This post resonated a lot with me. I was actually thinking of the term 'disillusionment' to describe my own life a few days before reading this.

One cautionary tale I'd offer to readers is don't automatically assume your disillusionment is because of EA and consider the possibility that your disillusionment is a personal problem. Helen suggested leaning into feelings of doubt or assuming the movement is making mistakes. That is good if EA is the main cause, but potentially harmful if the person gets disillusioned in general. 

I'm a case study for this. For the past decade, I've been attracted to demanding circles. First it was social justice groups and their infinitely long list of injustices. Then it was EA and its ongoing moral catastrophes. More recently, it's been academic econ debates and their ever growing standards for what counts as truth.

In each instance, I found ways to become disillusioned and to blame my disillusionment on an external cause. Sometimes it was virtue signaling. Sometimes it was elitism. Sometimes it was the people. Sometimes it was whether truth was knowable. Sometimes it was another thing entirely. All my reasons felt incredibly compelling at the time, and perhaps they all had significant degrees of truth.

But at the end of day,  the common denominator in my disillusionment was me. I felt all the problems in these circles very intensely, but didn't have much appreciation for the benefits. The problems loomed 10x larger in my head than the benefits did. Instead of appreciating all the important things I got to think about, talk about, or work on, I thought about the demands and all the stress it brought. In my case, leaning into the disillusionment would only perpetuate the negative pattern of thinking I have in my head.

Granted, my case is an extreme one. I have a decade of experiences to look back on and numerous groups I felt affinities with. And I've had intense experiences with imposter syndrome and performance anxiety. I can confidently attribute most of these feelings to myself,  reverse some of the advice Helen offered,^[1] and lean away  from disillusionment. 

But I suspect I'm not the only one with this problem. EA seems to selects for easily disillusioned personality traits (as evidenced by our love of criticism). And I also suspect that these feelings are common for young idealistic people to go through while navigating what it means to improve the world. Not everyone should be leaning into that.

1. ^{^}

   I'm practicing "maintain and/or build ties outside EA". It requires intentional effort on my part since making + maintaining adult friends is always hard. However, it has helped me realize my disillusionment still exists outside EA. I'm partly reversing "anticipate and lean into feelings of doubt..." since I like the anticipating part, but not the leaning part. I'm reversing "assume EA is making mistakes and help find them" since I need to see more of the positive and less of the negative. I don't have any thoughts on "defer cautiously, not wholesale" since this comes naturally to me.

Thank you for writing this - a lot of what you say here resonates strongly with me, and captures well my experience of going from very involved in EA back in 2012-14 or so, to much more actively distancing myself from the community for the last few years. I've tried to write about my perspective on this multiple times (I have so many half written Google docs) but never felt quite able to get to the point where I had the energy/clarity to post something and actually engage with EA responses to it. I appreciate this post and expect to point people to it sometimes when trying to explain why I'm not that involved in or positive about EA anymore.

On individual advice: I'd add  something about remembering that you are always in charge and should set your own boundaries. You choose what you want to do with your life, how much of EA you accept, and how much you want to use to influence your choices. If you're a professional acrobat and want to give 10% of your income to effective charities, that's a great way to be an EA. If someone points out that you also have a degree in computer science and could go work on AI safety, it's fine to reply "I know but I don't want to do that". You don't need to defend or justify your choices on EA grounds.

(That doesn't mean you might not want to defend some choice you've made. The research side of EA is all about making and breaking down claims about what actions do the most good. But people's personal choices about how to act don't themselves constitute claims about the best way to act.)

EA is a highly intellectual community, so I worry that people  feel the need to justify or defend anything they do or any choice they make though an EA lens, and this might make EA infiltrate their life more than they are actually comfortable with and fail to set the right boundaries. People should do EA things because and to the extent that they want to, and the EA community should be there as a resource to help them do that. But EA should justify itself to you, not the other way round.

For me, a big change happened when I had been around in EA long enough, done enough things, and spoken to enough people to be able to say, "if I say something disagreeable to somebody and it turns out they are one of those people who will judge me personally for disagreeing with the dominant paradigm on x thing, it's their loss, not mine." I also feel I can say something disagreeable to people and they will tend to hear me out rather than ignore me as a newbie who doesn't know anything (in fairness, when I was just starting, I actually didn't know much at all!).

