I like quite a bit of this post (particularly points #2,3,6,7), but also left it feeling uneasy and with a desire to downvote (although I haven’t done that because I’m conflicted).
I’m having trouble putting my finger on what I don’t like. I think it’s something like “I expect some people to be allergic to this, and it to correlate with the people who most need to hear the advice” (and the people who most feel excited about this correlating with those who most need to hear the opposite advice). So I’m feeling good about its existence as a resource to point specific people to (although a version which was less likely to trigger allergies would be even better!), but bad about the idea of it entering into EA cannon or being broadly seen as representing what EA is.
I guess I’ve talked myself into downvoting (since I currently think there are better effects from it having low karma), but I want to attach this to a “thank you for writing it”.
Oh maybe another thing that I feel uneasy about is the reinforcement of the message “the things you need are in other people’s gift”, and the way the post (especially #1) kind of presents “agency” as primarily a social thing (later points do this less but I think it’s too late to impact the implicit takeaway.
Sometimes social agency is good, but I’m not sure I want to generically increase it in society, and I’m not sure I want EA associated with it. I’m especially worried about people getting social agency without having something like “groundedness”.
(Thoughts still feel slightly muddled/incomplete, but guessing it’s better to share than not)
I agree with some of what you wrote. I don’t want the subtext of the post to be “you should amass social capital so that senior people will do you favours.”
Some thoughts:
It’s generally the case that ‘social domineeringness’ is a trait that is rewarded by society. Similar to intelligence, people who have this quality will probs be more likely to achieve their goals. (This makes me kinda uncomfortable, but I think it’s broadly true and it doesn’t seem good to ignore it).
Given that this is the case, I want to encourage this quality in EAs.
However, I would rather see EAs have this quality when interacting with non-EAs. Like, if young EAs all start asking senior EAs for favours, the EA landscape will become competitive and zero-sum.
BUT it seems strictly good for EAs to be socially domineering in non-EA contexts. Like… I want young EAs to out-compete non-EAs for internship or opportunities that will help them skill build. (This framing has a bad aesthetic, but I can’t think of a nicer way to say it.)
I’m curious about the specific parts that you think people would be allergic to.
I get where you’re coming from (although I think domineeringness is less universally rewarded than intelligence across different parts of society). But given that we don’t think the ideal society consists of people being very domineering, I worry that the indirect harms of pushing this in EA culture may be significant. I think it’s harder to know what these are than the benefits, but I’m worried that it’s a kind of naive consequentialist stance to privilege the things we have cleaner explicit arguments for.
At the very least I think there’s something like a “missing mood” of ~sadness here about pushing for EAs to do lots of this. The attitude I want EAs to be adopting is more like “obviously in an ideal world this wouldn’t be rewarded, but in the world we live in it is, and the moral purity of avoiding this generally isn’t worth the foregone benefits”. If we don’t have that sadness I worry that (a) it’s more likely that we forget our fundamentals and this becomes part of the culture unthinkingly, and (b) a bunch of conscientious people who intuit the costs of people turning this dial up see the attitudes towards it and decide that EA isn’t for them.
This is exacerbated by the fact that I don’t think there’s a clean boundary between EA and non-EA worlds (e.g. if there are EA-adjacent professors perhaps lots of the applicants to work with them are EAs, and we don’t really want the competition between them to be in terms of domineeringness).
But … I don’t think sadness is always correct around this! In particular I think many people do much less of putting themselves forwards // asking for favours than is socially optimal! I think most of the benefits of getting EAs to do more of this comes from the uncomplicated good of getting those people up to the social ideal rather than from the complicated case where there are tradeoffs. I think something which helped people to get up there (by helping them to think about what’s socially ideal and when it’s ambiguous whether to do more) would be really great.
To add some more thoughts along being “grounded,” my sports team has a culture of “grateful for everything, entitled to nothing.” You lost a race? Entitled to nothing. Had a productive injury free day? Grateful for everything. The attitude helps a lot for building resiliency and the stamina to continue. In the context of this post, if you get rejected the last thing you want to do is mope about and act entitled to what you’re asking for. And when you do get a yes, the other person will appreciate how grateful you are.
More seriously, this is a very powerful set of ideas and attitudes and I wish I had known them about 15 years earlier. (For contrast, during my school work experience I painted lines on country roads.)
You know my views about high schoolers being systematically underestimated and fully capable of greatness, so well done for bucking the trend. That said, there is such a thing as too much agency (e.g. starting a company without checking the competition or without knowing what the market fit is; e.g. starting a big impact-oriented project without looking to see if it’s been done).
