EA - EA is going through a bunch of conflict. Here’s some social technologies that may help. by Severin T. Seehrich

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 going through a bunch of conflict. Here’s some social technologies that may help., published by Severin T. Seehrich on January 29, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.There’s two ways I can see EA develop after the latest community drama: The community can have all the necessary debates in good faith, grow past them, and become a more mature movement. Or, neither side feels heard, nothing changes, and way too many competent people lose trust in EA and focus their energies elsewhere. After all, I’ve heard people from either side declare EA’s moral bankruptcy in consequence of the Bostrom email debate.In order to shift the balance towards a little bit more of movement maturation and a little bit less of quitting, we need to talk. The conversations to be had here are between you and me, between him and them, and not between a small band of anonymous rebels on the one side and the EA establishment at CEA on the other. The more isolated and unheard people feel in their opinions, the more angry and polarized things get. Starting to pop the bubbles starts right in our own local EA groups.For that, I’d like to share some tools that I found useful for resolving conflict in groups. It might be worthwhile to explore them on your own, and it might be even more worthwhile to spread them in your local EA group.But how does this fit into our other community building work?To answer this question, I’d like to summarize my favorite EAF post on community building of all times: Jan Kulveit’s “Different forms of capital”.He claims that there are different forms of capital we can optimize for in community building, and that there are two EA tends to over-optimize for:Financial capital: The total amount of donations committed and sent to our charities of choice.Human capital: The number of active community members and their level of commitment.Further, he argues, there are two other forms of capital EA tends to neglect, probably because they are harder to measure:Network capital: The number and closeness of ties between community members.Structural capital: The institutions and processes we have in place for doing stuff in a sensibly structured manner.And I’d like to add a fifth dimension:Memetic capital: The sum total of the useful ideas, psycho- and social technologies we have widely available in the community. An instance of memetic capital without which EA would be unthinkable is the capability to use language. Some other examples for memetic capital include knowledge about priorization, forecasting, or productivity tools, about where and how to apply for grants, how we think about mental health and staying productive in the long-term - and our strategies for addressing and resolving conflict with friends, colleagues, and fellow EAs.I think it would be wise for EA community building to start explicitly taking all five of these factors into account. In line with that, this post aims at increasing the community’s memetic capital. Trying these tools one-off to resolve a particular issue is good, but what I’m hoping for is that over time, they just become part of the way we do things. That way, they’d have the strongest and long-lasting positive impact on our network capital through frequent and casual prevention and repair of conflict.Social technologies for resolving and preventing conflictRepairRule 0 (coined by Seek Healing)WHY: The longer we sit on irritations, the bigger they grow, until at some point we write very, very long and elaborate EA Forum posts. Addressing points of conflict sooner rather than later helps create less friction and improve feedback loops in groups of people, no matter how uncomfortable it initially is.HOW: Rule 0 is a rule of thumb that goes like this: “If you feel queasy about addressing something with somebody, that’s a sign that y...