Hey Chris 😊, yeah, I think changing your mind and life in big ways overnight is a very big ask (and it’s nice to feel like you’re welcome to think about what might be true before you decide whether to commit to doing anything about it—it helps a lot with the cognitive dissonance we all feel when our actions, the values we claim to hold ourselves to and what we believe about the world are at odds[1]).
I also completely agree with some targeting being very valuable. I think we should target exceptionally caring people who have exceptional track-records of being able to accomplish the stuff they set out to accomplish/​the stuff they believe is valuable/​worthwhile. I also think that if you spend a tonne of time with someone who clearly isn’t getting it even though they have an impressive track record in some domain, then it makes complete sense to use your marginal community building time elsewhere.
However, my guess is that sometimes we can filter too hard, too early for us to get the tail-end of the effective altruism community’s impact.
It is easy for a person to form an accurate impression of another person who is similar to them. It is much harder for a person to quickly form an accurate impression of another person who is really different (but because of diminishing returns, it seems way more valuable on the margin to get people who are exceptional in a different way to the way that the existing community tends to be exceptional than another person who thinks the same way and has the same skills).
and we want people to make it easier for people to align these three things in a direction that leads to more caring about others and more seeing the world the way it is (we don’t want to push people away from identifying as someone who cares about others or from shying away from thinking about how the world). If we push too hard on all three things at once, I think it is much easier for people to align these three things by either deciding they actually don’t value what they thought they value, they actually don’t really care about others, or they might find it incredibly hard to see the world exactly as it is (because otherwise their values and their actions will have this huge gap)
Hey Chris 😊, yeah, I think changing your mind and life in big ways overnight is a very big ask (and it’s nice to feel like you’re welcome to think about what might be true before you decide whether to commit to doing anything about it—it helps a lot with the cognitive dissonance we all feel when our actions, the values we claim to hold ourselves to and what we believe about the world are at odds[1]).
I also completely agree with some targeting being very valuable. I think we should target exceptionally caring people who have exceptional track-records of being able to accomplish the stuff they set out to accomplish/​the stuff they believe is valuable/​worthwhile. I also think that if you spend a tonne of time with someone who clearly isn’t getting it even though they have an impressive track record in some domain, then it makes complete sense to use your marginal community building time elsewhere.
However, my guess is that sometimes we can filter too hard, too early for us to get the tail-end of the effective altruism community’s impact.
It is easy for a person to form an accurate impression of another person who is similar to them. It is much harder for a person to quickly form an accurate impression of another person who is really different (but because of diminishing returns, it seems way more valuable on the margin to get people who are exceptional in a different way to the way that the existing community tends to be exceptional than another person who thinks the same way and has the same skills).
and we want people to make it easier for people to align these three things in a direction that leads to more caring about others and more seeing the world the way it is (we don’t want to push people away from identifying as someone who cares about others or from shying away from thinking about how the world). If we push too hard on all three things at once, I think it is much easier for people to align these three things by either deciding they actually don’t value what they thought they value, they actually don’t really care about others, or they might find it incredibly hard to see the world exactly as it is (because otherwise their values and their actions will have this huge gap)