I work for CEA, but everything here is my personal opinion.
“General nerd social patterns” sounds right to me.
I’ve seen a lower proportion of people in “pits of despair” in EA than in other demographically similar communities I’m familiar with (social activists, serious gamers). The ways in which people choose to evaluate themselves differ, but there are always many people who feel inadequate relative to their own standards (whether that’s about upholding social justice norms or maintaining a certain winrate on the ladder). I think Sasha is describing the human condition (or at least the human condition among people who care a lot about certain social groups — “nerds”, I guess?) more than anything inherent to EA/rationality. (And it sounds like Sasha would agree.)
This kind of observation about any group also suffers from… observer effects? (Not sure that’s the right term to use.) There is a phenomenon where the most visible people in a group are often the most involved, and are more likely to experience personal difficulties that drive extreme levels of involvement. Another term people use for this is “very online”.
Having worked with lots and lots of people across lots and lots of EA orgs, I rarely see people who seem to be in “work until you drop” mode, compared to the more standard pattern of “work pretty hard for a pretty standard number of hours, mostly relax when not working”. People at CEA get married, have kids, and take vacations at rates that seem normal to me.
(Obvious disclaimer: It’s not always obvious when people are doing the work-until-you-drop thing. But in many cases, I’m also real-world or Facebook friends with these people and see them vacationing, partying, reading novels, sharing memes, and otherwise “indulging” in normal stuff.)
However, when I think of the people I know mostly from the EA internet — people whose main engagement with the community comes from engagement on social media or the Forum — I see them express these kinds of feelings far more often.
This makes sense — once you have a day job (and maybe a family), your focus is mostly on a few specific things, rather than “having as much impact as possible, generally”. You’re also able to accomplish a lot by just doing your job reasonably well (or helping to shepherd new life into the world!). By comparison, when EA feels like the biggest thing in your life and there’s no clear “part of it” for which you are responsible, it’s easier to feel like you should be doing everything, and harder to heed the messages about work/life balance that get shared in EA groups, at EA Global, etc.
Another way to put it is that people feel more comfortable once they have a source of status, either within EA or outside of it. (Being a parent seems very high-status in the sense that most people will compliment you for doing it, gladly talk about parenting with you, etc. — plus you get to actually help another person every single day in a highly visible way, which is good for the soul.)
The result: to people who see the EA community mostly through its online presence, EA looks like it has a high proportion of people who seem burnt-out or unhappy, even if the on-the-ground reality is that most people are living emotionally ordinary lives.
The practical takeaways:
It’s good to acknowledge that unhealthy norms do exist in some corners of EA, but I worry that confusing “what EA looks like online” with “how EA actually is on a population level” might lead us to throw too many resources or too much concern at problems that aren’t as widespread as they appear. (This isn’t to say that we’ve reached that point yet, or anything close to it, but I sometimes see takes like “EA should focus on taking care of burnt-out community members as an urgent priority” that seem to overstate how common this is.)
I’m also worried that people who want to get more involved with EA will assume that their risk of being pulled into a pit of despair is much higher than it actually is, or think of the community as being a collection of sad, burnt-out husks (rather than what it actually looks like to me — a bunch of people who span the full spectrum of emotional states, but who seem somewhat happier and calmer than average).
more standard pattern of “work pretty hard for a pretty standard number of hours, mostly relax when not working”. People at CEA get married, have kids, and take vacations at rates that seem normal to me.
(Obvious disclaimer: It’s not always obvious when people are doing the work-until-you-drop thing. But in many cases, I’m also real-world or Facebook friends with these people and see them vacationing, partying, reading novels, sharing memes, and otherwise “indulging” in normal stuff.)
For what it’s worth, my current impression is that “working a pretty standard number of hours (35-45?)” may well be the norm at CEA (and for that matter Rethink Priorities), but is not necessarily the norm at EA orgs overall.
From very close contact/intuitive tracking (e.g., people I live with during the pandemic who WFH), working >45h is the default for people I know at CHAI, Ought, Open Phil, and Redwood Research and definitely Alameda/FTX. I also believe this is true (with lower confidence) for Lightcone, and paid student organizers at places like SERI.
Interestingly enough, the non-EA STEM grad students at top universities who I can personally observe do not seem to work more than the norm, and I don’t have a strong sense of whether this is because my sample (n=3?) is skewed or too high-variance or because the polls are skewed.
