EA - EA is too reliant on personal connections by sawyer

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA is too reliant on personal connections, published by sawyer on September 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic status: Personal experience and anecdotes have led me to this bundle of weakly-held views, and I’m wondering what other people think. My experience is heavily biased towards the existential risk subculture of EA, so it’s possible that my criticism applies much less (or not at all) outside of that subculture. I think the EA community is too reliant on personal connections in a number of ways. I think that many individuals and organizations would benefit (by their own lights) from taking steps to be less reliant on personal connections, and that such steps would also increase overall impact by supporting better ideas, increasing community health, and improving the community’s reputation among outsiders. Evidence that EA is very reliant on personal connections Many large donors (and donation advisors) do not take general applications. This includes Open Philanthropy (“In general, we expect to identify most giving opportunities via proactive searching and networking”), Longview, REG, CERR, CLR, and the new Longtermism Fund. The 80,000 Hours job board does not take applications, saying, “Due to resource constraints, we are currently unable to process unsolicited requests to list vacancies on this board.” Compared to other communities, I think EA organizations and grantees are more likely to get funding from one of a small group of funders. Historical EA funding data is dominated by Open Philanthropy, Givewell, and (starting in 2022) FTX. Effective Altruism Data suggests that Founders Pledge might also be in this small dominant group. I don’t know how to compare this to other communities or research fields so I can’t really back up my claim with data, but I’d be interested if anyone has thoughts on this. Compared to other communities, EA grantees and grantors share a higher number of personal and professional connections. I can’t figure out how to operationalize this and don’t have any sources, but it seems obvious to me. How many physicists live in a group house with their NSF grant evaluator? How many physicists have a part-time job making grants to their colleagues? Both of these things are common among employees of organizations in the EA community. As a counterexample to my claim about the lack of applications, it’s important to note that some large EA-affiliated funders do take applications. For example, EA Funds, SFF, ACE, and FTX (though only once, and they “do not currently have any plans to resume accepting applications and do not know if or when we will do so”). Also, Givewell takes applications “for organizations [to] apply for a recommendation without receiving an invitation from GiveWell.” Finally, while 80k’s job board doesn’t take applications, it does include lots of jobs at organizations that don’t normally consider themselves part of the EA community, which I see as evidence against EA overreliance on personal connections. Why is overreliance on personal connections a problem? The more reliant we are on personal connections to achieve our altruistic goals, the more we entangle the EA community with the EA project. Having an EA community is good[citation needed], but the community is not identical to the project. Communities enforce certain norms and styles (any community that does not do so loses out on many of the benefits of being a community), and so necessarily exclude people who don’t want to follow those norms or who dislike that style. Furthermore, identifying the community with the project risks making people feel like once they leave the community, they might as well stop pursuing the project as well. Put another way, “I don’t feel like I belong in this community, so I guess I’m not meant to do [job/project/skill set tha...