I think there is a chance you’re overcomplicating it a bit 😅. I think she is just trying to create a culture where people don’t feel socially anxious about leaving EA if it is good for their mental health.
Social norms are present everywhere, including EA, and even if we are quite nerdy and prone to rule-binding, the pressure and expectation to do good can conflate against some of the members’ mental health.
And then, she is also saying that everyone should feel they are entitled to choose not to sacrifice (a significant portion of) their happiness to improve the world, and not feel bad about it. People sometimes rationalize it in that it is not sustainable, but I prefer understanding just allowing people to not be maximally altruistic as opposed to maximally efficient with their altruistic budget. As in a similar spirit to https://mindingourway.com/youre-allowed-to-be-inconsistent/
I don’t know, my sense is the earlier comment correctly points to something being a little off here. Like a (not necessarily intentional) motte-and-bailey thing where the bailey (the part that gets defended) is “this community should have a norm of not shaming people for being less-than-maximally altruistic,” and the motte is “it’s ethically acceptable for people to not act maximally altruistically.” But drawing from the latter claim (without justifying/scrutinizing it with ethical arguments) seems like severely devaluing ethical argumentation, which seems pretty questionable both philosophically and as a norm. (It also feels weirdly at odds with the community’s usual norm of caring a lot about ethical reasoning/argumentation.) I think the earlier comment does well at teasing apart different versions of “it’s fine,” a necessary step for noticing the potential motte-and-bailey error.
(I’m still sympathetic to a community norm of letting people leave if they want to; I feel iffy about the community justifying that norm by denying the ethical value of helping others more, or by denying the claim that (if approached in a healthy way) this community has e.g., some ideas that are pretty helpful for doing more good.)
I think there is a chance you’re overcomplicating it a bit 😅. I think she is just trying to create a culture where people don’t feel socially anxious about leaving EA if it is good for their mental health. Social norms are present everywhere, including EA, and even if we are quite nerdy and prone to rule-binding, the pressure and expectation to do good can conflate against some of the members’ mental health.
And then, she is also saying that everyone should feel they are entitled to choose not to sacrifice (a significant portion of) their happiness to improve the world, and not feel bad about it. People sometimes rationalize it in that it is not sustainable, but I prefer understanding just allowing people to not be maximally altruistic as opposed to maximally efficient with their altruistic budget. As in a similar spirit to https://mindingourway.com/youre-allowed-to-be-inconsistent/
I don’t know, my sense is the earlier comment correctly points to something being a little off here. Like a (not necessarily intentional) motte-and-bailey thing where the bailey (the part that gets defended) is “this community should have a norm of not shaming people for being less-than-maximally altruistic,” and the motte is “it’s ethically acceptable for people to not act maximally altruistically.” But drawing from the latter claim (without justifying/scrutinizing it with ethical arguments) seems like severely devaluing ethical argumentation, which seems pretty questionable both philosophically and as a norm. (It also feels weirdly at odds with the community’s usual norm of caring a lot about ethical reasoning/argumentation.) I think the earlier comment does well at teasing apart different versions of “it’s fine,” a necessary step for noticing the potential motte-and-bailey error.
(I’m still sympathetic to a community norm of letting people leave if they want to; I feel iffy about the community justifying that norm by denying the ethical value of helping others more, or by denying the claim that (if approached in a healthy way) this community has e.g., some ideas that are pretty helpful for doing more good.)