Here I share resources for a workshop titled “Red-Teaming Effective Altruism.” I offered this workshop at an EA community weekend, and got mostly positive feedback.[1] I hope that by sharing this material, I encourage more EA groups to set some time aside for critical reflection - whether in the context of regular meetups or larger retreats.
Overview
Target group: Mainly those who’re (at least somewhat) familiar with EA but haven’t yet reflected on EA in depth
Duration: 120 min (can be shortened to 90 min or extended to 180 min)
Goals: Breaking out of echo chambers; sparking reflections, discussions, and ideas for solutions
Activities: Brainstorming potential problems and negative impacts of EA; organizing findings on a collaborative whiteboard; discussing results and possible solutions
Requirements: A projector; ideally a few laptops (or just pen and paper); a free trial plan at miro.com
Preparation: None required but it’s recommended to spend 5-10 min to recall EA’s core principles; optionally, read some of the many thoughtful critiques of EA on this forum
Concept
The basic idea is to conceptualize EA as a tower with four floors, each being the foundation for the floors above it. The floors represent (from bottom to top): (A) EA’s core principles, (B) Other principles and tools, (C) Organization, culture, and priorities, and (D) Specific persons, institutions, and affairs within EA. Each of these aspects (A-D) has several sub-aspects, which are enumerated, too, for easy reference.
The workshop participants are asked to form red teams, each trying to “attack” a different floor of the tower (i.e., aspect of EA). The teams organize their findings on a shared whiteboard (template), which will then serve as a basis for discussions in the big group. In the end, results could look something like this (source):
You’re welcome to use the above template. To use it, follow these steps:
- Download the file “template.rtb” from this folder. The file is a backup of the Miro whiteboard you’ll use.
- Sign up for a free trial at Miro - unless you already have a premium plan. This step is necessary so that Miro allows you to import the file you downloaded in the previous step (“template.rtb”).
- Use Miro’s “import backup” function to load “template.rtb”.
If the above steps don’t work for you, you can instead download the template as a .pdf file for offline work (see “template.pdf” in the same folder).
Outline
You could use the following outline for a 120 min workshop:
| Timestamp | Contents | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 h | Buffer | |
| 0:05 h | Introduction round | Example prompt: “Please say your name and the number of years you’ve been engaging with EA ideas - just to get a feeling of each other’s pre-knowledge.” |
| 0:10 h | Input: What's red teaming? What's the goal of the workshop? | For a deep dive into red teaming as a method, see the UK government’s Red Teaming Handbook. |
| 0:13 h | Input: EA as a tower | A walkthrough on the whiteboard. |
| 0:20 h | Input: Workshop outline | The outline is roughly: brainstorming → organizing → presenting → integrating → discussing |
| 0:23 h | Group work I: Brainstorming | Prompt: "Brainstorm potential problems (yellow boxes) and potential negative consequences (orange boxes; be concrete). It may help to imagine a world in which EA doesn’t exist, and compare it to the (present and future) world we live in. Don’t overthink it (e.g., don’t assess whether positive impacts might outweigh the negative, as things would get too complicated in the context of this workshop)." |
| 0:45 h | Group work II: Organizing findings | You could suggest to:
|
| 1:00 h | Plenum: Group presentations | You might want to encourage presenters to try to be as convincing as possible, as if their respective teams were independent consultancies reporting results to their client Effective Altruism. |
| 1:15 h | Plenary discussion I: Integrating and analyzing results | Example prompts:
|
| 1:25 h | Plenary discussion II: Touching on solutions | Example prompts:
|
| 1:45 h | Input: Wrap-up and outlook | Wrapping up will probably involve noting that an in-depth analysis of problems would require more time, but that the workshop hopefully provoked thought. Before closing the workshop, you might want to remind everyone of what EA has already achieved to encourage an optimistic, solution-oriented mindset. |
| 1:50 h | Reflections | There’s a separate space for reflections on the Miro template. |
| 1:55 h | Feedback | There’s a separate space for feedback on the Miro template. |
| 2:00 h | End |
If you have less time (~90 min), I recommend that you reduce the workshop’s scope by skipping the “touching on solutions” part, and additionally shorten the group work. If you have more time (~180 min), you could prolong the group work and discussion parts.
Limitations
Breadth over depth: The workshop doesn’t allow for deep investigations of selected issues; rather, it’s designed to provoke thought by touching a broad range of issues.
Potentially not mature yet: Because I’ve hosted the workshop only once,[2] it has undergone only one iteration of feedback and refinement so far.[3]
Only one view of EA: The workshop requires participants to view EA in a certain way: as a community built around a philosophy. The framing used in this workshop borrows heavily from CEA’s view of EA. However, alternative views of EA might be just as accurate. Viewing EA through different lenses (e.g., sociological, historical, or political lenses) could lead to a wider range of useful red-teaming results.
Acknowledgements
I thank reviewers (especially @Patrick Gruban 🔸) for valuable feedback on a previous draft.
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About 20 people attended the workshop.
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The workshop was also scheduled at another community weekend in a different country, but it had to be canceled because people preferred to attend either of two parallel sessions.
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If you host the workshop, please leave a comment or message, so that we can revise the workshop based on your experience.