Thank you for writing this. I’m sure it was very difficult to do, and so I really appreciate it.
Effective altruism has an emotions problem.
I strongly agree with this. Have you seen Michel’s post on emotional altruism? It doesn’t get to your points specifically, but is similarly the need for more open emotion in the movement.
I also to add something that, in my experience, cannot really be ignored when speaking about the expression of emotion in particular in EA. EA has a lot of people who are on the autism spectrum who may relate to emotion differently, particularly in the way they speak about it. There are others who aren’t on the spectrum but similarly have a natural inclination to be less or differently publicly emotional. EA/rationality can feel rather welcoming (like “my people”) to people like this (which is good—welcomingness of people whose brains work differently is good) and this may produce a feedback loop. This is not at all to deny your recommendations on this particular area. Rather, it is to acknowledge that some proportion (far from all) of what you call the “emotions problem” is probably just people being themselves in a way we should find acceptable, which means that I am a bit more confused about how to best address it.
thanks for pointing this out—I think this is a key point AND I think it is inflected by gender. My guess (not being an expert on autism, but being somewhat of an expert on gender) is that women who are autistic are more likely to learn, over time, how to display and react to emotion “like normal people”, because women build social capital through relational and emotional actions. Personal experience (I am a woman, to a first degree approximation): as a child I did not really understand emotion / generally felt aversive when other people expressed it. Over time I learned how to feel / respond to others’ emotions in a socially normative way, through observation and self-reflection and learning.
This is not to say that those of us in EA who are naturally different w.r.t. our emotional processing should feel bad/abnormal, but to say that EA would be a more welcoming community, especially to women, if people in EA learned how to process and respond to “normative” emotional expressions. Someone above said that EAs see debate as an expression of caring, and I (a) am the same way and (b) understand that most people are not! I’ve learned to ask “are you looking for discussion and finding solutions together, or are you not ready for that yet?” (Similarly, people with more normative emotional expression entering EA should learn to ask/adapt to the person they’re talking to.) I’ve been in spaces that I think are very good at this and have a cultural norm of it.
Thank you for writing this. I’m sure it was very difficult to do, and so I really appreciate it.
I strongly agree with this. Have you seen Michel’s post on emotional altruism? It doesn’t get to your points specifically, but is similarly the need for more open emotion in the movement.
I also to add something that, in my experience, cannot really be ignored when speaking about the expression of emotion in particular in EA. EA has a lot of people who are on the autism spectrum who may relate to emotion differently, particularly in the way they speak about it. There are others who aren’t on the spectrum but similarly have a natural inclination to be less or differently publicly emotional. EA/rationality can feel rather welcoming (like “my people”) to people like this (which is good—welcomingness of people whose brains work differently is good) and this may produce a feedback loop. This is not at all to deny your recommendations on this particular area. Rather, it is to acknowledge that some proportion (far from all) of what you call the “emotions problem” is probably just people being themselves in a way we should find acceptable, which means that I am a bit more confused about how to best address it.
thanks for pointing this out—I think this is a key point AND I think it is inflected by gender. My guess (not being an expert on autism, but being somewhat of an expert on gender) is that women who are autistic are more likely to learn, over time, how to display and react to emotion “like normal people”, because women build social capital through relational and emotional actions. Personal experience (I am a woman, to a first degree approximation): as a child I did not really understand emotion / generally felt aversive when other people expressed it. Over time I learned how to feel / respond to others’ emotions in a socially normative way, through observation and self-reflection and learning.
This is not to say that those of us in EA who are naturally different w.r.t. our emotional processing should feel bad/abnormal, but to say that EA would be a more welcoming community, especially to women, if people in EA learned how to process and respond to “normative” emotional expressions. Someone above said that EAs see debate as an expression of caring, and I (a) am the same way and (b) understand that most people are not! I’ve learned to ask “are you looking for discussion and finding solutions together, or are you not ready for that yet?” (Similarly, people with more normative emotional expression entering EA should learn to ask/adapt to the person they’re talking to.) I’ve been in spaces that I think are very good at this and have a cultural norm of it.
This is an important consideration, thanks for bringing it up! I pretty much agree with all of it.