Healthy communities have all kinds. There is a magic in the plant world when a diversity of plants co-exist. Permaculture has been innovating through realizing how the community of plants help each other by each contributing a different gift to the benefit of the whole. Plants communicate with each other via mushroom like strands underground and work together. Interestingly, they speak French. Just kidding.
I’ve been in a movement that changed the world in a positive way and eventually fell apart, it was very very similar to EA in many ways — a bunch of talented young people trying to do good in the world. We had all the same criticisms people throw at EA and we did listen and learn as much as we had the capacity to. I won’t tell the whole story here, but we didn’t fall apart because of bad things, it was a necessary evolution, but one of the key problems that kept us from surviving was a lack of diversity.
For some reason when I was young, I think it’s because I was smart, I figured out that if older people had already faced all the challenges I face maybe they would be a good source of data and the gritty life wisdom of how to apply the data. So I would go out of my way to befriend them and listen to them. It was mixed results…lots of older people are just bitter, but there were enough that had made it through a life full of thriving and were happy to share it. You just have to find the right one’s.
Most of the world is made up of average people, smart people call them dumb, but they’re really just average. The thing is, if everybody in the room is smart, who is going to see the world as most of the world sees the world? That’s a data poor room.
If we are really smart we’ll make sure to surround ourselves not just with other smart people but with a variety of young and old, different cultures, different life experience levels and some average people. That’s a room rich in data.
Never underestimate the simple wisdom of simple people…and because most of the people in the world are religious, we should have them around too. You just need to find the right one’s…generous and kind and who want everyone to thrive.
Wisdom is learning how to live in reality…when we’re young we are really far from reality…you have a bedroom and a phone and an iPad in a lovely house, all provided for you magically. You have no clue how that all accrued to you. You’re not yet in touch with reality. But as you attend the school of hard knocks year after year, slowly but surely reality drifts in…essentially what happens is that as you are slowly disconnected from your parents and the “magical accrual” fades away, you learn how real life works.
Wise people have had the time it takes to boil it all down to pure essence, filter out the dross and see the pure reality…when you can see it, you can figure out how to negotiate it. It simply takes some years and a person oriented toward thriving rather than increasing bitterness.
If you have a lot of data, what you need more than anything is wisdom to interpret the data and wisdom to creatively imagine real world applications from the data.
You simply cannot be a movement committed to getting more effective at doing good in the world if you do not have some elder wisdom in the room. It’s a glaring deficit. Thank God for Singer, but he’s not around enough.
Especially in this time of post-FTX self examination and reforming, in this time of making efforts concerning the mental health of young people under pressure to save the world—this is the time to round out the community with some village like balance; The young, the old, the strong, the average all making life thrive like plants all mixed up in the jungle.
And artists! My God EA needs artists so freakin’ bad…but that’s a whole other post and I’ll get to it soon.
Here’s the reality; EA hires the cream of the crop. These are people who’ve always been gifted and who’ve flown above the heads of their peers…but because they’re young they still have not had the failures and heartaches that condition the unreality of youth and turn it toward wisdom. One of the biggest blindnesses of being in the elite is to have been handed power but being clueless as to what not having power is like.
The place where you really gain wisdom and get closer to reality is when the power has been taken away and you are subject to suffering and have to walk through it.
EA has been handed tremendous gargantuan levels of power…I’ve been around the Social Benefaction world for 35 years and I’ve never seen a movement so well funded—it is without precedent. It is mind blowing and I’m pretty sure most EA’ers have no idea how huge and amazing it is…Nobody, and I mean nobody in the history of the world has been funded as well as EA.
The result is so completely clear to me…it’s a little bit of tough love and I’ll try to make it clear in these two paragraphs; EA is still a little immature for the level of power it’s been given…it didn’t have enough time to get enough wisdom to handle this level. EA should have been given the money at 35, but instead it got it at 25…and those ten years are a whole world.
Here’s how we can know this assessment is true; If tomorrow a newly minted billionaire were to drop in on MacAskill, Beckstead and Karnovsky and tell them he’s so excited to form a new foundation within EA and really get to work…they would submit that poor F$!&k#*r to body cavity levels of due diligence (talk about “back” ground checking), they would talk to everyone they’d ever even glanced at, there would be community forums to discuss it and agencies hired to investigate…those guys would not allow themselves and EA to go through all that again! And so in contrast, we clearly see what they failed to do from lack of experience the first time…this is normal life.
So EA just hasn’t been mature enough for the power poured in its lap, like a young new monarch coming to power too early. The only solution is to wait many years for the life experience to accrue within the group —or— import it.
Get some veterans in and mix them around all the different EA org’s and get them in the room when discussing important things. Let them be there to help younger people learn how to get a life balance and not be overcome by the guilt of spending a dollar for an ice cream cone that could have gone to saving future humanity or sick children. You’re not the first one’s to struggle with the phenomenon of altruistic guilt. Other’s have gone before, they can help you.
And the reason why poverty, healthcare and animal welfare have to remain equal in the culture and investments of EA is because those altruistic communities generate a lot of life wisdom in their workers who are so close to those who have no power, EA needs them in the mix.
