Chimps, Bonobos, and the Community We Could Be

• I used an LLM to improve on the original draft, which was written without assistance and whose meaning remained unchanged. The version you will read likely contains about 60% AI-generated text.

Chimps, Bonobos, and the Community We Could Be

Robert Sapolsky offers a striking lesson about primate societies. Chimpanzees strive for hierarchy, dominance, and control of resources. Males fight for access to females, bands are brutal to one another, and stress pervades the whole structure. The higher you climb the social ladder, the more energy you spend defending your position; the lower your rung, the more you suffer. Alpha males are not spared: they bear the costs of leadership without much of the joy.

Bonobos are biologically very close to chimpanzees — and to us — and share the same set of instincts. Yet a single ecological difference, the fact that females tend to stick together, tilts their social world toward cooperation. Bonobos groom each other, form stable bonds, ease social tensions very effectively and interact mostly in ways that are relaxed and pleasant. Hierarchy exists, but it matters far less than it does for chimps.

Humans can go either way. It is not quite a conscious decision we make as individuals: we sense from our environment whether hierarchy or mutual care is more valued, and we tend to follow what is socially rewarded. Frans de Waal makes a similar argument in The Age of Empathy. He traces our capacity for empathy to the bond between mammalian mothers and their offspring — a bond that generalized over time to create the broader sense of community that helped humans and other apes survive in dangerous conditions. The greater the threat, the stronger and more complex the bond. Even chimpanzees, whom Sapolsky describes in rather unflattering terms, depend on mutual care: the alpha male spends real energy and takes real risks to protect the members of his band and resolve conflicts.

De Waal is also a sharp critic of ideologies that deny this side of our nature. He devotes considerable attention to the culture of Enron under Jeff Skilling — a company that turned a distorted reading of Richard Dawkins's "selfish gene" into a management philosophy, pitting employees against each other in a permanent internal competition. The result was not efficiency but dysfunction, fraud, and collapse. The selfish gene does not mean that individuals should be selfish: it means that genes propagate through a wide range of strategies, including cooperation, care, and solidarity.

Neither extreme works. Societies that ask us to suppress private interest entirely in favor of the common good tend to fail, often brutally. But societies that celebrate individual achievement while dismissing the value of community produce a different kind of failure — loneliness, inequality, and moral disorientation, and are not efficient either, as the Enron case exemplified. Some of the most rigorous longitudinal research we have ties health, wealth, and happiness not to individual success but to the quality of our relationships[1].

The dichotomy and how to move past it

Autonomy and community are usually presented as opposites. The more you value individual freedom and critical thinking, the more you risk weakening collective loyalty; the more you demand loyalty, the more you risk suppressing dissent and moral growth. Strong communities are wonderful, but they often come with a cost: the expectation that you will not question shared beliefs.

I think this tension is real but not irresolvable. In fact, I would argue that Effective Altruism, like the scientific community before it, has already found a partial solution — at least at the level of ideas. EA explicitly enshrines the scout mindset: the commitment to updating beliefs in response to evidence, to treating the ability to change your mind as a virtue rather than a weakness. This creates a positive feedback loop. Individuals pursuing their own reasoning and sense of agency enrich the community's thinking; the community, by valuing that process, gives individuals both freedom and belonging.

The question is whether we can extend the same logic from the practice of ideas to the practice of community itself.

From talent stacks to group talent stacks

Scott Adams, as taught in the 80,000 Hours materials, argues that if you are not top-ranking in any single relevant skill, you have a better chance of standing out through an unusual combination of skills — say, programming and emotional intelligence together. He calls this a talent stack.

I want to extend the concept. What about the talent stack of a group? A small group of people — say, five or fewer — might together hold ten or fifteen complementary skills that no individual among them possesses alone, that make the group extraordinarily fit for a specific task, and, crucially, the right combination of skills for a given goal is not just about competence: it is also about whether these people will genuinely enjoy working together. We care about wellbeing; we know that pleasure in collaboration improves effectiveness; and we know that a community whose internal practices align with its stated values creates a ripple effect of motivation and trust.

The challenge, of course, is coordination costs. The more people involved, the greater the complexity and the more things can go wrong. But we could design simple tests to assess whether a collaboration is actually going somewhere — and be willing to dismantle it and try a different arrangement if it is not.

There is plenty of literature to help individuals do their best work alone: flow states, time management, deep work. There is far less on how to set the conditions for collaboration that is both effective and genuinely pleasant. That gap is worth exploring.

The case for ordinary people

I think the EA movement is too focused on peak performance.

Sure, we need world-class scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and communicators working full-time on the hardest problems of our civilization. We want brilliant people doing their best, and we should encourage more people to aim high if they can. But we also need ordinary people living ordinary lives who believe in altruism and want it to be effective.

We need them because community requires bodies. People who gather regularly across a wide range of social settings. People who bring EA ideas into everyday conversations, who spread the word, who raise children with these values, who donate and advocate for effective giving, who recognize a bright friend or relative and suggest they look into this. Even if recruiting exceptional talent were the single most effective intervention available, someone still has to find those people and ask them to get involved.

But there is a deeper problem with a community that values only the contribution of its highest achievers. If the social structure rewards hierarchy while the explicit message preaches equality of moral worth, people will feel the contradiction at a level that does not require articulation. They will begin competing for status within a movement that is theoretically anti-hierarchical, in some sense. Social interactions affect us in ways we are not always aware of, and a community that tells you that you matter while treating you as peripheral will eventually lose you.

Building around effective altruism a community of people that gather in real life is not a secondary task — it is foundational.

What this looks like in practice

We should encourage small, ordinary achievements and speak about them openly. We should devote at least as much attention to the process of collaborating as we give to its results. How do we develop the skills to be partners with whom working is genuinely enjoyable? How do we make the creative contributions of ordinary members both visible and useful to the community as a whole?

We should not be naïve about this. It will not always be easy. Sometimes it will be impossible, and recognizing those situations early will matter.

A few ordinary people with the right combination of skills and a genuine pleasure in working together could, for instance, open a vegan restaurant that turns a profit and promotes effective altruism through flyers and occasional events. Self-sustaining, visible, and potentially very effective at growing a community.

I think of EA as an attempt to move us closer to the bonobo end of the spectrum — and then to go further. To care not only for each other, but for bonobos, for chimpanzees, and for everything capable of suffering or flourishing.

That project needs everyone.

Notes

[1] Waldinger, R. J., & Schulz, M. S. (2023). The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Simon & Schuster. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, begun in 1938, is the longest in-depth longitudinal study of adult life ever conducted. Its central finding: good relationships are the strongest predictor of long-term health and happiness — stronger than income, fame, or professional success. See also Waldinger's TED Talk (2015), one of the ten most watched ever, with over 44 million views: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness