The replies got a tad out of hand and this whole thing of trying to structure my replies as distinct little sub-replies looks so spammy. I am very sorry (I clearly was way too excited about having a reply to my post)!
All the replies are structured so you definitely don’t have to read all the threads, just the ones that interest you. I’ve outlined the topic of each comment in each higher-level reply.
That is definitely not a no-brainer kind of question. I don’t have any neat answers because the answer varies so much between different cases.
Broadly speaking, it depends on the details of three things:
the individual who doesn’t care about causes the effective altruism community currently thinks are promising;
the individual who does care; and
their relationship to each other (eg. how much they trust each other, how honest they can be with each other, how much time they are likely to be able to spend together to talk more in-depth etc)
I’ve discussed these in more depth in two comment threads below because I started writing about the first one and the comment already felt too long (my new EA forum resolution is to break up my thoughts into distinct pieces more)! 🤣
One comment thread gives a bit more detail on the individual who doesn’t care about effective altruism. The other discusses the individual who does care about effective altruism.
I didn’t really feel like I needed a separate thread for the third component because I feel like it came up pretty naturally that, depending on the individuals (both the one that doesn’t care about effective altruism and the one that does), trust and time spent chatting curiously with each other can sometimes be necessary for any mind-changing or value discovery to occur.
EDIT: (I think everyone in the community is naturally a community-builder.
We all set the culture.
We all care about this enough to likely want to bring it up in some way to the people in our lives.
Why?
Because a big way to help others more is to get other people on board with the idea that making a difference really does seem way more actionable than many of us might have thought before coming across this group of incredibly smart and caring people.)
Why is the person who cares about effective altruism and their relationship to the person who doesn’t so key in answering this question?
Changing your mind is exhausting and challenging.
Changing your mind on topics that might affect all your future life choices and also might reflect badly on many of your past choices is incredibly difficult.
Asking someone to question everything either requires the person who is questioning everything to have:
a very weird disposition (unusually unaffected by wild swings in what their future should be and how good their past actions were); or
someone or many people there to gradually help them think clearly about what they truly believe about the world and what they truly care about.
If the person in question does not have a very weird disposition and can just casually question everything, then they do not need much beyond a little exposure. However, 99.9% of people on planet Earth are not like that! 99.9% of people on planet Earth find questioning everything quite emotionally challenging.
This can make conversations breakdown very quickly without a lot of trust and care, especially if the conversation moves extremely quickly and questions a lot of things all at once in ways that are brand new.
There are several ways community-builders can mitigate this:
Take a lot of time to understand where the person who doesn’t care is coming from with an open and curious mind (how they see the world, what they currently care about and why they think the stuff they care about is worth caring about). People are so interesting and if you take a genuine interest in the person you are talking to, this can go a long way to not only giving you the tools to discuss all this incredibly challenging stuff in a sensitive way, but also can give you insight into this human being in front of you who cares deeply about various things in their lives for various reasons. I am always blown away by how much people care and also how differently they think and feel about things and it is generally pretty wonderful if you get an opportunity to hear about another person’s life passions and wordview.
Go slowly. Give people permission to take it at their own pace. Give people permission to take one small corner at a time and not change their whole lives and worldview immediately or at all. By giving people room to change their minds at a safe pace for them, they can be more intellectually honest with themselves and ease into the emotional rollar-coaster that is questioning everything you believe about the world and everything you value deep down at an appropriate pace.
Once we believe something, once we care about something, we all tend to forget the often long journey to that worldview and that passion. We enthusiastically feel like because it is now obvious to us that it always was and then talk to others like it is no big deal.
Usually, if you don’t have an exceptionally weird disposition, questioning everything you think about the world and everything you care about is a challenging journey. I took more time to come around than I remembered for a long-time, once it all felt obvious to me. The memories of everything it took to change my mind came back to me slowly. This is so human I think. We move on fast once we believe something, no matter how long the journey took. Once we believe something is true, it often feels like we always knew it deep down (when actually, I think our brains just conveniently forget that so we have more space to think about new things).
Remembering that changing your mind and accepting that you were wrong in the past and that all your future plans might be worth changing is bloody hard. For people to think clearly, they often need room and support. They also need permission to think differently! These are really hard questions! Smart people definitely can very reasonably disagree.
The role, I see, of a community builder, is to create a space where people can safely think about what they think and what they care about. It is not to convince them of any one particular answer or any one particular value system. It seems fine to nudge people towards a wider moral circle. It seems fine to present people with why you believe what you believe. The rest is an open-minded, open-hearted, curious conversation.
