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.
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.