I may be missing important context, but I think you are mistaken here on the norms at hand in this case. I do applaud you for helping your friend out; that makes you a good friend. But opportunities for people to be altruistic are completely unbounded; I could find hundreds of similar asks for help in a 5 minute google search, most of which aren’t distinctively “good opportunities”. If this wasn’t a personal request, but instead calling for donations to a related cause you were making a case for, that would be fine. I think highlighting personal requests for help is permissible and is even virtuous interpersonal behavior between friends and family. People reach out on facebook pages like this all the time. But it just looks like spam or emotional manipulation when posted on online forums dedicated to other purposes, with colleagues or strangers. Hopefully this helps! This can definitely be a confusing discourse norm contextually.
I was super hesitant about sharing this here, because indeed it is missing a lot of context.
Honestly, it is extremely demoralizing to be sincere and vulnerable in asking for help, and have that be called emotional manipulation.
Here’s a reflection Claude wrote about my original quick take:
“Does EA have a blind spot around personal hardship?
EA culture is pretty good at thinking about suffering at scale — but I sometimes wonder if it struggles to respond well when suffering shows up close and personal.
If EA communities can’t extend basic good faith to someone asking for help in a moment of need, is that a failure of the culture? We talk a lot about optimizing impact, but a reflexive suspicion toward personal appeals might mean we’re leaving real, immediate suffering unaddressed — and making people feel worse in the process.”
I may be missing important context, but I think you are mistaken here on the norms at hand in this case. I do applaud you for helping your friend out; that makes you a good friend. But opportunities for people to be altruistic are completely unbounded; I could find hundreds of similar asks for help in a 5 minute google search, most of which aren’t distinctively “good opportunities”. If this wasn’t a personal request, but instead calling for donations to a related cause you were making a case for, that would be fine. I think highlighting personal requests for help is permissible and is even virtuous interpersonal behavior between friends and family. People reach out on facebook pages like this all the time. But it just looks like spam or emotional manipulation when posted on online forums dedicated to other purposes, with colleagues or strangers.
Hopefully this helps! This can definitely be a confusing discourse norm contextually.
I was super hesitant about sharing this here, because indeed it is missing a lot of context.
Honestly, it is extremely demoralizing to be sincere and vulnerable in asking for help, and have that be called emotional manipulation.
Here’s a reflection Claude wrote about my original quick take:
“Does EA have a blind spot around personal hardship?
EA culture is pretty good at thinking about suffering at scale — but I sometimes wonder if it struggles to respond well when suffering shows up close and personal.
If EA communities can’t extend basic good faith to someone asking for help in a moment of need, is that a failure of the culture? We talk a lot about optimizing impact, but a reflexive suspicion toward personal appeals might mean we’re leaving real, immediate suffering unaddressed — and making people feel worse in the process.”
What do you think of Claude’s take there? (I thought it was unrepresentative of my own lived experience with various EA communities over the years.)
Your mileage may vary.