It was incredibly useful to be reminded of the obvious fact that rewriting a load-bearing belief is crazy. Doing it has had me in tumultuous staits that absolutely needed to be sorted out asap but I had no way forward and no way back.
Sometimes I have been uneasy for days trying to adjust to the new world. Sometimes it would make me feel like an imposter when I would talk to people about ordinary stuff. Incredibly uncomfortable experience that I do immediately forget.
What seems best to do when a person has no interest in EA causes naturally depends a lot on why the person has no interest. Some people have no interest in EA causes because:
They believe that the causes the EA community thinks are important are not, actually, important.
They believe that helping others is intractable.
They have a narrower moral circle than the people in this community have.
Usually, I think, it’s a blurry mix of all three of the above. I will discuss how it gets blurred together and how I think people end up sometimes getting clarity on what factors are most important to them in several separate comments.
Human minds conflate things a lot. Often a person’s beliefs about the world and what they care about are blurred together in a very confused way if they’ve never thought about it before.
Some key questions that come to mind, given people conflate things so much, are:
How does a person start to get clarity on whether they care about what they care about due to their beliefs about the world or their values?
How does a person deal with finding out that they care because of something other than facts or deeply held values? To put it another way, if a person starts thinking, and then they realise that their rationalizations for their feelings don’t add up, how does a person deal with this?
This comment responds to the second set of questions posed above.
How does a person deal with finding out that they care because of something other than facts or deeply held values? To put it another way, if a person starts thinking, and then they realise that their rationalizations for their feelings don’t add up, how does a person deal with this?
Two responses are:
Think harder and try to reconcile this inconsistency that has been found.
Avoid thinking more about this at all costs because it is so unpleasant to have your fundamental beliefs and values shaken up.
The second possible response is why warm, approachable caring community-builders are so valuable. It is also why it is so important for people to feel like they have permission to not act on what they believe to be important to act on.
Changing your mind is hard. Changing your mind is so much harder if you feel like you have to completely change your life and all your future plans every time a new consideration pops into your head that puts your previous conclusion on shaky ground.
This was really insightful: I can definitely envision how creating a warm, cozy atmosphere is crucial as a demonstration that 1) its safe to be vulnerable 2) other people have done this and it’s not so hard 3) that’s what we do here and it’s understood how difficult it is to do 4) you won’t be attacked for being unskilled at it
And it also helps elucidate how having an open but critical atmosphere doesn’t work for first time folks, even very thoughtful, open, truth-seeking ones. They aren’t ready to defend themselves in friendly combat, even as a game / helpful search for truth in such a state of world-instability.
Yeah, I also find it very de-stabilizing and then completely forget my own journey instantly once I’ve reconciled everything and am feeling stable and coherent again.
It’s nice to hear I’m not the only one here who isn’t 99.999 percentile stoically unaffected by this.
I think one way to deal with this is to mainly select for people with these weird dispositions who are unusually good at coping with this.
I think an issue with this is that the other 99% of planet Earth might be good allies to have in this whole “save the world” project and could actually get on board if we do community building exceptionally well. On the other hand, maybe this is too big an ask because community building is just really hard and by optimising for inclusivity, we maybe trade-off against other things that we care about possibly even more.
I personally don’t know what the optimal message for community-builders is but I hope we keep having these sorts of conversations. Even if it turns out that there is no good answer, I think it’s still worth it on expectation to think hard about this.
If we can guide community-builders better to manage these complexities and nuances, I think we’ll be able to create a much stronger ecosystem to help us tackle the world’s most pressing problems.
Also, thank you for navigating through my replies! I really appreciate you taking the time to read them.
I will limit myself to just this one comment so I don’t drown this post’s comment thread in any more of my spam. 😅
I have been told by friends that sometimes I talk in their presence but it’s pretty clear that I’m actually really talking to myself: ”...where would I have put my keys when I got home yesterday?” (or “what do I actually care about here?”)
This thinking requires time and patience that most people are too busy for or not curious enough for or too tired to question their current life choices and worldview (it is extremely exhausting to question your fundamental beliefs and values).
This is one key reason why the person who is interested in effective altruism and their relationship to the person who isn’t are such vital components to the equation in my mind.
This was such a lovely comment to receive!
A quick edited in note:
The replies got a tad out of hand and this whole thing of trying to structure my replies as distinct little sub-replies looks so spammy. I am very sorry (I clearly was way too excited about having a reply to my post)!
