I don’t think it’s a matter of reputation as much as a matter of socialization and network building. Humans are at their best when they’re interacting with other humans (generally speaking). If your actions based in EA motivations are hurting your personal relationships or your ability to socialize, either by constraining your living situation or by limiting your social interactions due to cost / time considerations, then they may be doing more harm than good. I think building a strong network of friends and colleagues is one of the highest-leverage things you can do, and shouldn’t be easily discounted for the sake of simply giving as much money as you can.
Similarly, while going overseas for vacation is expensive and bad for the environment, sometimes seeing another place or culture in real life can have a lot of altruism-related benefits.
I don’t mean this to disparage your particular life choices, but rather to say that a “typical” EA shouldn’t be expected to make the same choices, and it shouldn’t be implied that making those choices makes you more effective or more altruistic than somebody else who focuses more on network building and travel, for instance.
There was a great thread in the facebook group on whether people making a modest wage (around or below $30k/yr in US terms) should be donating to effective charities or saving money. I’d like to weigh in on this but that thread is already pretty crowded and unstructured.
The proposition here is “People with average or below average income should save money rather than donate to effective charities”
One thing that it looks like almost nobody mentioned is the opportunity cost of worrying about other people over yourself and how this corresponds to effective altruistic output. It seemed from facebook that most EA’s were against the proposition, claiming that most people in the developed world are still far better off than X% of the global population and therefore they should still be donating some percentage of their wealth. I believe there is a strong case to be made that focusing on optimizing one’s own career capital, not just making smart personal finance decisions, will enable one to earn substantially higher income in the future and thus be a more “E” EA. Any intellectual power devoted to understanding the EA argument (doing the relevant research, picking an EA organization or EA-organization-recommended charity to donate to, and “stretching your EA muscles” by donating a small amount over a regular period of time) is a small investment in terms of money but a large investment in terms of intellectual capital that I think dedicated EA’s tend to discount because they have already invested this capital. This is a CFAR-esque argument that advocates focusing on personal development and improvement until one is at a level to reasonably maximize one’s own output both in terms of income and effectiveness of donations.
I am still uncertain about my position in this debate, but it seemed that most EA’s (at least on facebook) were strongly against the proposition so I would like to see more discussion taking the above points into consideration.