For the newest people (I've only been in EA for 2 years, so I am still quite new) with few legible achievements and almost no connections, this is more difficult. If you constantly feel you have to think about how to get into x office or get in the good graces of y person or receive z grant, you feel far more pressure to fight against your own doubt for fear that people will judge you for your disagreements. This is unhealthy. 

Obviously there is a continuum: it's not that you can either disagree all the time or never disagree, but there are varying amounts of disagreement that people feel comfortable having.

Sometimes people talk about "f**k you money" to mean money that you can use to ride out unemployment if you decide you don't like your job anymore and want to quit. In EA circles there is an analogous concept, something like "I respectfully disagree with your worldview social capital" or "I respectfully disagree with your worldview concrete achievements that you cannot ignore". The more of that you have, especially the latter, the better. Luckily, the latter is also relatively correlated with how much you've been able to achieve, which is (hopefully) correlated with impact.

Know that other people have gone through the disillusionment pipeline, including (especially!) very smart, dedicated, caring, independent-minded people who felt strong affinity for EA. Including people who you may have seen give talks at EA Global or who have held prestigious jobs at EA orgs.

Also, I think even people like this who haven't gone through the disillusionment pipeline are often a lot more uncertain about many (though not all) things than most newcomers would guess. 

I'd say I'm a newcomer to EA. I'd also say I'm in Phase 1. In other words, I'd say I’m an infatuated newcomer reading a post meant to warn newcomers against infatuation.

I agree with Helen's overall argument, and I think it applies to most ideologies, movements, passions, and ideas. Overcommitment leads to burnout and backlash and eventual disillusionment — people shouldn’t become overly infatuated with anything.

Figuring out gaps, mistakes, subtle wrongnesses, etc. is so helpful! That’s what we most desperately need as a community! And it will often begin with a feeling of something being subtly off…

I have a feeling of something being subtly off, and the thing that feels wrong is the tone of this post.

Before I clarify my critique, I want to strongly affirm my agreement with Helen’s thesis and thank her (as well as those she thanks) for writing and editing this post.

This post feels condescending. I feel like a child being instructed on how to digest an ideology that I’m told is far too complicated for little me to explore on my own. I know that wasn’t at all Helen’s purpose; I know she had entirely good intentions. However, the post feels like it was written and edited exclusively by people who are intimately related to the EA movement, and never given to an inexperienced layman to digest.

I’m merely following Helen’s own instructions — I felt something subtly off, and I’m pointing it out. I hope those reading my comment realize that my goal is not to merely critique Helen, but also to inform future writers of future posts to keep in mind the importance of including the voices of the newcomers in posts directed at those newcomers.

-Munn

I'm somewhat more pessimistic that disillusioned people have useful critiques, at least on average. EA asks people to swallow a hard pill "set X is probably the most important stuff by a lot", where X doesn't include that many things. I think this is correct (i.e. the set will be somewhat small), but it means that a lot of people's talents & interests probably aren't as [relatively] valuable as they previously assumed.

That sucks, and creates some obvious & strong motivated reasons to lean into not-great criticisms of set X. I don't even think this is conscious, just vague 'feels like this is wrong' when people say [thing I'm not the best at/dislike] is the most important. This is not to say set X doesn't have major problems

They might more often have useful community critiques imo, e.g. more likely to notice social blind spots that community leaders are oblivious to.

Also, I am concerned about motivated reasoning within the community, but don't really know how to correct for this. I expect the most-upvoted critiques will be the easy-to-understand plausible-sounding ones that assuage the problem above or social feelings, but not the correct ones about our core priorities. See some points here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pxALB46SEkwNbfiNS/the-motivated-reasoning-critique-of-effective-altruism

I'd add a much more boring cause of disillusionment: social stuff

It's not all that uncommon for someone to get involved with EA, make a bunch of friends, and then the friends gradually get filtered through who gets accepted to prestigious jobs or does 'more impactful' things in community estimation (often genuinely more impactful!)

Then sometimes they just start hanging out with cooler people they meet at their jobs, or just get genuinely busy with work, while their old EA friends are left on the periphery (+ gender imbalance piles on relationship stuff). This happens in normal society too, but there seem to be more norms/taboos there that blunt the impact.

I really appreciated you writing this up. A couple of thoughts.