It seems likely that summers spent reading whatever you feel like, and even years spent just becoming yourself, yields certain virtues and groundedness which full blown first-order life optimisation doesn’t. The annoying thing is that I can’t say which of the two any given person needs more of on the margin.
(See also Owen on overoptimisation or Elizabeth on being a potted plant.)
[On the title—you gotta have fun with these things haha]
Thanks Gavin!
Yes, the laws of equal and opposite advice defo apply here.
I also wonder whether this sort of thing becomes zero sum within a small enough environment (e.g. if everyone starts lowering their bar for asking for help, people will raise their bar for saying yes, because they will be inundated with requests). Could lead to competitor dynamics (discussed in the comments of this post), which seems unfortunate.
I really like the point of spending years ‘becoming yourself’. Like, I probs just want my younger siblings to chill out and spend a lot of time with their friends and doing stuff that feels hedonically good to them. I like the point about groundedness. I felt ungrounded and uncertain when I was first immersed in EA, and I think this could (?) have been less if I was older. I’m kinda unsure, and think it’s maybe inevitable to feel unsettled when you are introduced to and immersed in a very new culture/worldview in a short space of time.
Where is Elizabeth’s post on being a potted plant? Could you send it?
To avoid the “opposite advice” thing, maybe we can just talk about in absolute terms what are good amounts to ask for help?
My guess is that people should ask their friends/colleagues/acquaintances for help with things a few times a week, and ask senior people they don’t know for help with things a few times a year. This is based on a sense of “imagining everyone was doing this” and wondering where I want to turn the dial to. I’m interested if others have different takes about the ideal level.
I think if people are asking noticeably less than that they should be seriously asking themselves if they should be ramping it up. And if people are asking noticeably more they should be seriously asking themselves if they should be turning it down.
I think that people receiving requests should tend to look for signals that suggest that the person makes few/many requests, and be more inclined to be positive if they make few or more inclined to be negative if they make many—in order to try to get the overall incentive landscape right to encourage people to make about the right number of requests. Of course this is kind of hard to detect particularly if someone is cold emailing you … anyone have better ideas?
My guess is that people should ask their friends/colleagues/acquaintances for help with things a few times a week, and ask senior people they don’t know for help with things a few times a year. T
Is this a few times each person, or a few times total? It’s hard for me to tell because either seems slightly off to me.
I meant like maybe 3-15 times total (“few” was too ambiguous to be a good word choice).
Writing that out maybe I want to change it to 3-30 (the top end of which doesn’t feel quite like “a few”). And I can already feel how I should be giving more precise categories // how taking what I said literally will mean not doing enough asking in some important circumstances, even if I stand by my numbers in some important spiritual sense.
Anyway I’m super interested to get other people’s guesses about the right numbers here. (Perhaps with better categories.)
Sure that makes more sense to me. I was previously reading “few” as 2-4 times, and was thinking that’s way too few times to be asking for help from coworkers total in a week, but a bit too high to be asking (many) specific senior people for help each year.
I’m sure it’s context dependent and depends on size of favours. But I’m not sure it depends that much—and I’m worried that if we don’t discuss numbers it’s easy for people who are naturally disinclined to ask to think “oh I’m probably doing this enough already” (or people who are naturally inclined to do this a lot already to think “oh yeah I totally need to do that more”).
Maybe you could give a context where you think my numbers are badly off?
As an occasional antidote to forced-march
life: consider yourself as a homeostatic organism with a particular trajectory. Like a plant in a pot.
What does a plant need? Water, light, space, soil, nitrogen, pest defence, pollinators. What are the potted human equivalents? What would an environment which gave you this without striving look like? What do you need to become yourself?
(You can reshape a plant, like bonsai, but really not too much or you’ll kill it or stunt it.)
Some rejections are inevitable, and never getting rejected is a sign of unhealthy risk aversion. But I think if you get rejected much more than equivalent people in your situation (eg. applying to twenty colleges and getting no acceptances), changing your strategy is more important than just trying harder.
Every time I get rejected, I write it in a Google doc. I am playing a game with myself, and the goal is to maximise my rejections. This technique has single-handedly transformed my approach to rejection.
I love this. Moreover, this framing seems applicable across a whole spectrum of experiences, from job applications to social situations.
Gorgeous post! Up next, I’d like to see a followup from an older person’s perspective about preservation of agentiness, because I have a number of friends who started out very agenty then kinda tapered off by their mid 20s.
