Focus group study of Non-Western EAs’ experiences with Western EAs

By Yi-Yang @ 2024-07-24T02:47 (+31)

Summary

What are my goals? And what did I find?

Are cross cultural interactions (CCIs) in EA even an issue for non-Western EAs who attended the retreat?
1. It’s more likely than not that they had experienced at least one mildly-to-moderately bad interaction. These are usually more subtle and unintentional.
2. It’s very unlikely that they had experienced an extremely bad interaction.
3. It’s very likely that their interactions are mostly positive.
How widespread is it?
1. Uncertain, but probably yes.

Methodology

I thought a retreat that happened before EAGxPhilippines was a good opportunity to talk to a bunch of non-Western EAs, so I ran a focus group session as a way to solicit people’s experiences of CCIs in EA settings.

The rules I enforced during that time were:

To use Chatham house rule when talking about the session to others
To keep our shared notes anonymised
To differentiate between purely factual observations (e.g., I see this person doing that) and interpretations of these observations (e.g., I think they are bad)

Results

Negative experiences

* indicates that I was the one who initially shared the experience, and hence may be biassed to get people to talk more about it.

Experiences	Supporting details
* EAs in "perceived-to-be-lower-status-cultures" [e.g., non-Western] have to put much more effort to be included in spaces where EAs in "perceived-to-be-higher-status-cultures" [e.g., Western] occupy. OTOH, EAs in "perceived-to-be-higher-status-cultures" have to put much less effort to be included in spaces where "perceived-to-be-lower-status-cultures" occupy.	3 people gave supporting anecdotal evidence. “In a conference, I noticed EAs from ‘low status cultures’ weren’t invited to hang out. OTOH, folks from ‘high status cultures’ were doing their own thing and not being super inclusive.” “Someone from country X told me their effort is double or maybe triple to join events, book 1-1s, etc” “Everyone but me [in a group] was invited to an after-conference party. I suspect it’s because I’m a POC.”
* EAs from "perceived-to-be-higher-status-cultures" hijacking (probably unintentionally) norms in spaces that belong to EAs from "perceived-to-be-lower-status-cultures"	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence 1 person gave counter anecdotal evidence Didn’t really see people hijack conversations that much, but they have to sometimes push people to speak up more due to lack of comfort in speaking in other languages. 1 person gave a different hypothesis Different cultures have different wait times to fill the silence: some are longer and some are shorter. After telling people about this, they give other people more wait time.
EAs usually find the opportunity cost of travelling to far away conferences very high. This makes EAs in far away countries less likely to interact with other EAs in other parts of the world.	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence
Pressure to move to an EA hub.	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence. “In many EA forms they ask how willing you are to move to different hubs for work. But many people like myself aren’t willing to uproot their entire lives. Maybe there should be more effort to have work that is remote-friendly, or time zone-friendly.”
Cause prioritisation done by folks are influenced by their location	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence “If you live somewhere without AI safety jobs, you’re much more unlikely to pursue it.” 1 person disagreed “I tend to separate out cause prio and personal fit. So I do the cause prio separately, and then look into what fits me.”
Folks in Asia think they’re not a great fit for EA if they’re not working on AI safety	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence
Culture of reducing meat consumption can be seen as untrustworthy in certain cultures	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence
Non-westerners with English as their second language apologise more often when speaking in English, compared to Westerners with English as their second language	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence
There are differences in how punctuality is viewed depending on culture	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence
* There’s a trend of non-Western people wanting to be more Westernised for many reasons (e.g., status, economic, cultural, romantic, etc).	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence “Some non-western people adopt a more Western accent so they will be taken more seriously.”
Some non-westerners write long emails to pitch for more funding support, whereas some Westerners write shorter emails	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence

Positive experiences

Experiences	Supporting details
EAGx’s are great	2 people gave supporting anecdotal evidence
Great to learn from other cultures regarding best practices, and even work-life boundaries.	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence
More emails and less calls from Western folks than non-Western folks	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence
Encouraged to create materials or host meetings in their own language instead of English, even if it meant English-speaking folks couldn’t participate	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence
CEA recorded some mock situations with people role-playing bad situations--that was helpful.	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence
There’s a good culture of trying to pronounce non-Western names correctly	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence

Limitations

There was one or two people taking notes, and I paraphrased from these notes, so there might be errors.
I tried to get people to differentiate between purely factual observations (e.g., I see this person doing that) and interpretations of these observations (e.g., I think they are bad), but I wasn’t successful.
Furthermore, some of the experiences listed are pretty subtle so relies more heavily on interpretation rather than factual observation.
I tried getting people to share positive experiences as well (which I think is still helpful), but most shared negative experiences.
Instead of purely facilitating, I participated as well, which probably influenced people’s thoughts towards more negative experiences.
Everyone was invited to this session, but I didn’t explicitly say that, which Western EAs in the retreat might have taken as “not excitedly invited”.
I think there might be some pressure to not share more as some might worry that they might be perceived as “rocking the boat too much”, too “social justice” coded, “this is a ‘you’ problem”, or some other kind of backlash I haven’t thought about.

Appendix

Non-cross-cultural related or uncertain-if-it-is-cross-cultural related experiences

Experiences	Supporting details
Imposter syndrome makes people feel less included in EA.	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence Surveyed group on three metrics: safety (high), openness (high), inclusivity (low). People said they didn’t feel smart enough; or they lack technical skills. There are a lot of imposter syndrome in their group too. They think giving psychological support helps a lot.
Hard to engage in EA due to monocultural subcultures.	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence “AI risk is crowding out other issues”
Community builders have limited funding if they’re not focusing on AI safety	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence
Power or status imbalances between EAs	1 person gave supporting anecdotal evidence “There are organisations and people who get money really easily while others are struggling a lot. This creates awkward imbalances when everyone’s in the same EA conference.” [I’m unsure if this is related to settings with cultural differences but I’m putting this here if that’s the case]"