First, a useful frame: when people are unhappy about a group, any group, they have two choices. They can either 'exit' or 'voice'. This was originally discussed in relation to consumers buying goods, but it's general and as simple as it sounds: you leave or you complain. Which of those people do is more complicated: it depends, afaict, on how loyal they are to the group and also whether they think voicing their concerns will work. 

It seems like what you're saying is that people come into EA, become loyal to the idea, get disillusioned because the reality doesn't live up to the hype, but then exit rather than voice. The reason they exit is some combination not wanting to harm the project or be seen as a bad actor, and because they don't think their criticisms will be listened to. 

Second, lots of this really resonates with me. EA sort of sells itself as being full of incredibly smart, open-minded, kind, dedicated people. And, for the most part, they are - at least by the starts of the rest of the world. But they are people still: prone to ego, irrationality, distraction, championing their pet projects, sticking to their guns, and the rest. And these people work together in groups we call 'organisations'.  And even with the best people, getting them to work together and work differently is a struggle...  It is a recipe for disillusionment.

(I recognise I'm not offering any solutions here, sorry...)

The biggest reason I am / have been disillusioned is that ethics are subjective (in my view, though I feel very confident). I don’t understand how a movement like EA can even exist within this paradigm unless 

1.  The movement only serves as a knowledge keeper of how to apply epistemics to the real world, with a specific focus on making things “better”, better being left undefined, but does not engage in object level/non research work outside of education. Which is almost just LW. 
2.  The movement splits into a series of submovements which each have an agreed upon ethical framework. Thus every cause area/treatment can be compared under a standardized cost benefit analysis, and legitimate epistemic progress can be made. Trades can be made between the movements to accomplish shared ethical goals. Wars can be waged when consensus is impossible (sad). 

Clearly, neither of the above suggestions are what we are currently doing. It feels low integrity to me. I’m not sure how we have coalesced around a few cause areas, admitted each is justified basically because of total utilitarianism, and then still act like we are ethically agnostic. That seems like a very clear example of mental gymnastics.

Once you get in this mindset, I feel like it immediately becomes clear that EA in fact doesn’t have particularly good epistemics. We are constantly doing CBAs (or even worse, just vaguely implying things are good without clear evidence and analysis) with ill defined goals.  Out of this many problems emerge. We have no institutional system for deciding where our knowledge is at and checking decision making powers (decentralization is good and bad though). Billionaires have an outsized ability to imprint their notion of ethics on our movement. We hero worship. We pick our careers as much on what looks like it will be funded well by EA and by what other top EAs are doing as what seems in theory to be the best thing to us. Did you get into AI safety because it was justified  under your world view or did you adopt a worldview because people who seemed smart convinced you of AI safety before you even had a clearly defined worldview? 

One reason I’ve never really made comments like this on the forum is that it feels sort of silly. I would get it if people feel like there isn’t a place for anti-realists here, since once you go down the rabbit hole literally everything is arbitrary. Still I find myself more aligned with EAs by far than anyone else in my thinking patterns, so I never leave.

Talking about "there should be spaces to articulate hunches", I am now taking the plunge and speed-writing a few things that have felt slightly off in EA over the last few years. They are definitely not up to the standard of thought-through critique (I've tried to indicate confidence levels to at least show how they might compare against each other), but I'd like to know if any of them resonate with other people here who might've thought about them more.  The list isn't complete, either.

Things that feel off in EA:

• Lots of white male people working on AI alignment (pretty sure that this is not great)
• Issues in the community
  • feeling unwelcome as a woman, and from a non-maths background... why is this still a thing?? >>> feeling quite disillusioned after spending a lot of my early time (very sure)
  • the negative mental health effect of being surrounded by an optimising mindset all the time (and, as a result, internalising "you need to be better", as opposed to "you are enough (as a person)", which maybe results in people being valued/gaining status by how impactful they are, and thereby conflating worth-as-a-person with worth-of-your-actions?) (Very sure, at least in my own experience)
• How unaware are we of the place this movement takes in the grander scheme of things? I sometimes worry about the resemblance to eschatological movements, but also biases that we pretty surely have. (Unsure about the eschatology stuff, but definitely worried about blindspots)
• How would a community with a different background approach the question of how to do the most good?
• What could we learn from an STS/sociology/anthropology analysis of the movement? (these fields tend to study e.g. where a (scientific) movement comes from, and what their values and maybe assumptions are... I feel like such an outside perspective might indicate some blind spots?
• Relying so heavily on economic tools, and then thinking the solutions are unbiased? (unsure about the extent to which this is a problem, and to what extent this is based in optimising for impact as such and you can't )
• Lack of respect for established fields, like the whole risk community, and lack of communication between fields. Not using already established methods from those fields, or making use of their expertise. Not really trying to frame things in a way that would be appealing to them (I'm basing this on conversations with staff members at the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction in London, and STS (science and technology studies) scholars in Edinburgh and elsewhere). (Fairly sure)
• In general, perhaps, neglecting some less "wacky" arguments, like the common-sense argument for X-risk reduction, and also thinking about non-utilitarian values (I feel like we're on an okay path here)
• I have a weird feeling about similarities in thinking to liberal and libertarian ideology. (Just a hunch)
  • Maybe something about the individual as unit of analysis, and calculating in terms of aggregate welfare (of individuals) ? (Medium sure?)
  • And, in turn, neglecting other values like justice, equality etc... I am kind of confused that there isn't more discussion around these values at least.
  • Maybe neglecting goodness of process over concerns over goodness of outcome? I am unsure about this myself, but the kinds of things I'm thinking about are: How important is it that decisions involving all of humanity are made in a democratic/participatory way. I think this is only partially thinking that participation is good in itself, and mostly having a hunch that it would increase quality of outcome... so it's more like "we should care about quality of process because we actually care about quality of outcome, but if we focus too much on outcome, the outcome will actually be worse. (Unsure)
    • Random side note: I've been curious about the potential of citizens' assemblies - maybe as an intervention for improving institutional decision-making? (speculative)

Relatedly, be wary of cutting ties to non-EA friends, social spaces, hobbies, or other sources of meaning. If you don’t have many such ties (e.g. because you’ve just moved to a new place), actively foster new ones. This isn’t just so that you have something to catch you if you end up wanting more distance from EA—it’s also an important psychological buffer to have in place to ensure that you feel able to think clearly about EA ideas, social pressures, and so on in the first place. If your life is set up such that your brain subconsciously thinks that criticizing EA could alienate you from your entire support structure, you’re likely to have a much harder time thinking independently.

When I see new peoples setting themselves up so they only spend time with other EAs, I feel worried.

It could be good to make 'have a social life outside' a norm.

I've tried to do this via keeping in touch with my friends from university, which I've found really valuable. I know others who've done it via a social scene around a hobby, or by having flatmates who aren't EAs.

Thanks for writing this post. I think it improved my understanding of this phenomenon and I've recommended reading it to others.

Hopefully this doesn't feel nitpicky but if you'd be up for sharing, I'd be pretty interested in roughly how many people you're thinking of:

"I know at least a handful of people who have experienced this (and I’m sure there are many more I don’t know)—people who I think are incredibly smart, thoughtful, caring, and hard-working, as well as being independent thinkers. In other words, exactly the kind of people EA needs. Typically, they throw themselves into EA, invest years of their life and tons of their energy into the movement, but gradually become disillusioned and then fade away without having the energy or motivation to articulate why."

I'm just wondering whether I should update toward this being much more prevalent than I already thought it was.

Thanks for writing this, this resonated a lot with me. As Brad writes here, I think this provides a good response to why EAs shouldn't (immediately at least) consider leaving the EA movement if something doesn't feel right. As you point to, there's probably lots of things that EA is getting wrong, and people leaving the EA community is likely not going to fix those things. Whilst challenging, I think people with disillusionment persevering (probably with some additional distance) and pushing back on certain things will be important for EA to self-correct.

I found myself confused about the quotes, and would have liked to hear a bit more where they came from. Are these verbatim quotes from disillusioned EAs you talked to? Or are they rough reproductions? Or completely made up?

I think a big thing I feel after reading this is a lot more disillusioned about community-building. 

It is really unhealthy that people feel like they can’t dissent from more established (more-fleshed out?) thoughts/arguments/conclusions. 

Where is this pressure to agree with existing ideas and this pressure against dissent coming from? (some early thoughts to flesh out more 🤔)

This post isn’t the only thing that makes me feel that there is way too much pressure to agree and way too little room to develop butterfly ideas (that are never well-argued the first time they are aired, but some of which could iterate into more fleshed-out ideas down the road if given a bit more room to fly). 

