I’m grateful to everyone who’s ever written to me to report a bug, unexpected behavior, or suggestion related to the Forum. One of my favorite things about this community is that it’s full of people who don’t just want to help in big ways, but are also helpful in small ways.
Whenever I see someone accuse the community of being a giant virtue-signaling exercise, I think about the people who take time out of their days to send me detailed Intercom messages.
Illegible impact is, by comparison, invisible, like helping a friend who, without your help, might have been too depressed to get a better job and donate more money to effective charities or filling a seat in the room at an EA Global talk such that the speaker feels marginally more rewarded for having done the work they are talking about and marginally incentives them to do more. Illegible impact is either hard or impossible to measure or there’s no agreed upon model suggesting the action is correlated with impact. And the examples I gave are not maximally illegible because they had to be legible enough for me to explain them to you; the really invisible stuff is like dark matter—we can see signs of its existence (good stuff happens in the world) but we can’t tell you much about what it is (no model of how the good stuff happened).
The alluring trap is thinking that illegible impact is not impact and that legible impact is the only thing that matters.
I’m grateful to everyone who’s ever written to me to report a bug, unexpected behavior, or suggestion related to the Forum. One of my favorite things about this community is that it’s full of people who don’t just want to help in big ways, but are also helpful in small ways.
Whenever I see someone accuse the community of being a giant virtue-signaling exercise, I think about the people who take time out of their days to send me detailed Intercom messages.
This reminded me of the interesting post Illegible impact is still impact. An excerpt: