I have really positive feelings towards the effective altruism community on the whole. I think EA is one of the most important ideas out there right now.
However, I think that there is a lot of hostility in the movement towards those of us who started off as ‘ineffective altruists,’ as opposed to coming from the more typical Silicon Valley perspective. I have a high IQ, but I struggled through college and had to drop out of a STEM program as a result of serious mental health disturbances. After college, I wanted to make a difference, so I’ve spent my time since then working in crisis homeless shelters. I’ve broken up fistfights, intervened in heroin overdoses, received 2am death threats from paranoid meth addicts, mopped up the blood from miscarriages. I know that the work I’ve done isn’t as effective as what the Against Malaria Foundation does, but I’ve still worked really hard to help people, and I’ve found that my peers in the movement have been very dismissive of it.
I’m really looking to build skills in an area where I can do more effective direct work. I keep hearing that the movement is talent-constrained, but it isn’t clearly explained anywhere what the talent constraints are, specifically. I went to EA Global hoping for career advice—an expensive choice for someone in social work! -- but even talking one-on-one with Ben Todd, I didn’t get any actionable advice. There’s a lot of advice out there for people who are interested in earning to give, and for anyone who already has great career prospects, but for fuck-ups like me, there doesn’t seem to be any advice on skills to develop, how to go back to school, or anything of that kind.
When I’ve tried so hard to get any actionable advice whatsoever about what I should do, and nobody has any, and yet there’s nothing but contempt for people in social work or doing local volunteer work to make a difference—that’s a movement that isn’t accessible to me, and isn’t accessible to a lot of people, and it makes me want to ragequit. If you don’t respect the backbreaking work I’ve done for years while attempting to help people, that’s fine, but please have some kind of halfway viable advice for what I should be doing instead if you’re going to dismiss what I’m currently doing as ineffective.
Write about what you’ve learned doing direct work that might be relevant to EAs.
Reach out to me if I can be helpful with this in any way.
Keep doing the good work you know how to do, if you don’t see any better options.
Stay alert for high-leverage opportunities to do more, including opportunities you can see and other EAs can’t, where additional funding or people or expertise that EAs might have would be helpful.
“Keep doing the good work you know how to do, if you don’t see any better options” still sounds implicitly dismissive to me. It sounds like you believe there are better options, and only a lack of knowledge or vision is keeping this person from identifying them.
Breaking up fistfights and intervening in heroin overdoses to me sound like things that have small-to-moderate chances of preventing catastrophic, permanent harm to the people involved. I don’t know how often opportunities like that come up, but is it so hard to imagine they outstrip a GWWC pledger on an average or even substantially above-average salary?
Anonymous #28:
I want to hug this person so much!
I want to encourage this person to:
Write about what you’ve learned doing direct work that might be relevant to EAs.
Reach out to me if I can be helpful with this in any way.
Keep doing the good work you know how to do, if you don’t see any better options.
Stay alert for high-leverage opportunities to do more, including opportunities you can see and other EAs can’t, where additional funding or people or expertise that EAs might have would be helpful.
so much!
“Keep doing the good work you know how to do, if you don’t see any better options” still sounds implicitly dismissive to me. It sounds like you believe there are better options, and only a lack of knowledge or vision is keeping this person from identifying them.
Breaking up fistfights and intervening in heroin overdoses to me sound like things that have small-to-moderate chances of preventing catastrophic, permanent harm to the people involved. I don’t know how often opportunities like that come up, but is it so hard to imagine they outstrip a GWWC pledger on an average or even substantially above-average salary?