My sense of self-worth often comes from guessing what people I respect think of me and my work.
In EA… this is precarious. The most obvious people to listen to are the senior/powerful EAs.
In my experience, many senior/powerful EAs I know: 1. Are very focused on specific domains. 2. Are extremely busy. 3. Have substantial privileges (exceptionally intelligent, stable health, esteemed education, affluent/ intellectual backgrounds.) 4. Display limited social empathy (ability to read and respond to the emotions of others) 5. Sometimes might actively try not to sympathize/empathize with many people, because they are judging them for grants, and want don’t want to be biased. (I suspect this is the case for grantmakers). 6. Are not that interested in acting as a coach/mentor/evaluator to people outside their key areas/organizations. 7. Don’t intend or want others to care too much about what they think outside of cause-specific promotion and a few pet ideas they want to advance.
A parallel can be drawn with the world of sports. Top athletes can make poor coaches. Their innate talent and advantages often leave them detached from the experiences of others. I’m reminded by David Foster Wallace’s How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.
If you’re a tennis player, tying your self-worth to what Roger Federer thinks of you is not wise. Top athletes are often egotistical, narrow-minded, and ambivalent to others. This sort of makes sense by design—to become a top athlete, you often have to obsess over your own abilities to an unnatural extent for a very long period.
Good managers are sometimes meant to be better as coaches than they are as direct contributors. In EA, I think those in charge seem more like “top individual contributors and researchers” than they do “top managers.” Many actively dislike management or claim that they’re not doing management. (I believe funders typically don’t see their work as “management*”, which might be very reasonable.)
But that said, even a good class of managers wouldn’t fully solve the self-worth issue. Tying your self-worth too much to your boss can be dangerous—your boss already has much power and control over you, so adding your self-worth to the mix seems extra precarious.
I think if I were to ask any senior EA I know, “Should I tie my self-worth with your opinion of me?” they would say something like,
“Are you insane? I barely know you or your work. I can’t at all afford the time to evaluate your life and work enough to form an opinion that I’d suggest you take really seriously.”
They have enough problems—they don’t want to additionally worry about others trying to use them as judges of personal value.
But this raises the question, Who, if anyone, should I trust to inform my self-worth?
Navigating intellectual and rationalist literature, I’ve grown skeptical of many other potential evaluators. Self-judgment carries inherent bias and ability to Goodhart. Many “personal coaches” and even “executive coaches” raise my epistemic alarm bells. Friends, family, and people who are “more junior” come with different substantial biases.
Some favored options are “friends of a similar professional class who could provide long-standing perspective” and “professional coaches/therapists/advisors.”
I’m not satisfied with any obvious options here. I think my next obvious move forward is to acknowledge that my current situation seems subpar and continue reflecting on this topic. I’ve dug into the literature a bit but haven’t found answers I’ve yet found compelling.
Who, if anyone, should I trust to inform my self-worth?
My initial thought is that it is pretty risky/tricky/dangerous to depend on external things for a sense of self-worth? I know that I certainly am very far away from an Epictetus-like extreme, but I try to not depend on the perspectives of other people for my self-worth. (This is aspirational, of course. A breakup or a job loss or a person I like telling me they don’t like me will hurt and I’ll feel bad for a while.)
A simplistic little thought experiment I’ve fiddled with: if I went to a new place where I didn’t know anyone and just started over, then what? Nobody knows you, and you social circle starts from scratch. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have a worth as a human being (although it might mean that you don’t have any worth in the ‘economic’ sense of other people wanting you, which is very different).
There might also be an intrinsic/extrinsic angle to this. If you evaluate yourself based on accomplishments, outputs, achievements, and so on, that has a very different feeling than the deep contentment of being okay as you are.
In another comment Austin mentions revenue and funding, but that seems to be a measure of things VERY different from a sense of self-worth (although I recognize that there are influential parts of society in which wealth or career success is seen as the proxies for worth). In favorable market conditions I have high self worth?
I would roughly agree with your idea of “trying not to tie my emotional state to my track record.”
I can relate, as someone who also struggles with self-worth issues. However, my sense of self-worth is tied primarily to how many people seem to like me / care about me / want to befriend me, rather than to what “senior EAs” think about my work.