All the replies are structured so you definitely don’t have to read all the threads, just the ones that interest you. I’ve outlined the topic of each comment in each higher-level reply.
That is definitely not a no-brainer kind of question. I don’t have any neat answers because the answer varies so much between different cases.
Broadly speaking, it depends on the details of three things:
the individual who doesn’t care about causes the effective altruism community currently thinks are promising;
the individual who does care; and
their relationship to each other (eg. how much they trust each other, how honest they can be with each other, how much time they are likely to be able to spend together to talk more in-depth etc)
I’ve discussed these in more depth in two comment threads below because I started writing about the first one and the comment already felt too long (my new EA forum resolution is to break up my thoughts into distinct pieces more)! 🤣
One comment thread gives a bit more detail on the individual who doesn’t care about effective altruism. The other discusses the individual who does care about effective altruism.
I didn’t really feel like I needed a separate thread for the third component because I feel like it came up pretty naturally that, depending on the individuals (both the one that doesn’t care about effective altruism and the one that does), trust and time spent chatting curiously with each other can sometimes be necessary for any mind-changing or value discovery to occur.
EDIT: (I think everyone in the community is naturally a community-builder.
We all set the culture.
We all care about this enough to likely want to bring it up in some way to the people in our lives.
Why?
Because a big way to help others more is to get other people on board with the idea that making a difference really does seem way more actionable than many of us might have thought before coming across this group of incredibly smart and caring people.)
Why is the person who cares about effective altruism and their relationship to the person who doesn’t so key in answering this question?
Changing your mind is exhausting and challenging.
Changing your mind on topics that might affect all your future life choices and also might reflect badly on many of your past choices is incredibly difficult.
Asking someone to question everything either requires the person who is questioning everything to have:
a very weird disposition (unusually unaffected by wild swings in what their future should be and how good their past actions were); or
someone or many people there to gradually help them think clearly about what they truly believe about the world and what they truly care about.
I think often it requires both.
If the person in question does not have a very weird disposition and can just casually question everything, then they do not need much beyond a little exposure. However, 99.9% of people on planet Earth are not like that! 99.9% of people on planet Earth find questioning everything quite emotionally challenging.
This can make conversations breakdown very quickly without a lot of trust and care, especially if the conversation moves extremely quickly and questions a lot of things all at once in ways that are brand new.
There are several ways community-builders can mitigate this:
Take a lot of time to understand where the person who doesn’t care is coming from with an open and curious mind (how they see the world, what they currently care about and why they think the stuff they care about is worth caring about). People are so interesting and if you take a genuine interest in the person you are talking to, this can go a long way to not only giving you the tools to discuss all this incredibly challenging stuff in a sensitive way, but also can give you insight into this human being in front of you who cares deeply about various things in their lives for various reasons. I am always blown away by how much people care and also how differently they think and feel about things and it is generally pretty wonderful if you get an opportunity to hear about another person’s life passions and wordview.
Go slowly. Give people permission to take it at their own pace. Give people permission to take one small corner at a time and not change their whole lives and worldview immediately or at all. By giving people room to change their minds at a safe pace for them, they can be more intellectually honest with themselves and ease into the emotional rollar-coaster that is questioning everything you believe about the world and everything you value deep down at an appropriate pace.
Once we believe something, once we care about something, we all tend to forget the often long journey to that worldview and that passion. We enthusiastically feel like because it is now obvious to us that it always was and then talk to others like it is no big deal.
Usually, if you don’t have an exceptionally weird disposition, questioning everything you think about the world and everything you care about is a challenging journey. I took more time to come around than I remembered for a long-time, once it all felt obvious to me. The memories of everything it took to change my mind came back to me slowly. This is so human I think. We move on fast once we believe something, no matter how long the journey took. Once we believe something is true, it often feels like we always knew it deep down (when actually, I think our brains just conveniently forget that so we have more space to think about new things).
Remembering that changing your mind and accepting that you were wrong in the past and that all your future plans might be worth changing is bloody hard. For people to think clearly, they often need room and support. They also need permission to think differently! These are really hard questions! Smart people definitely can very reasonably disagree.
The role, I see, of a community builder, is to create a space where people can safely think about what they think and what they care about. It is not to convince them of any one particular answer or any one particular value system. It seems fine to nudge people towards a wider moral circle. It seems fine to present people with why you believe what you believe. The rest is an open-minded, open-hearted, curious conversation.