Essentially, what altruism is, is just balancing the power equally.
Get a balanced community with Artists, Oldies and Average people. Health and wisdom will accrue.
Would you agree with the statement:
"EA made an attempt to attract as many students and young people as possible, and therefore neglected older groups. As a result, the movement to a huge extent:
a) has a too small proportion of emotionally mature people, which makes it more turbulent, and, as a result, less effective;
b) makes it not very attractive to mid-career and mature people, who - even if impressed by young prodigies, don't regard them as their thought partners (due to lack of life experience);
c) puts too much pressure on young people, as they are sometimes put into leadership positions which they are emotionally not ready for"
.
For the record, I don't know if I agree with this statement. But I'm curious what do you guys think.
Having gotten into an EA leadership position in my late 40s last year these statements ring true. I’m very grateful to be able to work with young and smart people but I see the same risks and downsides I faced when running my first startup in my early twenties. I learned a lot when it failed and hope to be able to use this experience in building a more resilient EA organization.
As a mid-career EA, I strongly agree with this.
Liv - I agree. I've complained about EA's ageism a few times on EA Forum -- an ageism that seems fairly common, but that is also perhaps only mild to moderate in its strength.
There seems to be a lot more EA effort invested in recruiting young people into EA (e.g. through 80k Hours) than to recruiting mid-career and late-career professionals who could offer a little wisdom, perspective, life experience, mentorship, professional contacts, etc.
I've sometimes seen this pro-youth bias justified in terms of expected future decades of useful contributions, e.g. 'If we recruit a 20-year-old into EA, they can contribute for at least 50 years (assuming retirement at 70), whereas a 60-year-old might only contribute for another 10 years, so the 20-year-old has 5x the ROI on recruitment effort.'
That might be a misleading calculation, insofar as a 20-year-old might get enthused about EA for a couple of years, but then drift off into other passions; whereas a 60-year-old who pivots into EA late in their career, despite the barriers to entry and the professional disincentives to do so, might be more likely to stick around.
And the 60-year-old might have a lot more to offer right from the start, in terms of professional expertise, connections, money, leadership experience, etc.
(Epistemic status: I'm 57, so I'm probably biased about this issue. On the other hand, young people are generally pretty oblivious to their ageism, so they might not recognize it when it's being expressed.).
+1 to Geoffrey here.
I still think of EA as a youth movement, though this label is gradually fading as the "founding cohort" matures.
It a trope that the youth are sometimes too quick to dismiss the wiser counsel of their elders.
I've witnessed many cases where, to my mind, people were (admirably) looking for good explicit arguments that they can easily understand, but (regrettably) forgetting that things like inferential distance sometimes make it hard to understand the views of people who are wiser or more expert than you are.
I'm sure I've made this mistake too. That said: my intellectual style is fairly slow and conservative compared to many of my peers, and I'm often happy to trust inarticulate holistic judgements over apparently solid explicit arguments. These traits insulate somewhat me from this youthful failure mode, though they expose me to similarly grave errors in other directions :/
Peter -- nice point about inferential distance. This can lead to misunderstandings from both directions:
Youth can hear elders make an argument that sounds overly opaque, technical, and unfamiliar to them, given the big inferential distance involved (although it would sound utterly clear & persuasive to the elder's professional colleagues), and dismiss it as incoherent.
Elders can see youth ignoring their arguments (which seem utterly clear & persuasive to them), get exasperated that they've invested decades learning about something only to be dismissed by people who don't know nearly as much, and who can't be bothered to do the work to overcome the inferential distance, and then the elders go into 'trust my authority' mode, which sounds domineering & irrational to the youth.
It's worth being careful about both of these failure modes (which I've been guilty of, plenty of times, from both sides, at different ages).
To Peter and Geoffrey, I agree but I don't think the dynamics of old and young working together are really an issue until you have young and old working together!
I don't think there's been a problematic effort to avoid hiring the more experienced, I just think a youthful movement will naturally do as EA has done...but when it reaches a crossroads as it has now, then it's time for some new thinking. As a practical consideration, some organizations might not be able to afford hiring more senior people, but EA surely can.
Hi Liv. I think there's a lot of truth in these statements, but I think there's another side balancing it that is kind of hard to avoid -- movements just start and grow, the grow from where they started, they attract people that were where they started -- same dynamic happened in my past movement which I mention...EA started with young academics on campuses, that's who populated it, it could have been much smaller and not controversial, but fate happened and big money came in and that's what put it on it's course toward all that's happening now...You kind of just can't help where you came from. So the question isn't how can I change where I came from, but now that I'm here in my current reality, what can I do going forward to improve things? I have no real criticisms of how EA has done things, I love it, think it's amazing, so grateful for it...I applaud the amazing young people who created it...but now with success it's found itself in a new kind of crazy place...so maybe it's time for some new energies within the group, I think diversity of all kinds and governance which empowers the new diversity is the path.
The problem with some criticisms is they imagine you could go back and change where you came from...the statements you gathered here that you're asking for comment on kind of have that feeling for me...but I think some of it is very true now in the current reality...and it would be good to change some things, but it wasn't planned or some huge mistake, it's just how things developed from where it started.