I think that the framing “what is the objectively correct way to determine my self-worth” is counterproductive. Every person has worth by virtue of being a person. (Even if I find it much easier to apply this maxim to others than to myself.)
IMO you should be thinking about things like, how to do better work, but in the frame of “this is something I enjoy / consider important” rather than in the frame of “because otherwise I’m not worthy”. It’s also legitimate to want other people to appreciate and respect you for your work (I definitely have a strong desire for that), but IMO here also the right frame is “this is something I want” rather than “this is something that’s necessary for me to be worth something”.
It’s funny, I think you’d definitely be in the list of people I respect and care about their opinion of me. I think it’s just imposter syndrome all the way up.
Personally, one thing that seemed to work a bit for me is to find peers which I highly appreciate and respect and schedule weekly calls with them to help me prioritize and focus, and give me feedback.
After transitioning from for-profit entrepreneurship to co-leading a non-profit in the effective altruism space, I struggle to identify clear metrics to optimize for. Funding is a potential metric, but it is unreliable due to fluctuations in donors’ interests. The success of individual programs, such as user engagement with free products or services, may not accurately reflect their impact compared to other potential initiatives. Furthermore, creating something impressive doesn’t necessarily mean it’s useful.
Lacking a solid impact evaluation model, I find myself defaulting to measuring success by hours worked, despite recognizing the diminishing returns and increased burnout risk this approach entails.
This is brave of you to share. It sounds like there are a few related issues going on. I have a few thoughts that may or may not be helpful:
Firstly, you want to do well and improve in your work, and you want some feedback on that from people who are informed and have good judgment. The obvious candidates in the EA ecosystem are people who actually aren’t well suited to give this feedback to you. This is tough. I don’t have any advice to give you here.
However it also sounds like there are some therapeutic issues at play. You mention therapists as a favored option but one you’re not satisfied with and I’m wondering why? Personally I suspect that making progress on any therapeutic issues that may be at play may also end up helping with the professional feedback problem.
I think you’ve unfairly dismissed the best option as to who you can trust: yourself. That you have biases and flaws is not an argument against trusting yourself because everyone and everything has biases and flaws! Which person or AI are you going to find that doesn’t have some inherent bias or ability to Goodhart?
Five reasons why I think it’s unhelpful connecting our intrinsic worth to our instrumental worth (or anything aside from being conscious beings):
Undermines care for others (and ourselves): chickens have limited instrumental worth and often do morally questionable things. I still reckon chickens and their suffering are worthy of care. (And same argument for human babies, disabled people and myself)
Constrains effective work: continually assessing our self-worth can be exhausting (leaving less time/attention/energy for actually doing helpful work). For example, it can be difficult to calmy take on constructive feedback (on our work, or instrumental strengths or instrumental weaknesses) when our self-worth is on the line.
Constrains our personal wellbeing and relationships: I’ve personally found it hard to enjoy life when continuously questioning my self-worth and feeling guilty/shameful when the answer seems negative
Very hard to answer: including because the assessment may need to be continuously updated based on the new evidence from each new second of our lives
Seems pointless to answer (to me): how would accurately measuring our self-worth (against a questionable benchmark) make things better? We could live in a world where all beings are ranked so that more ‘worthy’ beings can appropriately feel superior, and less ‘worthy’ beings can appropriately feel ‘not enough’. This world doesn’t seem great from perspective
Despite thinking these things, I often unintentionally get caught up muddling my self-worth with my instrumental worth (can relate to the post and comments on here!) I’ve found ‘mindful self-compassion’ super helpful for doing less of this
The most obvious moves, to me, eventually, are to either be intensely neutral (as in, trying not to tie my emotional state to my track record), or to iterate on using AI to help here (futuristic and potentially dangerous, but with other nice properties).
A very simple example is, “Feed a log of your activity into an LLM with a good prompt, and have it respond with assessments of how well you’re doing vs. your potential at the time, and where/how you can improve.” You’d be free to argue points or whatever.
Reading this comment makes me think that you are basing your self-worth on your work output. I don’t have anything concrete to point to, but I suspect that this might have negative effects on happiness, and that being less outcome dependent will tend to result in a better emotional state.
Personal reflections on self-worth and EA
My sense of self-worth often comes from guessing what people I respect think of me and my work.
In EA… this is precarious. The most obvious people to listen to are the senior/powerful EAs.