My guess is there is a lot more uncertainty among people who fleshed out a lot of the ideas that now feel unquestionable, but uncertainty is hard to communicate. It is also much easier to build on someone else’s groundwork than to start an argument from scratch, making it easier to develop existing ideas and harder to get new ones, even potentially good ones, off the ground. 

I also think it’s incredibly important to make sure people who are doing community building feel fully comfortable saying exactly what they think, even if it isn’t their impression of the “consensus” view. No talking point should ever be repeated by someone who doesn’t buy into it because that person can’t defend it if questioned because it’s not their view. My guess is the original talking points got written up as inspiration or prompts, but weren’t ever intended to be repeated without question and without buy-in. It’s such a big ask of people though to figure out that they don’t really believe the things they are saying. It is especially hard in a community that values legible thinking and intelligence so much and can be quite punishing to half-formed thoughts. There is often a long period between not fully buying-in and having a really well-fleshed out reason for disagreeing. This period where you have to admit you feel you don’t really agree but you don’t know why yet is hard to be honest about, especially in this community. I don’t think addressing this pressure has easy answers but I think addressing it seems pretty incredibly important anyway for creating healthy spaces with healthy epistemics. 

More thoughts and suggestions on how we maybe can improve

I agree with so much of this post's suggestions. I also have so many random half-baked ideas in so many half-finished google docs. 

Maybe get better at giving people who are not extremely dedicated or all-in good vibes/a good impression because we see them as future potential allies (even if we don't have the capacity to fully on-board them into the community)

It just does seem so important to make sure we have a culture where people really feel they don’t have to take all or leave all of effective altruism to have a voice in this community or to have a place in our spaces. The all-in and then all-out dynamic has a tonne of negative side-effects and I’ve definitely seen it a lot in the people I’ve known. 

I can see why the strategy of only accepting and focusing on full-in extremely dedicated people makes sense given how capacity constrained community building is and given this community probably can only accommodate so many new people at a time (detailed and nuanced communication is so time-consuming and within community trust seems important but is hard to build with too much growth too fast).

 It is challenging to create room for dissent and still have a high trust community with enough common ground for it to be possible for us to cohesively be all in the same community. 

I'm not sure exactly what a feasible alternative strategy looks like, but it seems plausible to me that we can get better at developing allies to collaborate with who come by a local group and have a good time and some food for thought without this feeling like an all-in or all-out type engagement.

It seems good to me to have more allies who give us that sometimes nuanced but sometimes (naturally) missing-the-mark critique, who feel comfortable thinking divergently and developing ideas independently. Many of those divergent ideas will be bad (of course, that's how new ideas work) but some might be good, and when they're developed, those people who got good vibes from their local group are keen to share them with us because we've left a good enough impression that they feel we'll really want to listen to them. I think there are ways of having a broader group of people who are sympathetic but who think differently who we don't try and do the "super detailed and nuanced take on every view ever had about how to help others as much as possible" thing. Not sure exactly how to do this well though, messaging gets mixed-up easily and I think there are definitely ways to implement this idea that could make things worse.

More separate communities for the thinking (the place where EA is supposed to be a question) and the doing (the place for action on specific causes/current conclusions)

Maybe it is also important to separate the communities that are supposed to be about thinking and the ones that are supposed to be about acting on current best guesses. 

Effective altruism groups sound like they sometimes are seen as a recruiting ground for specific cause areas. I think this might be creating a lot of pressure to come to specific conclusions. Building infrastructure within the effective altruism brand for specific causes maybe also makes it harder for anyone to change their minds. This makes effective altruism feel like much less of a question and much more like a set of conclusions. 

 Ideally, groups that are supposed to be about the question “how do we help others as much as possible?” should be places where everyone is encouraged to engage with the ideas but also to dissent from them and to digress for hours when someone has an intelligent objection. If effective altruism is not a question, then we cannot say it is. If the conclusions newcomers are supposed to adopt are pre-written, then effective altruism is not a question.  

Separating encouragement of the effective altruism project from the effective altruism community

Maybe also we need to be better at not making it feel like the effective altruism project and the effective altruism community come together. Groups can be places where we encourage thinking about how big a part of our lives we want the effective altruism project to be and what our best guesses are on how to do that. The community is just one tool to help with the effective altruism project, to the extent that the EA project feels like something that group members want to have as a part of their lives. If collaborating with the community is productive, then good, if a person feels like they can do the EA project or achieve any of their other goals better by not being in the community, that should be strongly encouraged too! 