I vaguely share your impressions that EA org people who are active socially/online (including myself) may on average be less hardworking, but I think there’s a pretty intuitive story for the relevant self-selection biases.
I vaguely share your impressions that EA org people who are active socially/online (including myself) may on average be less hardworking
That seems like the opposite of my impression. My impression is that the majority of people in EA positions who are less active online are more likely to have normal work schedules, while the people who spend the most time online are those who also spend the most time doing what they think of as “EA work” (sometimes they’re just really into their jobs, sometimes they don’t have a formal job but spend a lot of time just interacting in various often-effortful ways).
Thanks for sharing your impression of people you know — if you live with a bunch of people who have these jobs, you’re in a better position to estimate work time than I am (not counting CEA). When you say “working >45h”, do you mean “the work they do actually requires >45 hours of focused time”, or “they spend >45 hours/week in ‘work mode’, even if some of that time is spent on breaks, conversation, idle Forum browsing, etc.”?
That seems like the opposite of my impression. My impression is that the majority of people in EA positions who are less active online are more likely to have normal work schedules, while the people who spend the most time online are those who also spend the most time doing what they think of as “EA work”
Sorry to be clear, here’s my perspective: If you only observe EA culture from online interactions, you get the impression that EAs think about effective altruism much more regularly than they actually do. This will extend to activities like spend lots of time “doing EA-adjacent things”, including the forum, EA social media, casual reading, having EA conversations, etc. Many people in that reference class include people volunteering their time, or people who find thinking about EA relaxing compared to their stressful day jobs.
However, if we’re referring to actual amounts/hours of work done on core EA topics in their day job, EA org employees who are less active online will put in more hours towards their jobs compared to EA org employees who are more active online.
When you say “working >45h”, do you mean “the work they do actually requires >45 hours of focused time”, or “they spend >45 hours/week in ‘work mode’, even if some of that time is spent on breaks, conversation, idle Forum browsing, etc.”?
They spend >>45h on their laptops or other computing devices, and (unlike me) if I glance over at their laptops during the day, it almost always appears to be a work-related thing like a work videocall or github, command line, Google Docs, etc.
A lot of the work isn’t as focused, e.g., lots of calls, management, screening applications, sys admin stuff, taking classes, etc.
My guess is that very few people I personally know spends >45h on doing deep focused work in research or writing. I think this is a bit more common in programming, and a lot more common in trading. I think for the vast majority of people, including most people in EA, it’s both psychologically and organizationally very hard to do deep focused work for anywhere near that long. Nor do I necessarily think people should even if they could: often a 15-60 minute chat with the relevant person could clarify thoughts that would otherwise take a day, or much longer, to crystallize.
But they’re still doing work for that long, and if you mandate that they can only be on their work computers for 45h, I’d expect noticeable dips in productivity.
Re:
the work they do actually requires [emphasis mine] >45 hours
Not sure what you mean by “requires.” EA orgs by and large don’t clock you, and there’s pretty high individual variance in productivity. A lot of the willingness to work is self-imposed. I don’t think this is abnormal. I think most people will have less output if they work a lot less, though of course there’s large individual variance here and I can imagine negative marginal returns for some people. I can also buy that some/most people, even in that reference class, aren’t very good at time management and can theoretically have more output on much less hours. But this is far from easy to do in practice. These are often very smart, dedicated, conscientious, people.
If you only observe EA culture from online interactions, you get the impression that EAs think about effective altruism much more regularly than they actually do. This will extend to activities like spend lots of time “doing EA-adjacent things”, including the forum, EA social media, casual reading, having EA conversations, etc. Many people in that reference class include people volunteering their time, or people who find thinking about EA relaxing compared to their stressful day jobs.
I agree.
However, if we’re referring to actual amounts/hours of work done on core EA topics in their day job, EA org employees who are less active online will put in more hours towards their jobs compared to EA org employees who are more active online.
I don’t have an opinion about this either way. My argument was about people who were org employees vs. interested in doing EA work but not actually employees of EA orgs (the latter being the group somewhat more likely to talk online about feeling bad in the ways Sasha described).
By comparison, when EA feels like the biggest thing in your life and there’s no clear “part of it” for which you are responsible, it’s easier to feel like you should be doing everything, and harder to heed the messages about work/life balance...
“No clear part of it” = “no one job that belongs to you, so you may feel vaguely like you should be contributing to everything you see, or doing everything possible to figure out a career path until you find one”.
“Requires” was imprecise language on my part — I just meant “they are actually working 45 hours, rather than just completing <45 hours of work in what looks like 45 hours.” Your response satisfies me w/r/t people seeming to have more than a 45-hour workweek of “actual/required work”.
Nice. What you wrote accords with my experience. In my own personal case, my relationship to EA changed quite substantially—and in the way you describe—when I transitioned from very online to being within a community.
I definitely feel this as a student. I care a lot about my impact and I know intellectually that being really good at being a student the best thing I can do for long term impact. Emotionally though, I find it hard to know that the way I’m having my impact is so nebulous and also doesn’t take very much work do well.
I work for CEA, but everything here is my personal opinion.
“General nerd social patterns” sounds right to me.
I’ve seen a lower proportion of people in “pits of despair” in EA than in other demographically similar communities I’m familiar with (social activists, serious gamers). The ways in which people choose to evaluate themselves differ, but there are always many people who feel inadequate relative to their own standards (whether that’s about upholding social justice norms or maintaining a certain winrate on the ladder). I think Sasha is describing the human condition (or at least the human condition among people who care a lot about certain social groups — “nerds”, I guess?) more than anything inherent to EA/rationality. (And it sounds like Sasha would agree.)
This kind of observation about any group also suffers from… observer effects? (Not sure that’s the right term to use.) There is a phenomenon where the most visible people in a group are often the most involved, and are more likely to experience personal difficulties that drive extreme levels of involvement. Another term people use for this is “very online”.
Having worked with lots and lots of people across lots and lots of EA orgs, I rarely see people who seem to be in “work until you drop” mode, compared to the more standard pattern of “work pretty hard for a pretty standard number of hours, mostly relax when not working”. People at CEA get married, have kids, and take vacations at rates that seem normal to me.
(Obvious disclaimer: It’s not always obvious when people are doing the work-until-you-drop thing. But in many cases, I’m also real-world or Facebook friends with these people and see them vacationing, partying, reading novels, sharing memes, and otherwise “indulging” in normal stuff.)
However, when I think of the people I know mostly from the EA internet — people whose main engagement with the community comes from engagement on social media or the Forum — I see them express these kinds of feelings far more often.
This makes sense — once you have a day job (and maybe a family), your focus is mostly on a few specific things, rather than “having as much impact as possible, generally”. You’re also able to accomplish a lot by just doing your job reasonably well (or helping to shepherd new life into the world!). By comparison, when EA feels like the biggest thing in your life and there’s no clear “part of it” for which you are responsible, it’s easier to feel like you should be doing everything, and harder to heed the messages about work/life balance that get shared in EA groups, at EA Global, etc.
Another way to put it is that people feel more comfortable once they have a source of status, either within EA or outside of it. (Being a parent seems very high-status in the sense that most people will compliment you for doing it, gladly talk about parenting with you, etc. — plus you get to actually help another person every single day in a highly visible way, which is good for the soul.)
The result: to people who see the EA community mostly through its online presence, EA looks like it has a high proportion of people who seem burnt-out or unhappy, even if the on-the-ground reality is that most people are living emotionally ordinary lives.
The practical takeaways:
It’s good to acknowledge that unhealthy norms do exist in some corners of EA, but I worry that confusing “what EA looks like online” with “how EA actually is on a population level” might lead us to throw too many resources or too much concern at problems that aren’t as widespread as they appear. (This isn’t to say that we’ve reached that point yet, or anything close to it, but I sometimes see takes like “EA should focus on taking care of burnt-out community members as an urgent priority” that seem to overstate how common this is.)
I’m also worried that people who want to get more involved with EA will assume that their risk of being pulled into a pit of despair is much higher than it actually is, or think of the community as being a collection of sad, burnt-out husks (rather than what it actually looks like to me — a bunch of people who span the full spectrum of emotional states, but who seem somewhat happier and calmer than average).
For what it’s worth, my current impression is that “working a pretty standard number of hours (35-45?)” may well be the norm at CEA (and for that matter Rethink Priorities), but is not necessarily the norm at EA orgs overall.
