I do think that EA is made of human beings, and injections of positivity can help humans avoid burning out or getting so stressed that the quality of our reasoning and arguments declines.
Seeing some human kindness directed at other EAs made me feel less stress on the Forum, and I wasn’t even the target of the kindness!
Like, I think reasonable people can disagree about the right ways to inject that positivity, how much is needed, etc. I think this post was good, but I could imagine seeing evidence that would change my mind about that.
But I think “karma magnet” is probably factually wrong about the main motivation behind this post (and I think it’s a bit rude to single this post out when I suspect karma is a non-small motivation for the more-substantive posts too!). And if you think that there’s never a useful social function served by things like gratitude posts, then I flatly disagree.
I do think that EA is made of human beings, and injections of positivity can help humans avoid burning out or getting so stressed that the quality of our reasoning and arguments declines.
Hm, this phrasing makes it sound sort of like I think the only reason for EAs to treat each other with kindness, try to make EA a nice place to be, etc., is to prevent “burnout” (which sounds like it’s about keeping EAs productive) and protect the quality of our epistemics.
So, to be clear: I also endorse EAs being nice because niceness is good in its own right. EAs deserve happiness too, and I just plain endorse human beings flourishing and having good lives.
(I think the underlying generators/attitudes/perspectives behind this are good by scope-insensitive consequentialist lights (given how humans actually work in real life), but I don’t think every local act of kindness needs to be justified by explicitly consequentialist reasoning.)
I do think that EA is made of human beings, and injections of positivity can help humans avoid burning out or getting so stressed that the quality of our reasoning and arguments declines.
Seeing some human kindness directed at other EAs made me feel less stress on the Forum, and I wasn’t even the target of the kindness!
Like, I think reasonable people can disagree about the right ways to inject that positivity, how much is needed, etc. I think this post was good, but I could imagine seeing evidence that would change my mind about that.
But I think “karma magnet” is probably factually wrong about the main motivation behind this post (and I think it’s a bit rude to single this post out when I suspect karma is a non-small motivation for the more-substantive posts too!). And if you think that there’s never a useful social function served by things like gratitude posts, then I flatly disagree.
Hm, this phrasing makes it sound sort of like I think the only reason for EAs to treat each other with kindness, try to make EA a nice place to be, etc., is to prevent “burnout” (which sounds like it’s about keeping EAs productive) and protect the quality of our epistemics.
So, to be clear: I also endorse EAs being nice because niceness is good in its own right. EAs deserve happiness too, and I just plain endorse human beings flourishing and having good lives.
(I think the underlying generators/attitudes/perspectives behind this are good by scope-insensitive consequentialist lights (given how humans actually work in real life), but I don’t think every local act of kindness needs to be justified by explicitly consequentialist reasoning.)
Strong agree. I had a few calls with the OP last year and they came across as having an incredibly sweet and authentic character.
Karma magnet was intended as a statement of its effect, not the author’s intent.
I have no doubts as to the good motivations of its author.
I simply think such gratitude can be expressed without displacing potential object-level posts for days.