Last week at the fUnconference in Berlin, we had a failure party. Your story would have fit in perfectly, and I want to cheer you on! You seem to have generated tons of expected utils ex ante, even if your bets didn’t pay off.
Thanks for sharing this compilation of failures. Overall, I’m still impressed by your life story so far!
I’d like to know: Is there something the EA community could have done better to support you emotionally?
No joke, I would kind of love it if there was some kind of official recognition we could give people for “did something that was very plausibly good ex ante but it didn’t work out”.
Thank you! I’m relieved to have finally posted it. There were some failed attempts because I way overthink everything that’s remotely social, even something as low-stakes as posting pseudonymously.
I didn’t expect to get this many comments, and I really didn’t expect so much positivity and encouragement! This community really is fantastic, and I hope someday to overcome my personal foibles with social media and engage regularly with you wonderful people.
I’d like to know: Is there something the EA community could have done better to support you emotionally?
Thanks for asking. It’s a great question, and I wish I had good answers. I’ve thought about how people like me can be incorporated better, and I honestly don’t know.
The encouragement is helpful! For people who already obsess about maximizing impact, it helps to be reminded that any impact (or expected value of impact?) is still very real and valuable. I shudder to think that someone who donates any amount to AMF would ever feel bad about it, yet I know how hard it can be to convince oneself otherwise. Related, I’m glad 80k Hours has eased off on the messaging that EA should focus on the top 1% of people who have most of the impact (ivy league, etc) because that kind of thing is alienating and discouraging to everyone who isn’t in that group. Even if it’s true, I don’t need the reminder.
As far as getting connected, at a surface level maybe it has been tougher to live in a metro area without local meetups; however, lack of opportunity has never been the root problem for me personally. After all, remote meetups have existed forever, and I have made astonishingly little effort to participate. Broadly speaking, “mental health” is the closest I get to a root cause. Ever since I read that survey saying that social anxiety was the most common reason people didn’t engage actively (I hope I’m remembering that correctly), I have wondered about solutions to that. Engagement is a hard problem generally, one that Facebook et. al. spend huge sums to solve. Engagement of those reluctant to engage anywhere… especially hard.
So yeah, more mental health resources and research (!) would be helpful. I recommended to 80k Hours that they add more mental health and self care content, and I gather they’re working towards that. The episode with Howie about his mental health challenges helped me tremendously, both because of his story and the practical tips. Spencer Greenberg’s podcast is helpful too.
I deeply appreciate the hard work that has gone into building the EA community. I hope my post didn’t come across as critical of them in any way.
Thank you for sharing, I think your post will resonate with many people and show them they are not alone in their struggles. I’ve gone through similar phases of depression, guilt, feelings of rejection and not allowing myself to seek help or complain as I’m much better off than 99% of the world. This sucks.
The Celebrating Failure at the fUnconference that Ludwig mentioned felt cathartic to me as people shared professional and personal failures. In EA we’re an unusual community as we try hard and constantly fail at our expectations. This goes for people applying for jobs as well as leaders of EA orgs. A coach recently told me most calls with them turn to mental health problems at some point.
I hope you will find a community that supports you. I have proposed Masterminds as a format and am in talks to see how we can make it happen. But I’ve heard of more similar remote formats and interventions that are planned and am hopeful we will see some soon.
So I think there are really compelling reasons to think that the “optimal strategy” to follow is one that probably fails — but if it doesn’t fail, it’s great. But as a community, what that would imply is this weird thing where you almost celebrate cases where someone completely craps out — where things end up nowhere close to what they could have been — because that’s what the majority of well-played strategies should end with. I don’t think that we recognize that enough as a community, and I think there are lots of specific instances as well where we don’t incentivize that.
Also really helpful was the book by Julian Simon where he talks about overcoming depression in a very relatable way (link via Rob Wiblin).
I shudder to think that someone who donates any amount to AMF would ever feel bad about it, yet I know how hard it can be to convince oneself otherwise.