More articulation of the specific problems like this one

I’m so very glad you articulated your thoughts because I think it’s posts like this that help us better capture exactly what we don’t want to be and more of what we do want to be. There have been a few and I think each one is getting us closer (and we'll iterate on each other's ideas until we narrow down what we do and don't want the effective altruism community to be). 



(just for context given I wrote way too many thoughts: I used to do quite a bit of community building and clearly have way too many opinions on stuff given my experience is so out-of-date, I am still pretty engaged with my local community, I care a lot about the EA project, a lot of my friends consider themselves engaged with the effective altruism community but many aren't but everyone I'm close to knows lots about the EA community because they're friends with me and I talk way too much about my random interests, I have a job outside the EA community ecosystem, I haven't yet been disillusioned but I cheated by having over-confident friends who loudly dissented so I think this helped a tonne in me avoiding a lot of the feelings described here) 

 

There are huge differences in how well-grounded different EA claims are; we should be much more mindful of these differences. “Donations to relieve poverty go much further in the developing world than in the developed world” or “If you care about animal welfare, it probably makes more sense to focus on farmed animals than pets because there are so many more of them” are examples of extremely well-grounded claims. “There’s a >5% chance humanity goes extinct this century” or “AI and bio are the biggest existential risks” are claims with very different epistemic status, and should not be treated as similarly solid.

One thing I struggle with is switching back and forth between the two types of claims.

If we have a bunch of ideas that we think are really important and not widely appreciated ('type 1' claims), it's hard to trumpet those without giving off the vibe that you have everything figured out – I mean you're literally saying that other people could have 100x the impact if only they realised.

But then when you make type 2 claims, I'm not sure that emphasising they're really unsettled really 'undoes' the vibe created by the type 1 claims.

This is compounded by type 1 claims stated clearly being much easier to spread and remember, while hedging tends to be forgotten.

I'm sure there are ways to handle this way better, but I find it hard.

Thanks for this post - dealing with this phenomenon seems pretty important for the future of epistemics vs dogma in EA. I want to do some serious thinking about ways to reduce infatuation, accelerate doubt, and/or get feedback from distancing. Hopefully that'll become a post sometime in the near-ish future.

Thank you for this, particularly in a way that feels (from someone who isn't quite disillusioned) considerate to people who are experiencing EA disillusionment. I definitely resonate with the suggestions - these are all things I think I should be doing off, particularly cultivating non-EA relationships since I moved to the Bay Area specifically to be in an EA hub.

Also really appreciate your reflection on 'EA is a question' as more of an aspiration than a lived reality. Myself, along with other community-builders I know, would point to that as a 'definition' of EA but would (rightly) come across people who felt like that simply wasn't very representative of the community's culture.

Thanks for writing this post. I think this would be very good to have as a required reading for fellowship programs.

Thank you for writing this!

I recently encountered the EA community (Sep 16, 2022), and it is extremely unlikely I will ever become a member of the EA community. This being said, I think there is a lot of room for me to collaborate with EA and bring a healthy outsider perspective and contribute a lot of value.

I am going to drop a personal and individual account of my own experience here with the hope that it can be used as a piece of empirical  piece of evidence for your proposed solution. Specifically,  by fostering people like me who think "EAs have a lot of great ideas, but the community is also misguided in a bunch of ways"  and by preventing deep initial infatuation.  If there is more evidence similar to my own experiences, I think this post should be part of the introductory content for people looking to interact with EA.

Reading this post allowed me to more easily break the three point cycle of infatuation, doubt, and distancing.  When I first discovered EA through Giving What We Can and saw how few people out of those with the means to do so had signed the pledge, I was worried EA's ideas might be subject to pressures which would eventually cause it to die out because the community was so self sacrificing. This probably could have led me down a path of infatuation. Fortunately, I quickly discovered the forum with its enormous number of community critiques,  which led me to become suspicious enough of effective altruism to make sure it remains a small portion of my interpersonal network.