It was incredibly useful to be reminded of the obvious fact that rewriting a load-bearing belief is crazy. Doing it has had me in tumultuous staits that absolutely needed to be sorted out asap but I had no way forward and no way back.
Sometimes I have been uneasy for days trying to adjust to the new world. Sometimes it would make me feel like an imposter when I would talk to people about ordinary stuff. Incredibly uncomfortable experience that I do immediately forget.
What seems best to do when a person has no interest in EA causes naturally depends a lot on why the person has no interest. Some people have no interest in EA causes because:
They believe that the causes the EA community thinks are important are not, actually, important.
They believe that helping others is intractable.
They have a narrower moral circle than the people in this community have.
Usually, I think, it’s a blurry mix of all three of the above. I will discuss how it gets blurred together and how I think people end up sometimes getting clarity on what factors are most important to them in several separate comments.
Human minds conflate things a lot. Often a person’s beliefs about the world and what they care about are blurred together in a very confused way if they’ve never thought about it before.
Some key questions that come to mind, given people conflate things so much, are:
How does a person start to get clarity on whether they care about what they care about due to their beliefs about the world or their values?
How does a person deal with finding out that they care because of something other than facts or deeply held values? To put it another way, if a person starts thinking, and then they realise that their rationalizations for their feelings don’t add up, how does a person deal with this?
This comment responds to the second set of questions posed above.
How does a person deal with finding out that they care because of something other than facts or deeply held values? To put it another way, if a person starts thinking, and then they realise that their rationalizations for their feelings don’t add up, how does a person deal with this?
Two responses are:
Think harder and try to reconcile this inconsistency that has been found.
Avoid thinking more about this at all costs because it is so unpleasant to have your fundamental beliefs and values shaken up.
The second possible response is why warm, approachable caring community-builders are so valuable. It is also why it is so important for people to feel like they have permission to not act on what they believe to be important to act on.
Changing your mind is hard. Changing your mind is so much harder if you feel like you have to completely change your life and all your future plans every time a new consideration pops into your head that puts your previous conclusion on shaky ground.
This was really insightful: I can definitely envision how creating a warm, cozy atmosphere is crucial as a demonstration that 1) its safe to be vulnerable 2) other people have done this and it’s not so hard 3) that’s what we do here and it’s understood how difficult it is to do 4) you won’t be attacked for being unskilled at it
And it also helps elucidate how having an open but critical atmosphere doesn’t work for first time folks, even very thoughtful, open, truth-seeking ones. They aren’t ready to defend themselves in friendly combat, even as a game / helpful search for truth in such a state of world-instability.
Yeah, I also find it very de-stabilizing and then completely forget my own journey instantly once I’ve reconciled everything and am feeling stable and coherent again.
It’s nice to hear I’m not the only one here who isn’t 99.999 percentile stoically unaffected by this.
I think one way to deal with this is to mainly select for people with these weird dispositions who are unusually good at coping with this.
I think an issue with this is that the other 99% of planet Earth might be good allies to have in this whole “save the world” project and could actually get on board if we do community building exceptionally well. On the other hand, maybe this is too big an ask because community building is just really hard and by optimising for inclusivity, we maybe trade-off against other things that we care about possibly even more.
I personally don’t know what the optimal message for community-builders is but I hope we keep having these sorts of conversations. Even if it turns out that there is no good answer, I think it’s still worth it on expectation to think hard about this.
If we can guide community-builders better to manage these complexities and nuances, I think we’ll be able to create a much stronger ecosystem to help us tackle the world’s most pressing problems.
Also, thank you for navigating through my replies! I really appreciate you taking the time to read them.
I will limit myself to just this one comment so I don’t drown this post’s comment thread in any more of my spam. 😅
It is also a reason why the level of mutual trust between the person who cares about EA causes and the person who doesn’t can be so vital.
How does a person start to get clarity on whether they care about what they care about due to their beliefs about the world or their values?
This just seems to require a lot of thinking!
I have found that I can get the most clarity when I do a mix of:
exposing myself to various points of view (eg. through books and conversation); and then
either writing or talking myself into clarity (with other people or alone[1]).
I have been told by friends that sometimes I talk in their presence but it’s pretty clear that I’m actually really talking to myself: ”...where would I have put my keys when I got home yesterday?” (or “what do I actually care about here?”)
This thinking requires time and patience that most people are too busy for or not curious enough for or too tired to question their current life choices and worldview (it is extremely exhausting to question your fundamental beliefs and values).
This is one key reason why the person who is interested in effective altruism and their relationship to the person who isn’t are such vital components to the equation in my mind.