In reading the post, I do appreciate the sentiments. However, I do think there’s still that idea that system-level / organizational-level barriers (unable to develop psychological safety, toxic work environments, internal biases in the workplace, organizational leadership hierarchical structures having no diversity, etc.) can prevent people from becoming more agentic. While I see that the blog focuses on what individuals can do, I wish it explicitly acknowledges that it WILL be harder for some individuals. While individuals can try and overcome this, there is work to be done at the overall level to make it easier for people to become more agentic.
I really liked the idea of a rejection doc when I first came across it. I have one with my brother, and it’s been super helpful in keeping us motivated.
Just what I needed to hear. It’s easy to become discouraged, but often finding an EA who can help you in your project to work toward a better world (and finding someone whose project you can help) is a numbers game. Like you say, developing resilience and empathy regarding gaps in perspective is critical toward advancing others’ good ideas and finding help for yours to be advanced by others. This is definitely something I’m acutely struggling with.
This is great—really inspiring, makes me want to do more of all of those things! Thank you for writing this! I’m going to create a rejection list right now.
One thing I thought in reaction to this is that a reason we might hesitate to be more agentic is being uncomfortable setting boundaries.
When you put-yourself-out-there a lot, you will also start being asked for things more. Or you might put yourself in a situation that feels bad for some other reason. Being comfortable rejecting requests or removing yourself from a situation seems like a really important related thing to work on.
I love this post, it is so engagingly written. And the links are great, and have opened up valuable new ideas and sources for me. I strongly recommend your list of further reading and. indeed, all the links you provide.
You and your sources make the case for a number of very valuable ideas including asking for help, using social media, writing blogs, taking action, taking risk. How far to pursue each of these will obviously depend on personality and circumstances and will be a matter of balance.
I love this post, it is so engagingly written. And the links are great, and have opened up valuable new ideas and sources for me. I strongly recommend your list of further reading and. indeed, all the links you provide.
You and your sources make the case for a number of very valuable ideas including asking for help, using social media, writing blogs, taking action, taking risk. How far to pursue each of these will obviously depend on personality and circumstances and will be a matter of balance.
I like quite a bit of this post (particularly points #2,3,6,7), but also left it feeling uneasy and with a desire to downvote (although I haven’t done that because I’m conflicted).
I’m having trouble putting my finger on what I don’t like. I think it’s something like “I expect some people to be allergic to this, and it to correlate with the people who most need to hear the advice” (and the people who most feel excited about this correlating with those who most need to hear the opposite advice). So I’m feeling good about its existence as a resource to point specific people to (although a version which was less likely to trigger allergies would be even better!), but bad about the idea of it entering into EA cannon or being broadly seen as representing what EA is.
I guess I’ve talked myself into downvoting (since I currently think there are better effects from it having low karma), but I want to attach this to a “thank you for writing it”.
Oh maybe another thing that I feel uneasy about is the reinforcement of the message “the things you need are in other people’s gift”, and the way the post (especially #1) kind of presents “agency” as primarily a social thing (later points do this less but I think it’s too late to impact the implicit takeaway.
Sometimes social agency is good, but I’m not sure I want to generically increase it in society, and I’m not sure I want EA associated with it. I’m especially worried about people getting social agency without having something like “groundedness”.
(Thoughts still feel slightly muddled/incomplete, but guessing it’s better to share than not)
Thank you for the comments!
I agree with some of what you wrote. I don’t want the subtext of the post to be “you should amass social capital so that senior people will do you favours.”
Some thoughts:
It’s generally the case that ‘social domineeringness’ is a trait that is rewarded by society. Similar to intelligence, people who have this quality will probs be more likely to achieve their goals. (This makes me kinda uncomfortable, but I think it’s broadly true and it doesn’t seem good to ignore it).
Given that this is the case, I want to encourage this quality in EAs.
However, I would rather see EAs have this quality when interacting with non-EAs. Like, if young EAs all start asking senior EAs for favours, the EA landscape will become competitive and zero-sum.
BUT it seems strictly good for EAs to be socially domineering in non-EA contexts. Like… I want young EAs to out-compete non-EAs for internship or opportunities that will help them skill build. (This framing has a bad aesthetic, but I can’t think of a nicer way to say it.)
I’m curious about the specific parts that you think people would be allergic to.
I get where you’re coming from (although I think domineeringness is less universally rewarded than intelligence across different parts of society). But given that we don’t think the ideal society consists of people being very domineering, I worry that the indirect harms of pushing this in EA culture may be significant. I think it’s harder to know what these are than the benefits, but I’m worried that it’s a kind of naive consequentialist stance to privilege the things we have cleaner explicit arguments for.