I recently read the Notes From a Pledger who I similarly far away from a hub and is ok with donating. The comment by Michelle Hutchinson touched me as it brought back the realisation that we’re already doing so much more than most people in donating. It’s great to aim high and try to get a job in EA but there is no shame in failing, getting a normal job and continuing with donations.
Just trying and failing is something to be celebrated as most people never try. Thank you for trying!
I hope successful rich people show up to the failure party to help provide a path forward.
When I think of my failures in life (and I’ve had many) what really irks me the most is that … I failed. I wanted to improve the world, and didn’t. (in my case: thousands of hours over 15 years, no impact, and a strong sense of wasted potential). The support I want most, then, is a path toward improving the world. But I guess emotional support would’ve helped too, in order to prevent me from losing faith that I could ever succeed (I did lose faith to some extent; I tend to act more like someone who expects to fail, now). In my case, I don’t know any other EAs in my city, so virtual meetings/therapy might have been helpful. I briefly purchased discount therapy while unemployed in 2018; it was better than nothing.
I like hits-based giving, but if somebody ends up working on misses for many years in a row… we need a community that can support that person.
Just going to say that your donation to CEEALAR (EA Hotel) in late 2019 when we were facing running out of money was very much appreciated, and, I think, probably pretty high EV! (although obviously I’m biased :))
I like the way Charity Entrepreneurship is set up—in short time during their application process, they give hopeful entrepreneurs a strong indication on whether they think the candidate is likely to be a good fit for entrepreneurship. This is helpful in that if you get rejected from the process early on, you probably should not push yourself too hard trying to start something.
I know a longtermist incubator was attempted at one point, but perhaps it would be helpful to have some sort of EA entrepreneur screening organization that would attract a large pool of applicants, have a streamlined and time-efficient process for evaluating entrepreneurial talent and letting people know if they should spend a lot of time trying to start something or whether they should make it less of a priority? It could also be tied in with something like unconditional funding for about a year to the top talent so they do not have to burn out in the process of trying to get something off the ground? I think the LTFF is somewhat like this already but it does require you to have a pretty good idea of what you want to do—the step before that is time consuming in looking across a large number of potential interventions and aligning with the wider EA community.
Last week at the fUnconference in Berlin, we had a failure party. Your story would have fit in perfectly, and I want to cheer you on! You seem to have generated tons of expected utils ex ante, even if your bets didn’t pay off.
Thanks for sharing this compilation of failures. Overall, I’m still impressed by your life story so far!
I’d like to know: Is there something the EA community could have done better to support you emotionally?
No joke, I would kind of love it if there was some kind of official recognition we could give people for “did something that was very plausibly good ex ante but it didn’t work out”.
The “Magnificent Failure” award.
Thank you! I’m relieved to have finally posted it. There were some failed attempts because I way overthink everything that’s remotely social, even something as low-stakes as posting pseudonymously.
I didn’t expect to get this many comments, and I really didn’t expect so much positivity and encouragement! This community really is fantastic, and I hope someday to overcome my personal foibles with social media and engage regularly with you wonderful people.
Thanks for asking. It’s a great question, and I wish I had good answers. I’ve thought about how people like me can be incorporated better, and I honestly don’t know.
The encouragement is helpful! For people who already obsess about maximizing impact, it helps to be reminded that any impact (or expected value of impact?) is still very real and valuable. I shudder to think that someone who donates any amount to AMF would ever feel bad about it, yet I know how hard it can be to convince oneself otherwise. Related, I’m glad 80k Hours has eased off on the messaging that EA should focus on the top 1% of people who have most of the impact (ivy league, etc) because that kind of thing is alienating and discouraging to everyone who isn’t in that group. Even if it’s true, I don’t need the reminder.
