EA - In (mild) defence of the social/professional overlap in EA by Amber Dawn

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: In (mild) defence of the social/professional overlap in EA, published by Amber Dawn on February 9, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The EA community has both a professional aspect and a social aspect; sometimes, these overlap. In particular, there are networks of EAs in major hubs who variously date each other, are friends with each other, live together, work at the same organizations, and sometimes make grantmaking or funding decisions related to each other. (I’ll call this the ‘work/social overlap’ throughout).Recently, lots of people have criticised the work/social overlap in EA, blaming it for things like the misogynistic, abusive dynamics described in the recent Time article, or for the FTX collapse. In this post, I talk a bit about why I’m wary of calls to “deal with” or “address” the work/social overlap in some way (this includes, but isn’t limited to, calls to “deal with” polyamory in EA specifically).This is partly because I think that the work/social overlap has some strong benefits, which is why it exists, and the benefits outweigh the drawbacks (though we should certainly try to mitigate the drawbacks as best we can). If you want to get rid of something, you should first try to make sure that it’s not importantly load-bearing first; I think in fact that EA work/social overlap probably is importantly load-bearing in some ways. (I never thought that I’d be invoking a Chesterton’s fence argument in support of polyamorously dating all your coworkers :p but there we go).And it’s partly because I think it’s immoral and harmful to try to prevent people from consensually forming relationships with whom they want, and it’s only a little better if the mechanisms you use to attempt this are supposedly “soft” or “non-coercive”.In Forum tradition, disclosures and caveats first:I’m fully embedded in the EA work/social overlap. I work as a freelancer, mostly with EA clients, some of whom I know socially; I live in London and am friends with many other London EAs; and I’m dating two other EAs.I also want to acknowledge that there are downsides to the work/social overlap - the critics aren’t wrong about their points, they are just missing important other parts of the story. In particular:1. The work/social overlap gives rise to conflicts-of-interest (and this is more of a problem in highly poly communities, because there are just more conflict-of-interest-ish relationships)2. The work/social overlap means that people who are engaged with EA professionally, but not part of the social community, may miss out on opportunities. The recent ‘come hang out in the Bay Area’ push seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that this is, in fact, how it works. It’s good that Bay Area EAs tried to mitigate this by inviting non-locals to visit the Bay and get more plugged in to the in-person social community, but it would be better, in my opinion, if organizations in hubs were less clique-y and more willing to hire people who weren’t part of the social community (and indeed, people who don’t identify as EA at all).3. You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. If you live with EAs, date EAs, are friends with EAs, and work with EAs, it makes the thought of leaving the EA community really hard. This is bad for epistemics: for a while, I found it really hard to think clearly about where I stood on EA philosophical/ideological positions, because I felt so ‘locked in’ to the community in all parts of my life.(I got past this thanks to a fruitful coaching session with Tee Barnett, where he pointed out that my social relationships formed through EA are now much deeper than our EA connection, and when I actually thought about it, I realised that most of my EA friends wouldn’t ditch me or disown me if I came to disagree with EA, so leaving EA wouldn’t really mean losing access to my so...