Good post! I think that addressing these concerns is definitely important; I have recently updated based on some similar conversations that I have had that the non-EA perception of EA is worse than I thought for reasons like these. However, on the object level, while I think that the mental health and social skills claims are probably true, I would be very surprised if EA’s were particularly bad at paying attention to their own feelings. Particularly in the Bay Area EA community, but AFAIK more broadly as well, I feel like there is a lot of focus on mental health, techniques like rationalist “focusing,” meditation, IFS etc. to get you in touch with your feelings, and lots of community discourse about these topics. Similarly, there is a lot of community attentions to problems like EA being a social bubble, burnout, and other ways in which EA can become too all encompassing. Am I missing something?
Good post! I think that addressing these concerns is definitely important; I have recently updated based on some similar conversations that I have had that the non-EA perception of EA is worse than I thought for reasons like these. However, on the object level, while I think that the mental health and social skills claims are probably true, I would be very surprised if EA’s were particularly bad at paying attention to their own feelings. Particularly in the Bay Area EA community, but AFAIK more broadly as well, I feel like there is a lot of focus on mental health, techniques like rationalist “focusing,” meditation, IFS etc. to get you in touch with your feelings, and lots of community discourse about these topics. Similarly, there is a lot of community attentions to problems like EA being a social bubble, burnout, and other ways in which EA can become too all encompassing. Am I missing something?