The section “Aptitude-agnostic vision: general longtermism strengthening” reminded me of the post Illegible impact is still impact. I liked that post, but/and also think think that the specific examples you give in your section might be better examples to point to than the examples given in that post.
Here are some excerpts from that post:
In the case of impact, legible impact is that which can be measured easily in ways that a model predicts is correlated with outcomes. Examples of legible impact measures for altruistic efforts include counterfactual lives saved, QALYs, DALYs, and money donated; examples of legible impact measures for altruistic individuals include the preceding plus things like academic citations and degrees, jobs at EA organizations, and EA Forum karma.
Some impact is semi-legible, like social status among EAs, claims of research progress, and social media engagement. [...]
Illegible impact is, by comparison, invisible, like helping a friend who, without your help, might have been too depressed to get a better job and donate more money to effective charities or filling a seat in the room at an EA Global talk such that the speaker feels marginally more rewarded for having done the work they are talking about and marginally incentives them to do more. Illegible impact is either hard or impossible to measure or there’s no agreed upon model suggesting the action is correlated with impact. And the examples I gave are not maximally illegible because they had to be legible enough for me to explain them to you; the really invisible stuff is like dark matter—we can see signs of its existence (good stuff happens in the world) but we can’t tell you much about what it is (no model of how the good stuff happened).
The alluring trap is thinking that illegible impact is not impact and that legible impact is the only thing that matters. If that doesn’t resonate, I recommend checking out the links above on legibility to see when and how focusing on the legible to the exclusion of the illegible can lead to failure.
[...] To me the first step is acknowledging that illegible impact is still impact. For example, to me all of the following activities are positively impactful to EA such that if we didn’t have enough of them going on then the EA movement would be less effective and less impactful and if we had more of them going on then EA would be more effective and more impactful, yet all of them produce impact of low legibility, especially for the person performing the action:
Reading the EA Forum, LessWrong, the Alignment Forum, EA Facebook, EA Reddit, EA Twitter, EA Tumblr, etc.
Voting on, liking, and sharing content on and from those places
Helping a depressed/anxious/etc. (EA) friend
Going to EA meetups, conferences, etc. to be a member in the audience
Talking to others about EA
Simply being counted as part of the EA community
The “general longtermism strengthening” section also reminded me of the EA Wiki entry scalably using labour and various posts with that tag.
The section “Aptitude-agnostic vision: general longtermism strengthening” reminded me of the post Illegible impact is still impact. I liked that post, but/and also think think that the specific examples you give in your section might be better examples to point to than the examples given in that post.
Here are some excerpts from that post:
The “general longtermism strengthening” section also reminded me of the EA Wiki entry scalably using labour and various posts with that tag.