At the very least I think there’s something like a “missing mood” of ~sadness here about pushing for EAs to do lots of this. The attitude I want EAs to be adopting is more like “obviously in an ideal world this wouldn’t be rewarded, but in the world we live in it is, and the moral purity of avoiding this generally isn’t worth the foregone benefits”. If we don’t have that sadness I worry that (a) it’s more likely that we forget our fundamentals and this becomes part of the culture unthinkingly, and (b) a bunch of conscientious people who intuit the costs of people turning this dial up see the attitudes towards it and decide that EA isn’t for them.
This is exacerbated by the fact that I don’t think there’s a clean boundary between EA and non-EA worlds (e.g. if there are EA-adjacent professors perhaps lots of the applicants to work with them are EAs, and we don’t really want the competition between them to be in terms of domineeringness).
But … I don’t think sadness is always correct around this! In particular I think many people do much less of putting themselves forwards // asking for favours than is socially optimal! I think most of the benefits of getting EAs to do more of this comes from the uncomplicated good of getting those people up to the social ideal rather than from the complicated case where there are tradeoffs. I think something which helped people to get up there (by helping them to think about what’s socially ideal and when it’s ambiguous whether to do more) would be really great.
To add some more thoughts along being “grounded,” my sports team has a culture of “grateful for everything, entitled to nothing.” You lost a race? Entitled to nothing. Had a productive injury free day? Grateful for everything. The attitude helps a lot for building resiliency and the stamina to continue. In the context of this post, if you get rejected the last thing you want to do is mope about and act entitled to what you’re asking for. And when you do get a yes, the other person will appreciate how grateful you are.
[Was this title written by an inner optimiser?]
More seriously, this is a very powerful set of ideas and attitudes and I wish I had known them about 15 years earlier. (For contrast, during my school work experience I painted lines on country roads.)
You know my views about high schoolers being systematically underestimated and fully capable of greatness, so well done for bucking the trend. That said, there is such a thing as too much agency (e.g. starting a company without checking the competition or without knowing what the market fit is; e.g. starting a big impact-oriented project without looking to see if it’s been done).
It seems likely that summers spent reading whatever you feel like, and even years spent just becoming yourself, yields certain virtues and groundedness which full blown first-order life optimisation doesn’t. The annoying thing is that I can’t say which of the two any given person needs more of on the margin.
(See also Owen on overoptimisation or Elizabeth on being a potted plant.)
[On the title—you gotta have fun with these things haha]
Thanks Gavin!
Yes, the laws of equal and opposite advice defo apply here.
I also wonder whether this sort of thing becomes zero sum within a small enough environment (e.g. if everyone starts lowering their bar for asking for help, people will raise their bar for saying yes, because they will be inundated with requests). Could lead to competitor dynamics (discussed in the comments of this post), which seems unfortunate.
I really like the point of spending years ‘becoming yourself’. Like, I probs just want my younger siblings to chill out and spend a lot of time with their friends and doing stuff that feels hedonically good to them. I like the point about groundedness. I felt ungrounded and uncertain when I was first immersed in EA, and I think this could (?) have been less if I was older. I’m kinda unsure, and think it’s maybe inevitable to feel unsettled when you are introduced to and immersed in a very new culture/worldview in a short space of time.
Where is Elizabeth’s post on being a potted plant? Could you send it?
To avoid the “opposite advice” thing, maybe we can just talk about in absolute terms what are good amounts to ask for help?
My guess is that people should ask their friends/colleagues/acquaintances for help with things a few times a week, and ask senior people they don’t know for help with things a few times a year. This is based on a sense of “imagining everyone was doing this” and wondering where I want to turn the dial to. I’m interested if others have different takes about the ideal level.
I think if people are asking noticeably less than that they should be seriously asking themselves if they should be ramping it up. And if people are asking noticeably more they should be seriously asking themselves if they should be turning it down.
I think that people receiving requests should tend to look for signals that suggest that the person makes few/many requests, and be more inclined to be positive if they make few or more inclined to be negative if they make many—in order to try to get the overall incentive landscape right to encourage people to make about the right number of requests. Of course this is kind of hard to detect particularly if someone is cold emailing you … anyone have better ideas?
Is this a few times each person, or a few times total? It’s hard for me to tell because either seems slightly off to me.
I meant like maybe 3-15 times total (“few” was too ambiguous to be a good word choice).