As far as getting connected, at a surface level maybe it has been tougher to live in a metro area without local meetups; however, lack of opportunity has never been the root problem for me personally. After all, remote meetups have existed forever, and I have made astonishingly little effort to participate. Broadly speaking, “mental health” is the closest I get to a root cause. Ever since I read that survey saying that social anxiety was the most common reason people didn’t engage actively (I hope I’m remembering that correctly), I have wondered about solutions to that. Engagement is a hard problem generally, one that Facebook et. al. spend huge sums to solve. Engagement of those reluctant to engage anywhere… especially hard.
So yeah, more mental health resources and research (!) would be helpful. I recommended to 80k Hours that they add more mental health and self care content, and I gather they’re working towards that. The episode with Howie about his mental health challenges helped me tremendously, both because of his story and the practical tips. Spencer Greenberg’s podcast is helpful too.
I deeply appreciate the hard work that has gone into building the EA community. I hope my post didn’t come across as critical of them in any way.
Thank you for sharing, I think your post will resonate with many people and show them they are not alone in their struggles. I’ve gone through similar phases of depression, guilt, feelings of rejection and not allowing myself to seek help or complain as I’m much better off than 99% of the world. This sucks.
The Celebrating Failure at the fUnconference that Ludwig mentioned felt cathartic to me as people shared professional and personal failures. In EA we’re an unusual community as we try hard and constantly fail at our expectations. This goes for people applying for jobs as well as leaders of EA orgs. A coach recently told me most calls with them turn to mental health problems at some point.
I hope you will find a community that supports you. I have proposed Masterminds as a format and am in talks to see how we can make it happen. But I’ve heard of more similar remote formats and interventions that are planned and am hopeful we will see some soon.
As a side note: What helped me in the last months were the 80K talk where Will MacAskill talks about his depression and the one with Sam Bankman-Fried where he agrees that most people will fail trying:
Also really helpful was the book by Julian Simon where he talks about overcoming depression in a very relatable way (link via Rob Wiblin).
I recently read the Notes From a Pledger who I similarly far away from a hub and is ok with donating. The comment by Michelle Hutchinson touched me as it brought back the realisation that we’re already doing so much more than most people in donating. It’s great to aim high and try to get a job in EA but there is no shame in failing, getting a normal job and continuing with donations.
Just trying and failing is something to be celebrated as most people never try. Thank you for trying!
I hope successful rich people show up to the failure party to help provide a path forward.
When I think of my failures in life (and I’ve had many) what really irks me the most is that … I failed. I wanted to improve the world, and didn’t. (in my case: thousands of hours over 15 years, no impact, and a strong sense of wasted potential). The support I want most, then, is a path toward improving the world. But I guess emotional support would’ve helped too, in order to prevent me from losing faith that I could ever succeed (I did lose faith to some extent; I tend to act more like someone who expects to fail, now). In my case, I don’t know any other EAs in my city, so virtual meetings/therapy might have been helpful. I briefly purchased discount therapy while unemployed in 2018; it was better than nothing.
I like hits-based giving, but if somebody ends up working on misses for many years in a row… we need a community that can support that person.
Just going to say that your donation to CEEALAR (EA Hotel) in late 2019 when we were facing running out of money was very much appreciated, and, I think, probably pretty high EV! (although obviously I’m biased :))
I like the way Charity Entrepreneurship is set up—in short time during their application process, they give hopeful entrepreneurs a strong indication on whether they think the candidate is likely to be a good fit for entrepreneurship. This is helpful in that if you get rejected from the process early on, you probably should not push yourself too hard trying to start something.
I know a longtermist incubator was attempted at one point, but perhaps it would be helpful to have some sort of EA entrepreneur screening organization that would attract a large pool of applicants, have a streamlined and time-efficient process for evaluating entrepreneurial talent and letting people know if they should spend a lot of time trying to start something or whether they should make it less of a priority? It could also be tied in with something like unconditional funding for about a year to the top talent so they do not have to burn out in the process of trying to get something off the ground? I think the LTFF is somewhat like this already but it does require you to have a pretty good idea of what you want to do—the step before that is time consuming in looking across a large number of potential interventions and aligning with the wider EA community.