In my experience, many senior/powerful EAs I know:
1. Are very focused on specific domains.
2. Are extremely busy.
3. Have substantial privileges (exceptionally intelligent, stable health, esteemed education, affluent/ intellectual backgrounds.)
4. Display limited social empathy (ability to read and respond to the emotions of others)
5. Sometimes might actively try not to sympathize/empathize with many people, because they are judging them for grants, and want don’t want to be biased. (I suspect this is the case for grantmakers).
6. Are not that interested in acting as a coach/mentor/evaluator to people outside their key areas/organizations.
7. Don’t intend or want others to care too much about what they think outside of cause-specific promotion and a few pet ideas they want to advance.
A parallel can be drawn with the world of sports. Top athletes can make poor coaches. Their innate talent and advantages often leave them detached from the experiences of others. I’m reminded by David Foster Wallace’s How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.
If you’re a tennis player, tying your self-worth to what Roger Federer thinks of you is not wise. Top athletes are often egotistical, narrow-minded, and ambivalent to others. This sort of makes sense by design—to become a top athlete, you often have to obsess over your own abilities to an unnatural extent for a very long period.
Good managers are sometimes meant to be better as coaches than they are as direct contributors. In EA, I think those in charge seem more like “top individual contributors and researchers” than they do “top managers.” Many actively dislike management or claim that they’re not doing management. (I believe funders typically don’t see their work as “management*”, which might be very reasonable.)
But that said, even a good class of managers wouldn’t fully solve the self-worth issue. Tying your self-worth too much to your boss can be dangerous—your boss already has much power and control over you, so adding your self-worth to the mix seems extra precarious.
I think if I were to ask any senior EA I know, “Should I tie my self-worth with your opinion of me?” they would say something like,
“Are you insane? I barely know you or your work. I can’t at all afford the time to evaluate your life and work enough to form an opinion that I’d suggest you take really seriously.”
They have enough problems—they don’t want to additionally worry about others trying to use them as judges of personal value.
But this raises the question, Who, if anyone, should I trust to inform my self-worth?
Navigating intellectual and rationalist literature, I’ve grown skeptical of many other potential evaluators. Self-judgment carries inherent bias and ability to Goodhart. Many “personal coaches” and even “executive coaches” raise my epistemic alarm bells. Friends, family, and people who are “more junior” come with different substantial biases.
Some favored options are “friends of a similar professional class who could provide long-standing perspective” and “professional coaches/therapists/advisors.”
I’m not satisfied with any obvious options here. I think my next obvious move forward is to acknowledge that my current situation seems subpar and continue reflecting on this topic. I’ve dug into the literature a bit but haven’t found answers I’ve yet found compelling.
My initial thought is that it is pretty risky/tricky/dangerous to depend on external things for a sense of self-worth? I know that I certainly am very far away from an Epictetus-like extreme, but I try to not depend on the perspectives of other people for my self-worth. (This is aspirational, of course. A breakup or a job loss or a person I like telling me they don’t like me will hurt and I’ll feel bad for a while.)
A simplistic little thought experiment I’ve fiddled with: if I went to a new place where I didn’t know anyone and just started over, then what? Nobody knows you, and you social circle starts from scratch. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have a worth as a human being (although it might mean that you don’t have any worth in the ‘economic’ sense of other people wanting you, which is very different).
There might also be an intrinsic/extrinsic angle to this. If you evaluate yourself based on accomplishments, outputs, achievements, and so on, that has a very different feeling than the deep contentment of being okay as you are.
In another comment Austin mentions revenue and funding, but that seems to be a measure of things VERY different from a sense of self-worth (although I recognize that there are influential parts of society in which wealth or career success is seen as the proxies for worth). In favorable market conditions I have high self worth?
I would roughly agree with your idea of “trying not to tie my emotional state to my track record.”
I can relate, as someone who also struggles with self-worth issues. However, my sense of self-worth is tied primarily to how many people seem to like me / care about me / want to befriend me, rather than to what “senior EAs” think about my work.
I think that the framing “what is the objectively correct way to determine my self-worth” is counterproductive. Every person has worth by virtue of being a person. (Even if I find it much easier to apply this maxim to others than to myself.)
