I really like this post, and in general appreciate the ways you've been thinking about the EA community over the last few years, as someone who has been very close to community building, dissatisfied, and engaging to improve it, where I think most people just check out/give up.

One dynamic I see in this problem, that I don't think you talked about, is that formal community building is focused on serving new EAs and growth partly because formal community doesn't serve the most engaged members very well. This is because:
1. More engaged EAs in hubs often work in EA roles, and their cup is full, they don't want more events.
2. Community builders are often not well placed to serve them, as they've been around longer than the community builders have.
3. People who have been in EA for a while often have their community experience be in their friendship groups, coworking spaces, or with colleagues, that I think does fill that role quite well. These places all have filters where they're not open to everyone, which makes sense, but does create an awkward dynamic where the public EA community space ends up serving the newer EAs.

I do think more work could be done to move CEA's strategy in the direction you point towards. But they do have to grapple with these dynamics, which I think are just pretty hard to change dramatically.   

This is a tough topic to discuss and I appreciate you being willing to discuss it on the forum.

In short, often yes.

This isn't a symmetrical issue, but the risk of saying 'EA is no worse or even better than some reference class' in relative terms is sorta kinda like 'sexual harrassment in EA is not that bad' in absolute terms. 

From speaking to some friends it seems like the many minor and occassional major harrassment incidents, and ways EA is unusually bad (e.g. misreading social cues and intense professional/social overlap), these 'not that bad ' issues might be burnout, leaving EA, needing to quite one's job, panic attacks, which doesn't even take into account all those people less able to do good in the world as a result.

One tension I grapple with in these conversations that I'm struggling to articulate is the difficulty between separating out the fact that bad things tend to be so much worse when you experience them, so that if the data isn't that damning, as I man, I can feel good about EA and continue with my day. Whereas I imagine for women who bear the brunt of it, EA being not that bad is still pretty shitty, and if I knew this viscerally, I would be a whole lot more empathetic and do a lot more to try and combat it. 

Maybe the point I'm trying to make is when engaging with topics like this there can be a muting of how bad 'not that bad' is. 

I don't think this invalidates or contradicts the main point of your post Nathan, more a potential missing mood to all those discussing in the comments (not calling out anyone in particular). 

To your questions, depends on the person. Definitely some people and contexts where it would go poorly. And yes I do think you're pointing at something that is probably true, but see my other comment, I think the risk of biasing things in these conversations can go both ways.

One thing I'll add which I haven't seen in the comments is some of the vibe of 'EA is unusally bad' is that EA is probably unusually bad in some ways due to the makeup and culture of our community, and less bad in others. Bluntly I think much of this comes down to things like being worse at reading social cues, a high male to female ratio, and a community that is an unusual mix of professional and social network. 

I get the impression from female friends that being in EA means tolerating, for example, a lot more being hit on in unprofessional situations (e.g. EAG) down to creepier contexts, with the men missing being rebuffed multiple times.

This doesn't discount your main argument Nathan, but to the extent that people complain about EA being worse, this might be what they're pointing at some of the time.

I also agree with others' comments that a lot of this conversation is about how EA is 'bad' rather than 'worse', and that as community builders we want to do better, even if we're already above average.

Really well done documentary IMO. Well done! My hunch is that this could succeed, as intended, at opening up conversations with friends and family in a way that some of the other docos might not. Curious to see the numbers and anecdotes when they come in. 

Has anyone talked about the role the Green Revolution probably played in making factory farming economically viable? 

Among other enabling factors (e.g. antibiotics), factory farming, especially of pigs and poultry, depends on cheap grain feed. The system only works at scale if feed costs are low enough to make confinement viable relative to pasture. The Green Revolution roughly tripled global grain production between 1960 and 2000, and maize in particular became cheap enough to feed to animals at industrial volumes.

Every time I see a celebration of Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution, I can't help but recoil a little, thinking about the unintended consequence on the tens of billions of non-human animals impacted.

If this is true, I feel conflicted in how to think about the Green Revolution. Clearly good intentions, saved hundreds of millions of humna, condemned hundreds of billions to lives of animals to pain. I feel like the EA community has the right virtues to hold this complexity. 

Which comes back to the question: how should we talk about the Green Revolution?

Cool news: Jesse Eisenberg donated a kidney to a stranger, and said it was after hearing a podcast on 'effective altruism' where they talked about kidney donations. He mentioned it in this podcast. I assume this might lead back to Dylan Matthews.