The good argument for an EA to invest nonzero time in layman altruism (scrubbing oil off baby ducklings, cancer research, soup kitchens) emphasizes a kind of integrity cultivation, not the signaling/marketing value. (to be fair, mutual aid and harm reduction projects like soup kitchens would be the activity I actually endorse, more than the baby ducklings or cancer research).
“Street kindness” or interpersonal ethics is probably an underrated lever, because you have more refined control over how you wiggle it and the speed at which you consume feedback/measurements and update your strategy. My oldest friend with whom I logged over a hundred hours of workshopping theories of change to free the world from capitalism or patriarchy or whatever (in my sordid past) landed on something like what we call “lifestyle anarchism”, in other words when I asked her recently why she quit activism and decultivated her youthful ambition she said “because every interaction is an opportunity to make the world better” (with respect to her anti-coercion worldview, a kinda NVC vibe)
Ambitiously impartial massive levers/wins are still the right thing to want, but the daily path to them might be more intricate than, say, your behavior during a fastforward in the Click universe.
Back to the PG analogy: I think it’s rather too often EAs do the equivalent of saying “I will ascend from scrappy garage band to lex luthor in like a year, by doing things similar to what lex luthor is doing now”, when in reality you can’t start up a startup by acting like a 2023 FAANG acts. The playbooks actually have nothing in common evenif FAANGs were all garage bands at one point in time. I’m glad EA cultivates ambition and everything, but, YC cultivates ambition probably more effectively than EA does.
Your friend sounds delightful! I think actually, what I’m trying to point towards here is closer to “lifestyle anarchism” than classic virtue ethics. Coincidentally, I found myself defaulting back to explaining my values in anarchist terms when I announced my career transition from active EA community builder to baby influencer in my first blog post.
I guess it’s no coincidence that Rocky’s “on living without idols” is my all-time favorite on the EA forum.
Someone in discord asked about local volunteering opportunities and I said “idk for meatspace stuff impact isn’t really the point” and reiterated my comment to this post and mentioned fuzzies budgeting, then wrote the following:
I generally endorse any way of sampling from the population that disproportionately puts me in the room with sincere nonnihilistic noncynical nondefeatist people who have their heart in the right place, because it’s at least plausible that the “hey, I have an action space here!” mental circuit is more important than how much they’d like to measure/multiply/maximize. The people you meet (at say food not bombs) will vary in their sympathies to the three Ms, some of them just haven’t gotten the right invitation or haven’t dedicated enough scrutiny to it yet and others will never in any circumstance get into it. But almost all of them will have observed something broken and decided not to seethe and cope about it because they were too busy rolling up their sleeves. That makes them precious to me.
Yes. I think of this as “do things that don’t scale” applied to acts of kindness.
The good argument for an EA to invest nonzero time in layman altruism (scrubbing oil off baby ducklings, cancer research, soup kitchens) emphasizes a kind of integrity cultivation, not the signaling/marketing value. (to be fair, mutual aid and harm reduction projects like soup kitchens would be the activity I actually endorse, more than the baby ducklings or cancer research).
“Street kindness” or interpersonal ethics is probably an underrated lever, because you have more refined control over how you wiggle it and the speed at which you consume feedback/measurements and update your strategy. My oldest friend with whom I logged over a hundred hours of workshopping theories of change to free the world from capitalism or patriarchy or whatever (in my sordid past) landed on something like what we call “lifestyle anarchism”, in other words when I asked her recently why she quit activism and decultivated her youthful ambition she said “because every interaction is an opportunity to make the world better” (with respect to her anti-coercion worldview, a kinda NVC vibe)
Ambitiously impartial massive levers/wins are still the right thing to want, but the daily path to them might be more intricate than, say, your behavior during a fastforward in the Click universe.
Back to the PG analogy: I think it’s rather too often EAs do the equivalent of saying “I will ascend from scrappy garage band to lex luthor in like a year, by doing things similar to what lex luthor is doing now”, when in reality you can’t start up a startup by acting like a 2023 FAANG acts. The playbooks actually have nothing in common even if FAANGs were all garage bands at one point in time. I’m glad EA cultivates ambition and everything, but, YC cultivates ambition probably more effectively than EA does.
Agree with everything.
Your friend sounds delightful! I think actually, what I’m trying to point towards here is closer to “lifestyle anarchism” than classic virtue ethics. Coincidentally, I found myself defaulting back to explaining my values in anarchist terms when I announced my career transition from active EA community builder to baby influencer in my first blog post.
I guess it’s no coincidence that Rocky’s “on living without idols” is my all-time favorite on the EA forum.
Someone in discord asked about local volunteering opportunities and I said “idk for meatspace stuff impact isn’t really the point” and reiterated my comment to this post and mentioned fuzzies budgeting, then wrote the following:
I generally endorse any way of sampling from the population that disproportionately puts me in the room with sincere nonnihilistic noncynical nondefeatist people who have their heart in the right place, because it’s at least plausible that the “hey, I have an action space here!” mental circuit is more important than how much they’d like to measure/multiply/maximize. The people you meet (at say food not bombs) will vary in their sympathies to the three Ms, some of them just haven’t gotten the right invitation or haven’t dedicated enough scrutiny to it yet and others will never in any circumstance get into it. But almost all of them will have observed something broken and decided not to seethe and cope about it because they were too busy rolling up their sleeves. That makes them precious to me.