EA - Learning from non-EAs who seek to do good by Siobhan M

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: Learning from non-EAs who seek to do good, published by Siobhan M on December 8, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Is EA a question, or a community based around ideology?After a year of close interaction with Effective Altruism – and recognizing that the movement is made up of many people with different views – I’m still confused as to whether EA aims to be a question about doing good effectively, or a community based around ideology.In my experience, it’s largely been the latter, but many EAs have expressed – either explicitly or implicitly – that they’d like it to be the former. I see this in the frequent citations of “EA is a question (not an ideology)” and the idea of the scout mindset; and most recently, in a lot of the top comments in the post on suggestions for community changes.As an EA-adjacent individual, I think the single most important thing the EA community could do to become more of a question, rather than an ideology, is to take concrete steps to interact more with, learn from, and collaborate with people outside of EA who seek to do good, without necessarily aiming to bring them into the community.I was a Fellow with Vox’s Future Perfect section last year, and moved to the Bay Area in part to learn more about EA. I want to thank the EA community for letting me spend time in your spaces and learn from your ideas; my view of the world has definitely broadened over the past year, and I hope to continue to be engaged with the community.But EA has never been, and I don’t see it ever becoming, my primary community. The EA community and I have differences in interests, culture, and communication styles, and that’s okay on both ends. As this comment says, the core EA community is not a good fit for everyone!A bit more about me. After college, I worked with IDinsight, a global development data analysis and advisory firm that has collaborated with GiveWell. Then I wrote for Future Perfect, focusing on global development, agriculture, and climate. I care a lot about lowercase effective altruism – trying to make the world better in an effective way – and evidence-based decision making. Some specific ways in which I differ from the average highly-engaged EA (although my, or their, priors could change) is that I’m more sympathetic to non-utilitarian ethical theories (and religion), more sympathetic to person-affecting views, and more skeptical that we can predict how our actions now will impact the long-term future.My personal experience with the EA community has largely been that it’s a community based around an ideology, rather than a question. I probably disagree with both some critics and some EAs in that I don’t think being a community based around ideology is necessarily bad. I come from a religious background, and while I have a complicated relationship with religion, I have a lot of close friends and family members who are religious, and I have a lot of respect for ideology-based communities in many ways. It’s helpful for me to know what their ideology is, as I know going into discussions where we’ll likely differ and where we’ll potentially find common ground.If EA aims to be a community based around ideology, I don’t think much has to change; and the only request I’d have is that EA leadership and general discourse more explicitly position the community this way. It’s frustrating and confusing to interact with a community that publicly claims the importance of moral uncertainty, and then have your ideas dismissed when you’re not a total utilitarian or strong longtermist.That said, a lot of EAs have expressed that they do not want to be a community based around ideology. I appreciated the post about EA disillusionment and agree with some of the recent critical posts around the community for women, but this post is not about the community itse...