“The EA Superstructure” by Brian Foerster

Crossposted on Substack. This recent podcast episode featuring Oliver Habryka and Austin Chen got me thinking about the social and political dimensions of EA. One moment in particular stood out to me. Habryka: “And so I'm currently expecting that, like, a lot of Anthropic employees will be pretty burned in a year or two. When they are experiencing these dynamics, it becomes very clear that a huge amount of grants are never presented to them because people are worried that they will find them weird. People will see that there's a lot of politics behind the scenes about which grants get put in front of you and stuff like that. People will see that there's a lot of weird reputational management around like, wait, I can't make this grant because another funder would be angry at me, angry at you if you made this grant.”I think I’m in a poor position to evaluate how true this claim is[1], and I have some nonspecific worries that what Habryka is doing here may be unproductive, but the pointedness of this claim makes it a good example of something I’d like to call the EA superstructure. Since most EAs have little [...] --- First published: June 28th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HqyPEXpJsJS9oSi2J/the-ea-superstructure --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.