And EA is the social life, not professional for a lot of us.
I want to say something specifically in response to this.
It’s great that EAs can be friends with each other. But EA has a mission. It’s not a social club. We’re here to do good better. Things that get in the way of doing good better should be dropped if we actually care about the mission.
The trouble is I know lots of people have impoverished social lives. They have maybe one or maybe two communities to build social bonds within. So when you’re in that stance the natural thing is to try to extract as much value from the one community you have, whether or not that is well advised.
The better strategy is to get some more communities!
I’ve seen this a lot within rationalist spaces. People come in and want to make rationality their whole identity. This isn’t a unique phenomenon. People try to do it with religion, hobbies, all kind of stuff. It’s almost always a mistake. We have the common wisdom against putting all your eggs in one basket for a reason.
Be friends with fellow EAs. Have a social life with some of them. But don’t let that be the whole social scene! That’s why we’re in this mess in the first place! We’ve got people who’ve mixed up their only personal and professional settings and now trouble in one means trouble in all of it. People’s whole lives fall apart because one part goes bad and they have no where to turn. And that’s just how it is, there’s nothing unusual about it; would happen anywhere and anytime someone wraps their entire life around a single thing. That’s not the way to have resilient social bonds that enable a person to do the most good in the world. It’s a way to do some good for a while until something goes wrong and then burnout or be ostracized and then do less good.
(I know this is perhaps a bit ranty, but I see people fucking this up all the time in EA and I just want to shake some sense into everyone because this is extremely obvious stuff that nerd-like people mess up all the time.)
“The better strategy is to get some more communities!”
Does this really work for most people?
I think my life over the past year or so has been substantially enriched as I’ve gone from seeing my rationalist group friends in my city from once a month or so to 1-2 times a week, but at the same time, as a reasonably introverted and Aspie person, who also has a three month old who always wants to be carried, this has close to maxed out my social meter. I don’t think normal people can maintain having more than one or two real space communities that they are really deeply involved in.
Though, I do have a group of friends outside of the rationalist group, and I’m connected through my wife to other communities, so I suppose I’m not failing to follow your advice of having other social groups.
As a poly person whose main relationship over the last seven years has been with a non-rationalist non-EA, I want to say:
Ingroup and outgroup people are both great. I think it would impoverish the community, and be a tragic loss of a lot of beautiful friendships and relationships, if people tried hard to avoid dating anyone from one group or the other.
(I’m interested in the counter-argument, and don’t mean to use platitudes to shout down what sounds like a complicated model I don’t yet understand. But I wanted to at least voice my view.
Normally I would feel less need to speak up and note disagreement, but right now I think a lot of EAs are feeling a lot of emotional conflict and shame about various EA-related things, so I’m unusually wary of pushes for people to cut ties with tons of their friends or partners or radically restructure their life based on a high-level theory about what’s good for them.
I think this is a good discussion to have, but I want to encourage EAs to be skeptical of contentful one-size-fits-all arguments about what’s good for them, compared to their own individual-specific sense of what’s helping them flourish in life. I trust individuals to build up self-expertise and steer by their taste more than I trust relationship or sociology experts to give useful advice.)
I want to say something specifically in response to this.
It’s great that EAs can be friends with each other. But EA has a mission. It’s not a social club. We’re here to do good better. Things that get in the way of doing good better should be dropped if we actually care about the mission.
The trouble is I know lots of people have impoverished social lives. They have maybe one or maybe two communities to build social bonds within. So when you’re in that stance the natural thing is to try to extract as much value from the one community you have, whether or not that is well advised.
The better strategy is to get some more communities!
I’ve seen this a lot within rationalist spaces. People come in and want to make rationality their whole identity. This isn’t a unique phenomenon. People try to do it with religion, hobbies, all kind of stuff. It’s almost always a mistake. We have the common wisdom against putting all your eggs in one basket for a reason.
Be friends with fellow EAs. Have a social life with some of them. But don’t let that be the whole social scene! That’s why we’re in this mess in the first place! We’ve got people who’ve mixed up their only personal and professional settings and now trouble in one means trouble in all of it. People’s whole lives fall apart because one part goes bad and they have no where to turn. And that’s just how it is, there’s nothing unusual about it; would happen anywhere and anytime someone wraps their entire life around a single thing. That’s not the way to have resilient social bonds that enable a person to do the most good in the world. It’s a way to do some good for a while until something goes wrong and then burnout or be ostracized and then do less good.
(I know this is perhaps a bit ranty, but I see people fucking this up all the time in EA and I just want to shake some sense into everyone because this is extremely obvious stuff that nerd-like people mess up all the time.)
“The better strategy is to get some more communities!”
Does this really work for most people?
I think my life over the past year or so has been substantially enriched as I’ve gone from seeing my rationalist group friends in my city from once a month or so to 1-2 times a week, but at the same time, as a reasonably introverted and Aspie person, who also has a three month old who always wants to be carried, this has close to maxed out my social meter. I don’t think normal people can maintain having more than one or two real space communities that they are really deeply involved in.
Though, I do have a group of friends outside of the rationalist group, and I’m connected through my wife to other communities, so I suppose I’m not failing to follow your advice of having other social groups.
As a poly person whose main relationship over the last seven years has been with a non-rationalist non-EA, I want to say:
Ingroup and outgroup people are both great. I think it would impoverish the community, and be a tragic loss of a lot of beautiful friendships and relationships, if people tried hard to avoid dating anyone from one group or the other.
(I’m interested in the counter-argument, and don’t mean to use platitudes to shout down what sounds like a complicated model I don’t yet understand. But I wanted to at least voice my view.
Normally I would feel less need to speak up and note disagreement, but right now I think a lot of EAs are feeling a lot of emotional conflict and shame about various EA-related things, so I’m unusually wary of pushes for people to cut ties with tons of their friends or partners or radically restructure their life based on a high-level theory about what’s good for them.
I think this is a good discussion to have, but I want to encourage EAs to be skeptical of contentful one-size-fits-all arguments about what’s good for them, compared to their own individual-specific sense of what’s helping them flourish in life. I trust individuals to build up self-expertise and steer by their taste more than I trust relationship or sociology experts to give useful advice.)