Where I'm at with effective altruism

I'm not quite sure where I'm at with EA.

Since leaving CEA around 6 months ago, I've been interacting less with people in the EA community, though still some. I don't consume much EA content at the moment, and do a lot less thinking about 'how I can maximise my impact' than I used to.

I still want to do good, and do it effectively. In particular, I'd like there to be a future, and if I can take actions that help make sure there is one, I'm game. I don't think the way I was going about this previously was working, and don't think my relationship with EA more broadly was working. So I'm trying to work out how to do that better.

I've become more pessimistic about EA. Insofar as I want to do good effectively, prevent apocalypse etc. I want to be in a social context/ community that helps me do that. And I'm unsure the EA community does, at least it's a far cry from my ideal version. I also am more pessimistic about EA being a useful thing for helping people do good effectively in general.

My pessimism is in some sense relative - relative to how I optimistic I was about EA previously, I'm now a lot more pessimistic... it's difficult to spell out what this means exactly in more concrete terms.

Trying to get more concrete...

One area that I could see myself focusing on going forward is building a community of people who want to do good effectively. If I were doing this, this would not be EA community building, but building another community.

I think the main/ current/ dominant paradigm of EA community building is wrong, and insofar as EA community building refers to doing things within that paradigm, I don't expect to be doing any EA community building. One of the main projects on my mind at the moment is writing up my criticisms of the EA community, and one of the key aims there is essentially changing the community building paradigm. I'm not particularly optimistic about being successful here, but it feels important to do.

One of the reasons it feels important to do is that for the last 5 years or so I've been working in/ on/ with/ through the dominant community building paradigm, and I think the work I was doing has pushed the EA community further away from the version that I'd like to see. Given this, it feels important to say how and why my views have changed.

What is the 'main/ current/ dominant paradigm of EA community building'. In one word, growth. Hopefully I'll write up more words in the future.