about it a fair amount lately, but I haven’t posted on it because I was afraid to trigger the wrong sort of discussion. However, now that you’ve brought the topic up, I may as well share some thoughts and hopefully contribute to a relatively nonpoliticized tone for this comment thread :)

So my first question is what the best way to ratchet politicization down is once it has been ratcheted up. It’s possible that, like cockroaches or government corruption, it’s a problem that’s difficult to get rid of once you acquire it. It’s also possible that expert mediators are relatively good at defusing politicization, and all the EA community needs is a team of respected neutral mediators (“flame war firefighters”) to deal with problems as they arise.

If there aren’t reliable ways to ratchet politicization down, then we’ll want to focus on prevention.

You write: “Effective altruism could become a movement of multiple communities, in which people of different political stripes or cluster-groups stick to their own.” I agree this would not necessarily be terrible, but it does seem potentially terrible. I can imagine a community of republican EAs and a community of democrat EAs, each deciding that the best way to be an effective altruist is to donate and promote “effectively altruistic” government policies (aka whichever policies they would have promoted anyway), and the two communities exactly cancel each other out with their work.

Right now we are not even close to the failure mode I describe above. The EA community currently has a strong norm against discussing government policy. I think this is a good norm and we shouldn’t let it degrade. There’s no question that improving policies can be high-impact, but if we allow discussion of policy on official EA channels, there’s nothing preventing that discussion from degrading in to a typical internet flamewar as the movement grows. If the EA movement ever wants to work on improving policy, we should do it very carefully.

Another way politicization could happen is if certain causes within the EA movement amp up their rhetoric and aggressively go around trying to convince EAs that their cause is the best.

This could trigger a corresponding response from other causes within the EA movement, and the official EA discussion channels could be flooded with cause prioritization discussion in the resulting arms race. I think we should be ready to ban cause prioritization discussion on mainstream EA channels and restrict it to dedicated cause prioritization channels if this starts happening. (E.g. a regular cause prioritization thread on this forum.)

Even worse, a heated cause prioritization discussion favors simple, legible accusations of the form “you’re a terrible person if you don’t support my cause” over the careful, reflective analysis that I currently see in the EA community. I see EA’s culture of careful, reflective analysis as the primary thing differentiating us from regular non-EA altruism. If our standards of discussion degrade, we may lose what makes us different.

I don’t think there are easy solutions but being aware of potential problems seems valuable.

I've observed the last point happening among many people I know, including myself - people absorb and act on EA values while not necessarily remaining in the community. It seems like creating people who act by EA values is more important than creating an EA community per se. I'm not sure how much community building helps bring this about, though. It would be interesting to see more research and thinking on the connection between community building and generating new EAs (a similar debate is going on among animal activists at the moment).

Where is the Ben post that this is referring to?