Writing that out maybe I want to change it to 3-30 (the top end of which doesn’t feel quite like “a few”). And I can already feel how I should be giving more precise categories // how taking what I said literally will mean not doing enough asking in some important circumstances, even if I stand by my numbers in some important spiritual sense.
Anyway I’m super interested to get other people’s guesses about the right numbers here. (Perhaps with better categories.)
Sure that makes more sense to me. I was previously reading “few” as 2-4 times, and was thinking that’s way too few times to be asking for help from coworkers total in a week, but a bit too high to be asking (many) specific senior people for help each year.
My guess is that it’s just very context dependent — I’m not sure how generalisable these sorts of numbers are.
It also seems like the size of favours would vary a ton and make it hard to give a helpful number.
I’m sure it’s context dependent and depends on size of favours. But I’m not sure it depends that much—and I’m worried that if we don’t discuss numbers it’s easy for people who are naturally disinclined to ask to think “oh I’m probably doing this enough already” (or people who are naturally inclined to do this a lot already to think “oh yeah I totally need to do that more”).
Maybe you could give a context where you think my numbers are badly off?
From memory:
As an occasional antidote to forced-march life: consider yourself as a homeostatic organism with a particular trajectory. Like a plant in a pot.
What does a plant need? Water, light, space, soil, nitrogen, pest defence, pollinators. What are the potted human equivalents? What would an environment which gave you this without striving look like? What do you need to become yourself?
(You can reshape a plant, like bonsai, but really not too much or you’ll kill it or stunt it.)
Some rejections are inevitable, and never getting rejected is a sign of unhealthy risk aversion. But I think if you get rejected much more than equivalent people in your situation (eg. applying to twenty colleges and getting no acceptances), changing your strategy is more important than just trying harder.
“Agency” needs nuance—an update from the author.
I love this. Moreover, this framing seems applicable across a whole spectrum of experiences, from job applications to social situations.
Gorgeous post! Up next, I’d like to see a followup from an older person’s perspective about preservation of agentiness, because I have a number of friends who started out very agenty then kinda tapered off by their mid 20s.
In reading the post, I do appreciate the sentiments. However, I do think there’s still that idea that system-level / organizational-level barriers (unable to develop psychological safety, toxic work environments, internal biases in the workplace, organizational leadership hierarchical structures having no diversity, etc.) can prevent people from becoming more agentic. While I see that the blog focuses on what individuals can do, I wish it explicitly acknowledges that it WILL be harder for some individuals. While individuals can try and overcome this, there is work to be done at the overall level to make it easier for people to become more agentic.
Good post!
I really liked the idea of a rejection doc when I first came across it. I have one with my brother, and it’s been super helpful in keeping us motivated.
Just what I needed to hear. It’s easy to become discouraged, but often finding an EA who can help you in your project to work toward a better world (and finding someone whose project you can help) is a numbers game. Like you say, developing resilience and empathy regarding gaps in perspective is critical toward advancing others’ good ideas and finding help for yours to be advanced by others. This is definitely something I’m acutely struggling with.
This is great—really inspiring, makes me want to do more of all of those things! Thank you for writing this! I’m going to create a rejection list right now.
One thing I thought in reaction to this is that a reason we might hesitate to be more agentic is being uncomfortable setting boundaries.
When you put-yourself-out-there a lot, you will also start being asked for things more. Or you might put yourself in a situation that feels bad for some other reason. Being comfortable rejecting requests or removing yourself from a situation seems like a really important related thing to work on.
Re: #2, you might enjoy this piece on shared rejection spreadsheets and rejection parties: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/01/celebrate-your-rejections-failures/621327/
Great breakdown of the skills and concrete steps, thanks for writing this! I can already tell I’ll be linking people to this fairly often :)
Thanks! I liked these a lot—especially endorse #2 and #6.
Thanks Kevin :)
I love this post, it is so engagingly written. And the links are great, and have opened up valuable new ideas and sources for me. I strongly recommend your list of further reading and. indeed, all the links you provide.
You and your sources make the case for a number of very valuable ideas including asking for help, using social media, writing blogs, taking action, taking risk. How far to pursue each of these will obviously depend on personality and circumstances and will be a matter of balance.
I love this post, it is so engagingly written. And the links are great, and have opened up valuable new ideas and sources for me. I strongly recommend your list of further reading and. indeed, all the links you provide.
You and your sources make the case for a number of very valuable ideas including asking for help, using social media, writing blogs, taking action, taking risk. How far to pursue each of these will obviously depend on personality and circumstances and will be a matter of balance.