EA - Evidence of Poor Cross-Cultural Interactions in the EA community by Yi-Yang

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome 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: Evidence of Poor Cross-Cultural Interactions in the EA community, published by Yi-Yang on July 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
In this project, I investigated non-Western EAs' perception of CCIs they had with Westerners, specifically:
1. How often non-Westerners experienced CCI issues;
2. What kinds of subtle acts of exclusion (SAEs) they had experienced;
3. How their CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings.
To do that, I collected an array of evidence from seven sources (e.g., anecdotes from interviews and a focus group, and some statistics from three surveys not done by me). And based on the evidence on CCIs I have collected so far, I believe that poor CCIs are likely to be a common but minor problem for most non-westerners in the EA community.
At the organisational or community level, I would not flag CCI issues as something to be heavily prioritised (moderate confidence), but I would recommend EA-aligned organisations and organisers to start or maintain interventions that are sensible or if the trade-offs are acceptable, like some of the ones listed here by AmAristizabal.
At the individual level, I recommend:
1. Checking out some of the vignettes shared by non-Western EAs here and here
2. Read more examples of SAEs here
3. Read some of my low-confidence takes on what non-Western and Western folks could do to improve CCIs
Background
I noticed that I was feeling annoyed in some of my cross-cultural interactions (CCIs) in the EA community, but I couldn't tell for sure whether these interactions had exclusionary elements in them. These are more subtle, and are not the overt racist behaviours that I'm more familiar with.
Hence, I started this investigation out of a desire to sanity check myself ("Am I misinterpreting things? Or has anyone else experienced the same thing?"). I would also be happy if this project is useful to others too, perhaps by making non-Western folks feel less perplexed or less alone.
In this project, I investigated non-Western EAs' perception of CCIs they had with Westerners, specifically:
1. How often non-Westerners experienced CCI issues;
2. What kinds of subtle acts of exclusion (SAEs) they had experienced;
3. How their CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings.
This investigation was done pretty informally and in a non-strategic way (e.g. I wasn't really explicitly thinking about this in a Bayesian probability way), but it does consist of an array of evidence from seven sources that I think, when combined, are pretty informative.
Evidence compiled
Evidence that might indicate less negative CCIs
1. EA Survey 2022
According to the Rethink Priorities team who lead the EA Survey 2022 project, survey respondents who identified as more non-Western scored slightly better than survey respondents who identified as more Western in terms of:
Satisfaction (mean): 7.55 (N=219) versus 7.17 (N=2251) out of 10.00 points
Retention (mean): 5.51 (N=144) versus 5.42 (N=1736) out of 7.00 points
Mental health (mean): 3.49 (N=143) versus 3.27 (N=1528) out of 5.00 points
The above three metrics aren't exactly what I'm looking for, that is belongingness. It might be the case that non-Westerners do experience CCI issues but still get a lot of value from EA or belongingness in their local EA groups.
Evidence that might indicate more negative CCIs
1. My personal experience
Firstly, I've noticed Western folks "hijacking" (most likely unconsciously or unintentionally) norms in spaces where non-Western folks traditionally belong, are the majority, or a mix of both. I've noticed at least one such behaviour in an EA setting before.
Here are a few non-EA-related examples (to preserve anonymity):
A discussion group in Malaysia I was a part of has a norm about raising one's hands and letting the moderator pick the next speaker to make speaking time more ...