An idea for addressing the challenges is to make the safety net something that only a “genuine EA” would find attractive. For example, you get free room and board in a house with other EAs in a low-prestige + low-rent location, with mandatory EA volunteer hours (perhaps spent helping other inhabitants of the house with their issues?) Only vegan food is served, and the length of your stay is capped at N years. I’m not sure it’s necessary to be 100% resistant to outsiders with sob stories; I’d say the important thing is that outsiders with sob stories should be able to market those stories elsewhere & get more of what they want. Also, even if they fake their way into an EA support group like what I described, they might find they absorb EA values and identify as an EA at the end… lol.
This sounds like an almost exact description of the EA Hotel (CEEALAR), which is mentioned in the post. I think this does a pretty decent job of selecting for ‘genuine EA’ people
Having listened to the 80K podcast with Howie Lempel it seems that for him it was important to get out of a context where he was with EAs for work and friendship for a time in order to recover. So I’m not sure for which cases this would actually be a good solution.
Good point. However, since Howie was employed at an EA organization, he might be eligible for the idea described here. One approach is to implement several overlapping ideas, and if there’s an individual for whom none of the ideas work, they could go through the process Ozzie described in the OP (with the associated unfortunate downsides).
An idea for addressing the challenges is to make the safety net something that only a “genuine EA” would find attractive. For example, you get free room and board in a house with other EAs in a low-prestige + low-rent location, with mandatory EA volunteer hours (perhaps spent helping other inhabitants of the house with their issues?) Only vegan food is served, and the length of your stay is capped at N years. I’m not sure it’s necessary to be 100% resistant to outsiders with sob stories; I’d say the important thing is that outsiders with sob stories should be able to market those stories elsewhere & get more of what they want. Also, even if they fake their way into an EA support group like what I described, they might find they absorb EA values and identify as an EA at the end… lol.
This sounds like an almost exact description of the EA Hotel (CEEALAR), which is mentioned in the post. I think this does a pretty decent job of selecting for ‘genuine EA’ people
Although I don’t think they have mandatory volunteering?
Having listened to the 80K podcast with Howie Lempel it seems that for him it was important to get out of a context where he was with EAs for work and friendship for a time in order to recover. So I’m not sure for which cases this would actually be a good solution.
Good point. However, since Howie was employed at an EA organization, he might be eligible for the idea described here. One approach is to implement several overlapping ideas, and if there’s an individual for whom none of the ideas work, they could go through the process Ozzie described in the OP (with the associated unfortunate downsides).