Your post probably had a very large positive impact on me, if only preventing massive burn out (I'm pretty susceptible to working too hard if everyone around me thinks something is important and I do as well). It may go beyond this as I figure out how to user my outsider knowledge to offer some potential improvements for EA in EA terminology which EA will hopefully use as a way to improve.

Perhaps it's helpful to recall that every ideology ever created has inevitably sub-divided in to competing (sometimes warring) internal factions.    The universal nature of this phenomena suggests that the source of this division and conflict process is that which all philosophies and philosophers have in common, what we're all made of psychologically, thought.

Point being, there is no way to edit EA or any other collection of ideas so as to remove division and conflict, because division and conflict are built in to the human condition at such a fundamental level as to be incurable.   

Thus, new arrivals to EA (such as myself) are perhaps best advised that EA, like all human endeavors, is a  big mess that will never be fully straightened out.    If such realism is presented right from the start, perhaps it can to some degree serve as an antidote to cynicism. 

Thank you so much for the post! It also resonated very strongly with me, so I felt I might share my own disillusionment journey here, in form of a post I wrote but never published. I wrote it in early 2020 - I followed pretty much the path the OP describes, but decided "this community isn't good for me", as opposed to "I disagree with the guiding principles", so I took a break from the community for around 2-3 years, dialed-down my expectations for impact, and am now back as something like "EA-adjacent". 

I feel like psychology offers some pretty standard solutions to disillusionment, and have light-heartedly thought about whether providing an EA-targeted charity/service to address this could be worthwhile.

However, there is an ethical dilemma here or two which I mulled over for years in other contexts, with no conclusion:

1. The perfect prevention and cure for disillusionment would likely mean fewer smart people stay in EA. I.e., we successfully dissuade people who would have joined EA and become disillusioned from ever committing to EA in the first place. Of those who we retain, the plus is that they are doing so for the right reasons for them and thus in a sustainable way. We probably improve open-mindedness and decrease groupthink in the community too. Is this net positive? Is it net positive on average if disillusioned EAs had never been a part of it instead?

2. A side-effect of an effective cure for disillusionment is increased life satisfaction. Could too much life satisfaction cause decreased productivity or drive within EA? (I don't have any evidence for this, it's just a thought.)

Some other thoughts about possible factors:

• A small number of people and organisations who set the tone for the movement seems in tension with it being 'a movement'. While movements might rally around popular figures, eg MLK, this feels like a different phenomenon where the independent funding many orgs receive make the prominence of those people less organic
• Lack of transparency in some of the major orgs
• No 'competition' among orgs means if you have a bad experience with one of them, it feels like there's nothing you can do about it, esp since they're so intertwined - which exacerbates the first two concerns
• Willingness to dismiss large amounts of work by very intelligent people justified by a sense that they're not asking the right questions
• Strong emphasis on attracting young people to the movement means that as you get older, you tend to feel less kinship with it

Other than the third, which I think is a real problem, one could argue all these are necessary - but I still find myself emotionally frustrated by them to varying degrees. And I imagine if I am, others are too.

I think the problem you raise is important and real, but I'm not sure that a post or policy or even a project would solve it, not even with improved feedback from people who are starting to drift away (which would be valuable, and which I'd love to discuss elsewhere).  I think there may be a better approach, which is more likely to happen and more likely to succeed, since it will happen (and is already happening) anyway, as with most intellectual 'movements', especially those close to an emerging Zeitgeist or perennial topic.

Here's the rub:

Should EA be like a supertanker, centrally controlled, and therefore perhaps more vulnerable* to whole-movement shipwreck or disgrace that goes unanswered? 

Or should it be more like a fleet/regatta, able to weave, sub-divide and reunite, or to adapt depending on storms and circumstances/needs that become evident and ways to move which become viable?

And if "more like a fleet" is the answer, wouldn't that also solve this disillusionment problem, because people could join the particular ship or sailing style which they like? 

To a degree this is inevitably happening anyway, and I've seen it often in other contexts: Mennonites are famous for sub-dividing over minor differences, while retaining an overall unity. See also Quakers, NVC, scouts, psychoanalysts, socialists, even Utilitarians .... and that's just the last century or so!

What's the advantage of a unitary movement, especially if there is no central comms/PR?

* especially since there is no required comms plan and training for the core team and leading lights, who tend to be busy writing/researching/teaching, and no obvious overall PR/reputation management strategy, which seems very high risk, considering how interesting the topics are for journalists!