IMO you should be thinking about things like, how to do better work, but in the frame of “this is something I enjoy / consider important” rather than in the frame of “because otherwise I’m not worthy”. It’s also legitimate to want other people to appreciate and respect you for your work (I definitely have a strong desire for that), but IMO here also the right frame is “this is something I want” rather than “this is something that’s necessary for me to be worth something”.
It’s funny, I think you’d definitely be in the list of people I respect and care about their opinion of me. I think it’s just imposter syndrome all the way up.
Personally, one thing that seemed to work a bit for me is to find peers which I highly appreciate and respect and schedule weekly calls with them to help me prioritize and focus, and give me feedback.
A few possibilities from startup land:
derive worth from how helpful your users find your product
chase numbers! usage, revenue, funding, impact, etc. Sam Altman has a line like “focus on adding another 0 to your success metric”
the intrinsic sense of having built something cool
After transitioning from for-profit entrepreneurship to co-leading a non-profit in the effective altruism space, I struggle to identify clear metrics to optimize for. Funding is a potential metric, but it is unreliable due to fluctuations in donors’ interests. The success of individual programs, such as user engagement with free products or services, may not accurately reflect their impact compared to other potential initiatives. Furthermore, creating something impressive doesn’t necessarily mean it’s useful.
Lacking a solid impact evaluation model, I find myself defaulting to measuring success by hours worked, despite recognizing the diminishing returns and increased burnout risk this approach entails.
This is brave of you to share. It sounds like there are a few related issues going on. I have a few thoughts that may or may not be helpful:
Firstly, you want to do well and improve in your work, and you want some feedback on that from people who are informed and have good judgment. The obvious candidates in the EA ecosystem are people who actually aren’t well suited to give this feedback to you. This is tough. I don’t have any advice to give you here.
However it also sounds like there are some therapeutic issues at play. You mention therapists as a favored option but one you’re not satisfied with and I’m wondering why? Personally I suspect that making progress on any therapeutic issues that may be at play may also end up helping with the professional feedback problem.
I think you’ve unfairly dismissed the best option as to who you can trust: yourself. That you have biases and flaws is not an argument against trusting yourself because everyone and everything has biases and flaws! Which person or AI are you going to find that doesn’t have some inherent bias or ability to Goodhart?
Five reasons why I think it’s unhelpful connecting our intrinsic worth to our instrumental worth (or anything aside from being conscious beings):
Undermines care for others (and ourselves): chickens have limited instrumental worth and often do morally questionable things. I still reckon chickens and their suffering are worthy of care. (And same argument for human babies, disabled people and myself)
Constrains effective work: continually assessing our self-worth can be exhausting (leaving less time/attention/energy for actually doing helpful work). For example, it can be difficult to calmy take on constructive feedback (on our work, or instrumental strengths or instrumental weaknesses) when our self-worth is on the line.
Constrains our personal wellbeing and relationships: I’ve personally found it hard to enjoy life when continuously questioning my self-worth and feeling guilty/shameful when the answer seems negative
Very hard to answer: including because the assessment may need to be continuously updated based on the new evidence from each new second of our lives
Seems pointless to answer (to me): how would accurately measuring our self-worth (against a questionable benchmark) make things better? We could live in a world where all beings are ranked so that more ‘worthy’ beings can appropriately feel superior, and less ‘worthy’ beings can appropriately feel ‘not enough’. This world doesn’t seem great from perspective
Despite thinking these things, I often unintentionally get caught up muddling my self-worth with my instrumental worth (can relate to the post and comments on here!) I’ve found ‘mindful self-compassion’ super helpful for doing less of this
This is an interesting post and seems basically right to me, thanks for sharing.
Thank you, this very much resonates with me
The most obvious moves, to me, eventually, are to either be intensely neutral (as in, trying not to tie my emotional state to my track record), or to iterate on using AI to help here (futuristic and potentially dangerous, but with other nice properties).
How would you use AI here?
A very simple example is, “Feed a log of your activity into an LLM with a good prompt, and have it respond with assessments of how well you’re doing vs. your potential at the time, and where/how you can improve.” You’d be free to argue points or whatever.
Reading this comment makes me think that you are basing your self-worth on your work output. I don’t have anything concrete to point to, but I suspect that this might have negative effects on happiness, and that being less outcome dependent will tend to result in a better emotional state.
That’s cool. I had the thought of developing a “personal manager” for myself of some form for roughly similar purposes