This is a Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked.
When I was pretty new to EA, I was way too optimistic about how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing experienced EAs would be.
I thought Open Phil would have some magic spreadsheets with the answers to all questions in the universe
I thought that, surely, experienced EAs had for 99% figured out what they thought was the biggest problem in the world
I imagined all EAs to have optimized almost everything, and to basically endorse all their decisions: their giving practices, their work-life balance, the way they talked about EA to others, etc.
I’ve now been around the community for a few years. I’m still really grateful for and excited about EA ideas, and I love being around the people inspired by EA ideas (I even work on growing our community!). However, I now also realize that today, I am far from how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing Joris-from-4-years-ago expected future Joris and his peers to be.
There’s two things that caused me to not live up to those ideals:
I was naive about how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing someone could realistically be
There’s good things I could reasonably do or should have reasonably done in the past 4 years
To make this concrete, I wanted to share some ways in which I think I’m not living up to my EA values or expectations from a few years ago. I think Joris-from-4-years-ago would’ve found this list helpful.[1]
I’m still not fully vegan
Donating:
I just default to the community norm of donating 10%, without having thought about it hard
I haven’t engaged for more than 30 minutes with arguments around e.g. patient philanthropy
I left my GWWC donations to literally the last day of the year and didn’t spend more than one hour on deciding where to donate
I have a lot less certainty over the actual positive impact of the programs we run than I expected when I started this job
I’m still as bad at math as I was in uni, meaning my botecs are just not that great
It’s so, so much harder than I expected to account for counterfactuals and to find things you can measure that are robustly good
I still find it really hard to pitch EA
I hope this inspires some people (especially those who I (and others) might look up to) to share how they’re not perfect. What are some ways in which you’re not living up to your values, or to what you-from-the-past maybe expected you would be doing by now?
I’ll leave it up to you whether these fall in category 1 (basically unattainable) or 2 (attainable). I also do not intend to turn this into a discussion of what things EAs “should” do, which things are actually robustly good, etc.
Ways in which I’m not living up to my EA values
When I was pretty new to EA, I was way too optimistic about how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing experienced EAs would be.
I thought Open Phil would have some magic spreadsheets with the answers to all questions in the universe
I thought that, surely, experienced EAs had for 99% figured out what they thought was the biggest problem in the world
I imagined all EAs to have optimized almost everything, and to basically endorse all their decisions: their giving practices, their work-life balance, the way they talked about EA to others, etc.
I’ve now been around the community for a few years. I’m still really grateful for and excited about EA ideas, and I love being around the people inspired by EA ideas (I even work on growing our community!). However, I now also realize that today, I am far from how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing Joris-from-4-years-ago expected future Joris and his peers to be.
There’s two things that caused me to not live up to those ideals:
I was naive about how Wise and Optimized and Ethical and All-Knowing someone could realistically be
There’s good things I could reasonably do or should have reasonably done in the past 4 years
To make this concrete, I wanted to share some ways in which I think I’m not living up to my EA values or expectations from a few years ago. I think Joris-from-4-years-ago would’ve found this list helpful.[1]
I’m still not fully vegan
Donating:
I just default to the community norm of donating 10%, without having thought about it hard
I haven’t engaged for more than 30 minutes with arguments around e.g. patient philanthropy
I left my GWWC donations to literally the last day of the year and didn’t spend more than one hour on deciding where to donate
I have a lot less certainty over the actual positive impact of the programs we run than I expected when I started this job
I’m still as bad at math as I was in uni, meaning my botecs are just not that great
It’s so, so much harder than I expected to account for counterfactuals and to find things you can measure that are robustly good
I still find it really hard to pitch EA
I hope this inspires some people (especially those who I (and others) might look up to) to share how they’re not perfect. What are some ways in which you’re not living up to your values, or to what you-from-the-past maybe expected you would be doing by now?
I’ll leave it up to you whether these fall in category 1 (basically unattainable) or 2 (attainable). I also do not intend to turn this into a discussion of what things EAs “should” do, which things are actually robustly good, etc.