Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I particularly appreciated you pointing out the plausible connection between experiencing scarcity and acting less prosocially / with less integrity. And I agree that experiencing scarcity in terms of social connections and money is unfortunately still sufficiently common in EA that I’m also pretty worried when people e.g. want to systematically tone down aspects that would make EA less of a community.
Game-theoretically, it makes total sense for people to be a bit untrustworthy while they are in a bad place in their life. If you’re in a place of scarcity, it is entirely reasonable to be strategic about where you put your limited resources. Then, it’s just reasonable to only be loyal to others as long as you can get something out of it yourself and to defect as soon as they don’t offer obvious short-term gains.
One reservation I had, I think it’d be useful not to mix together trustworthiness vs. the ability to contribute to common resources and projects and to be there for friends. Trustworthiness to me captures things like being honest, only committing to things you expect to be able to do, being cooperative as a default. Even if I experience a lot of scarcity, I aspire to stay just as trustworthy. And that e.g. includes warning others up front that I have very little extra energy and I might have to stop contributing to a shared project at any time.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I particularly appreciated you pointing out the plausible connection between experiencing scarcity and acting less prosocially / with less integrity. And I agree that experiencing scarcity in terms of social connections and money is unfortunately still sufficiently common in EA that I’m also pretty worried when people e.g. want to systematically tone down aspects that would make EA less of a community.
One reservation I had, I think it’d be useful not to mix together trustworthiness vs. the ability to contribute to common resources and projects and to be there for friends. Trustworthiness to me captures things like being honest, only committing to things you expect to be able to do, being cooperative as a default. Even if I experience a lot of scarcity, I aspire to stay just as trustworthy. And that e.g. includes warning others up front that I have very little extra energy and I might have to stop contributing to a shared project at any time.
Yep, I agree with that point—being untrustworthy and underresourced are definitely not the same thing.