From very close contact/intuitive tracking (e.g., people I live with during the pandemic who WFH), working >45h is the default for people I know at CHAI, Ought, Open Phil, and Redwood Research and definitely Alameda/FTX. I also believe this is true (with lower confidence) for Lightcone, and paid student organizers at places like SERI.
Interestingly enough, the non-EA STEM grad students at top universities who I can personally observe do not seem to work more than the norm, and I don’t have a strong sense of whether this is because my sample (n=3?) is skewed or too high-variance or because the polls are skewed.
I vaguely share your impressions that EA org people who are active socially/online (including myself) may on average be less hardworking, but I think there’s a pretty intuitive story for the relevant self-selection biases.
That seems like the opposite of my impression. My impression is that the majority of people in EA positions who are less active online are more likely to have normal work schedules, while the people who spend the most time online are those who also spend the most time doing what they think of as “EA work” (sometimes they’re just really into their jobs, sometimes they don’t have a formal job but spend a lot of time just interacting in various often-effortful ways).
Thanks for sharing your impression of people you know — if you live with a bunch of people who have these jobs, you’re in a better position to estimate work time than I am (not counting CEA). When you say “working >45h”, do you mean “the work they do actually requires >45 hours of focused time”, or “they spend >45 hours/week in ‘work mode’, even if some of that time is spent on breaks, conversation, idle Forum browsing, etc.”?
Sorry to be clear, here’s my perspective: If you only observe EA culture from online interactions, you get the impression that EAs think about effective altruism much more regularly than they actually do. This will extend to activities like spend lots of time “doing EA-adjacent things”, including the forum, EA social media, casual reading, having EA conversations, etc. Many people in that reference class include people volunteering their time, or people who find thinking about EA relaxing compared to their stressful day jobs.
However, if we’re referring to actual amounts/hours of work done on core EA topics in their day job, EA org employees who are less active online will put in more hours towards their jobs compared to EA org employees who are more active online.
They spend >>45h on their laptops or other computing devices, and (unlike me) if I glance over at their laptops during the day, it almost always appears to be a work-related thing like a work videocall or github, command line, Google Docs, etc.
A lot of the work isn’t as focused, e.g., lots of calls, management, screening applications, sys admin stuff, taking classes, etc.
My guess is that very few people I personally know spends >45h on doing deep focused work in research or writing. I think this is a bit more common in programming, and a lot more common in trading. I think for the vast majority of people, including most people in EA, it’s both psychologically and organizationally very hard to do deep focused work for anywhere near that long. Nor do I necessarily think people should even if they could: often a 15-60 minute chat with the relevant person could clarify thoughts that would otherwise take a day, or much longer, to crystallize.
But they’re still doing work for that long, and if you mandate that they can only be on their work computers for 45h, I’d expect noticeable dips in productivity.
Re:
Not sure what you mean by “requires.” EA orgs by and large don’t clock you, and there’s pretty high individual variance in productivity. A lot of the willingness to work is self-imposed. I don’t think this is abnormal. I think most people will have less output if they work a lot less, though of course there’s large individual variance here and I can imagine negative marginal returns for some people. I can also buy that some/most people, even in that reference class, aren’t very good at time management and can theoretically have more output on much less hours. But this is far from easy to do in practice. These are often very smart, dedicated, conscientious, people.
I agree.
I don’t have an opinion about this either way. My argument was about people who were org employees vs. interested in doing EA work but not actually employees of EA orgs (the latter being the group somewhat more likely to talk online about feeling bad in the ways Sasha described).
“No clear part of it” = “no one job that belongs to you, so you may feel vaguely like you should be contributing to everything you see, or doing everything possible to figure out a career path until you find one”.
“Requires” was imprecise language on my part — I just meant “they are actually working 45 hours, rather than just completing <45 hours of work in what looks like 45 hours.” Your response satisfies me w/r/t people seeming to have more than a 45-hour workweek of “actual/required work”.
Nice. What you wrote accords with my experience. In my own personal case, my relationship to EA changed quite substantially—and in the way you describe—when I transitioned from very online to being within a community.
I definitely feel this as a student. I care a lot about my impact and I know intellectually that being really good at being a student the best thing I can do for long term impact. Emotionally though, I find it hard to know that the way I’m having my impact is so nebulous and also doesn’t take very much work do well.