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Anonymous Answers: Flaws of EA Community - 80,000 Hours
webCredibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: 80,000 Hours
An 80,000 Hours community self-critique piece from 2020 collecting anonymous insider perspectives; useful for understanding cultural and epistemic failure modes within EA and longtermist communities relevant to AI safety coordination efforts.
Metadata
Importance: 38/100blog postcommentary
Summary
A collection of anonymous candid critiques from EA community members identifying structural and cultural flaws within the effective altruism movement. Topics range from groupthink and status dynamics around longtermism to insularity, poor hiring practices, and insufficient engagement with the outside world. The piece serves as internal self-reflection on how the EA community could improve.
Key Points
- •Groupthink and excessive peer-updating are identified as significant risks, potentially leading to correlated errors across the community.
- •Longtermism has reportedly become a status symbol rather than a well-reasoned priority, distorting community incentives.
- •The community is criticized for being too insular, not engaging enough with outside perspectives or broader global catastrophic risks.
- •Cultural issues include a 'holier than thou' attitude, disagreeableness, and failing to welcome diverse contributors with varied skill sets.
- •Operational critiques include poor hiring practices, abandoning projects too quickly, and neglecting less popular but potentially high-value funding opportunities.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| EA Global | Organization | 38.0 |
Cached Content Preview
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Anonymous contributors answer: What are the biggest flaws of the effective altruism community? | 80,000 Hours Search for: Our new book, a ridiculously in-depth guide to a fulfilling career, is out May 2026. Preorder now
On this page:
Introduction
1 What are the biggest flaws of the effective altruism community? 1.1 Groupthink
1.2 Disagreeableness
1.3 Too much focus on 'the community'
1.4 A 'holier than thou' attitude
1.5 Failing to give more people a vision of how they can contribute
1.6 Longtermism has become a status symbol
1.7 Not engaging enough with the outside world
1.8 Not following best hiring practices
1.9 Being too unwilling to encourage high standards
1.10 Doing non-technical research that isn't actually useful
1.11 Abandoning projects too quickly
1.12 Most people live in the centre of big cities
1.13 Lack of support for entrepreneurs
1.14 Valuing exceptional work in a non-effective job too highly
1.15 Too cautious
1.16 Too narrow
1.17 Neglecting less popular funding opportunities
1.18 A lack of focus on broader global catastrophic risks
1.19 Being too siloed
1.20 Not media savvy enough
2 Learn more
I’m extremely pro peer-updating in general, but from the perspective of the community as a whole — I’d much rather a lot of people having a lot of personally formed views.
Anonymous
The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don’t represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it’s valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree.
This entry is most likely to be of interest to people who are already aware of or involved with the effective altruism (EA) community .
But it’s the thirteenth in this series of posts with anonymous answers — many of which are likely to be useful to everyone. You can find the complete collection here .
We’ve also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here , or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.
Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours’ key ideas .
Why we're compiling career advice and allowing people to answer anonymously
In April 2019 we posted some anonymous career advice from someone who wasn’t able to go on the record with their opinions. It was well received, so we thought we’d try a second round, this time interviewing a larger number of people we think have had impressive careers so far.
It seems like a lot of successful people have interesting thoughts that they’d rather not share with their names attached, on sensitive and mundane topics alike, and for a variety of reasons. For example, they might
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